8 Ways Windows 8 Speeds Up

[Guest]

No Start Button and no direct boot into the desktop option are cynical marketing decisions by MS. They want to force users into Metro, so they get comfortable with with it and MS is better able to leverage the UI on tablets and smartphones. They may pay a price for this nonsense -- we'll see.

The last cynical MS decision? Office 2007, which changed the default file formats. Almost all organizations felt compelled to update their packages, and for what? Minor application improvements and big time retraining costs (You like the ribbon, don't you?). Worked out well for MS.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]John2247b[/nom]No Start Button and no direct boot into the desktop option are cynical marketing decisions by MS. They want to force users into Metro, so they get comfortable with with it and MS is better able to leverage the UI on tablets and smartphones. They may pay a price for this nonsense -- we'll see.The last cynical MS decision? Office 2007, which changed the default file formats. Almost all organizations felt compelled to update their packages, and for what? Minor application improvements and big time retraining costs (You like the ribbon, don't you?). Worked out well for MS.[/citation]
Office 2007 had more under the hood changes than you may realize...
The UI changes actually make sense for those people who have never used a computer before. It sucked for those of us used to the Word Perfect setup of the past, but it made no sense to new users. Hek, people don't even know what that icon is for 'Save' (a 3.5" floppy).

The big under-the-hood change was going from .doc to .docx (and adding an x to all the other names as well).

Redundancy and encryption, along with compression, was added to the format to improve the files' robustness...

 

[athurman]

This is NOT consistent with my findings on my hardware. Windows 8 was noticeably slower in most activities (in fact, the rendering in Solitaire the first time made it completely unplayable unless you had the patience of Job). I strongly hated the Metro interface, but ignoring that for the moment, the "performance improvements" did not materialize for me at all. Not that I am accusing MS of hyping a product (cough, choke), but when they told us that Windows 7 was so much faster than Vista, that part was true, BUT it was NOT faster than XP on the same hardware (assuming you could run XP on your hardware, UEFI ruined that for many). I will swear to you that 64-bit Windows 7 performed dissappointingly compared to 32-bit XP for my Asus motherboard i7 despite my having 12 GB RAM (which 32-bit XP can only access about 2.5 GB of). After my experience with the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, I will NOT be downgrading any of my machines to it, nor will I recommend it to my customers. Windows 7 works well, but I imagine it will be less available & less supported once 8 is out in full force. I may steer people towards Linux, Mac, or BSD if MS doesn't get it together and hear the voices of those of us in IT & systems.

 

[marybranscombe]

Wamphyri - I'm not seeing that on any of the Windows 8 test systems I'm using, either upgraded or clean installed, and many of them have SSDs. You could use the task manager to see what's starting up that could be slowing things down.

@whimseh, @warezme - on a faster system, Windows 8 still boots faster than Windows 7; we picked something less than a high power system to see if older machines get performance increases too, but on the Samsung Series 7 the startup goes from a few seconds to even fewer. If there is a problem with a specific driver it will not initialise correctly and will get reloaded insead.

 

[dreadlokz]

If some professional or ultimate version don't come with the Metro, just the good old start buttom, I'll give it a try =)

 

[Maza20]

I am still using Windows Vista! No problems at all.

Windows Vista is such a lovable operating system, and with Service Pack 2 + Platform Update, it has a lot of years ahead of it.
However, I am disappointed that Microsoft isn't supporting it. I would love to use it in conjunction with Internet Explorer 10.

 

[marybranscombe]

Maza - it's a question of the size of the user base and how many/few people would benefit from the engineering time being used for adding support for an older platform versus more features for newer platforms. On the right hardware, Vista is a great OS, but 7 improves on it without being the jump in interface that 8 is.

I'll just note I've re-run many of the same tests on RTM of Windows 8 and speeds are even faster. The file copy speed, browsing and startup all improve noticeably on the same test PC.

 

[Guest]

can you please repair my win8

 

[Guest]

I just installed Windows 8 Pro as an upgrade on my Compaq CQ60 212US. It boots way faster that my Vista install did. Not only that its usable much fast that Vista. 24 seconds to login. This is with an AMD Athlon X2 dual core 1.8 Ghz and a 5400 rpm hard drive. As far as liking Metro I am getting used to it. My daughter does miss the start menu....

 

[Guest]

6GB's SSD and HDD are taking a huge hit in transfer times. USB 3.0 transfer times are 2.5x SLOWER. Win 8 takes over the controllers. What did we expect? I am not going back to 2008 hardware just to make Win 8 faster.

 

[Guest]

Extensive review. Would've been great if there was a guide to make windows 8 faster like this one.
http/www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-8-pro.html