I suppose we've all had a look at Windows 8 by now. I'd be interested in your opinion. Mine is that it's mostly for people who are smartphone and tablet enthusiasts who want to integrate their "app" experience into their computer operating system. So, the "early adopters" (as the industry refers to them) will buying it and loading it very soon. My friends and I loaded Windows 8 on a couple of quad-core machines with 8 GB of RAM and phat hard drives -- and -- this is important -- higher class motherboards with chipsets that are no more than about a year old (Z68 being about the oldest). GET THIS: starting with a totally turned-off machine with no power activated at all, we booted into the Windows 8 desktop of tiles in 15 seconds! I'm not kidding. We did this repeatedly, and it was always 15 seconds, from a totally "cold" machine. But be advised, if you're running an older 1155 motherboard, it will take longer, but not a great deal. This OS is FAST! OK, navigation is, uh, "challenged" for a while, but once you learn to WORK THE CORNERS OF THE SCREEN, you can drill into everywhere with no problem. There are some things you'll like a LOT better in Win 8, like "msconfig". It's much more informative and makes so much more sense now than before. Same is true with "services". One major disappointment: so far, no new version of DX! By now, we should have had a newer, improved version of DX for graphics, but, if you've played Skyrim, you already know how good graphics are right now! Maybe a new one will roll out later in a service pack.... Oh, BTW, in Windows 8, if you totally crap up your machine and just want to do a clean-load with a couple of clicks -- no problem! You've got your choice of several different "start over" modalities -- painless, but know what you're doing! The biggest disappointment: what a screwjob for anybody migrating from 64-bit Vista Home Premium! You don't get the total wrap-around migration path including data AND programs like you do when upgrading from Windows 7. And you don't get any price breaks upgrading from Vista, either. This SUCKS like an industrial vacuum cleaner. They pushed out a defective operating system on us in Vista -- didn't do a useful Service Pack until 15 months after the rollout, then they gave us no consideration for the purchase of Windows 7. Now, Vista adopters are also getting the shaft on Windows 8, too. Thanks a lot, Bill! No wonder you're a multi, multi, multi-billionaire -- by screwing your customers. Well, that's enough from me. How 'bout you?
Haven't seen anything in Windows 8 that would inspire me to change from Windows 7. What I've seen on Windows 8 strikes me as being confusing and not intuitive. The speed isn't enough of an attraction. But then I'm not an early adopter. I basically went from Windows 2.0 to Windows 95 and then reluctantly to Windows 98; skipped the Windows ME and Vista crap, eventually got Windows XP and only moved to Windows 7 last winter when it came with my new computer.
I have a spare Gigabyte P45 mobo laying around (very decent quality for four years ago), along with an Intel E-8400 dual-core that OC's easily to 3. 6 GHz, and 8GB's of DDR2 RAM, and a smallish 120GB SATA hard drive. This stuff isn't really good for much anymore so I think I'll build a Windows 8 rig with this stuff, just for the hell of it. I do like playing with the new OS, mostly for the novelty of it. For my main hooptie quad-core gaming rig, I'll be sticking with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit.
This makes me wonder what differences you'll see installing a 32-bit version of Windows 8 on an older machine; whether you'll see improvements that you can identify as coming from the OS, versus those you see based on hardware.
No, I'll be installing the 64-bit version of Windows 8. I haven't used a 32-bit OS in many years... Vista 64, Win7 64. I'd never go back to 32-bit operating systems. The biggest advantage for "consumer grade" systems, as I'm sure you know, is that you can use more than about 3.2 GB of RAM, without maxing-out. The "legacy" type machine I'm going to build will have 8GB of DDR2 RAM, which is pretty mainstream today for desktops, and with a dual-core proc running at 3.6 GHz, I ought to be able to run Win 8 just fine. I know I won't get the 15-second boot time with an old P45 mobo's chipset , but it probably won't be worse than 30 - 40 seconds, either. Anyway, the main motivation is to play with it and see what it can do, especially integrated with tabs and smartphones.
Windows 8 looks like it's pretending to be an iPad or smart phone with all those starter icon things. I don't plan on switching from 7 any time soon.
