Windows 8 RTM Benchmarked 398
jjslash writes "Microsoft's PR machine has been hard at work over the past few months, trying to explain the numerous improvements Windows 8 has received on the backend. But are there real tangible performance differences compared to Windows 7? TechSpot has grabbed the RTM version of Windows 8, measuring and testing the performance of various aspects of the operating system including: boot up and shutdown times, file copying, encoding, browsing, gaming and some synthetic benchmarks." Lots of other sites are running reviews including: Infoworld, CNET, Computerworld, and Gizmodo, with very mixed opinions.
Paid for (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of other sites are running reviews including: Infoworld, CNET, Computerworld, and Gizmodo, with very mixed opinions.
You mean they're mixing the real opinions with the bought ones?
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It's putting lipstick on a pig anyway. It would have to be orders of magnitude better "under the hood" to put up with driving something that fugly.
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It looks like a step back to Windows 3.1 (which I hated). Instead of the convenience of having all your programs in a nice listing (the start menu), they are hidden in a bewildering mess of program groups & overlapping windows.
Curses.
Back then I avoided the mess that was 3.1 by sticking with my Commodore Amiga until Win98 arrived, but now that option no longer exists.
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
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There is no "start button" to "hit" from what I saw. Instead there is a Windows key on your keyboard and you can hit that and release, if you know to try that. If you try to use just the mouse you will get nowhere for a long time. If you just start typing you won't get anywhere either. If you accidentally clicked one of those big square buttons and now you want to get back to where you were you will be in for a lot of frustration.
Everyone who says it's obvious only says that because they have learned th
Re:Paid for (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Defending something repeatedly without a solid argument doesn't make a good case for it either. Take your own advice.
2. Starting a program should not be a full screen modal interruption on a modern machine. this is fine for tablets....or ms-dos, but not workstations. This trend of forcing users to get used to 'full screen only' again is part of that current dumb-it-down 'undevelopment' race to the bottom. It must stop.
3. The whole point of a gui is avoid having to type repetitive, simple commands. If their design actually takes longer than typing it out, like the playskool menu does, they've failed. The search box is an admission of failure. Just give me a console a-la quake; hit tilde and down comes a prompt ready to go...or leave the start menu alone. It works fine. The windows 7 start menu search is also stupid for the same reasons.
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I'm confused about #3. The Win8 Start screen displays way more apps than the Win7 Start menu. If anything, the Win8 screen greatly increases the chances of the app you want being right there and not requiring a click of All Programs so I don't see how it is any less efficient. From what I have seen, the only advantage the Start menu has over the Start screen is easier location of recently installed applications.
Though I have to also say that in Win7 (and XP and Vista) I start programs either from a taskbar
Re:Paid for (Score:4, Informative)
Calm down, scared old man. You can still use your mouse, but if you can type, and are not scared by this paradigm, you can find anything you want by pressing the Windows key, then typing, then pressing enter. It's so much faster than any menu, including the Start menu.
But I'm sure you're correct and all the intelligent people who made it are incorrect.
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Which is not an obvious thing to do. The only thing really obvious is how to slide the prebuilt list of applications back and forth. Everything else is somewhat mysterious until you figure it out. Including how to leave an application if you accidentally activate it while sliding the icons back and forth.
This thing needs to come with a default help/tutor application, similar to what came with some earlier versions of Windows.
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Ah, the return of Clippy? "It looks like you're trying to use Windows" or some other inane or obvious comment. Or perhaps Bob? Damn, where are they when you need them.
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I could be convinced to sell you my old Amiga. It won't be cheap.
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>>>I could be convinced to sell you my old Amiga. It won't be cheap.
I'll buy it but only if it comes with the latest OS 4.1 installed. (And web-capable of course.)
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It plays marble madness! Has the memory expansion that hangs off the side and two floppys. It's a pre-release. Shipped to SW companies early. Most of the docs too. Haven't booted it in a decade. Call it a barn find.
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It's putting lipstick on a pig anyway.
New Windows 8 slogan: Kiss me, I'm Bacon!
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It's putting lipstick on a pig anyway. It would have to be orders of magnitude better "under the hood" to put up with driving something that fugly.
Windows 8: The Pontiac Aztec of the computing world.
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I don't even want to know what the few Windows-using relatives I have left are going to think
They're all going to wonder why you're trying to run a tablet OS as a desktop. :)
Re:Paid for (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the next set of PC's will have more tablet features in them. For Most People. You buy a computer and you keep your OS version for the life of the computer. If it came with Windows 7, the PC was designed to run Windows 7... You stay on Windows 7 until you want a new computer.
Now after Windows 8 comes out, you will fine more and more PC's with multi-touch screens. (I myself have a Lenovo 220t, with Windows 8 RTM on it, and the interface is really nice and I like it better then Windows 7), because windows 8 supports it it means more PC manufactures will use it. Thus Microsoft tying to make multi-touch better.
This Windows 8 Touch Screen seems like the same debate 20 years ago, when PC's started to ship with a Mouse as a common device. It started out as a toy, with only a few applications that used it. While Apple had the mouse common, the PC was mostly still Keyboard, CPU, Monitor. Then when Windows 3.1, Most PC's started to come with a mouse standard, as well the applications for Windows started to use the mouse more. There were a ton of people who hated it, and we still get the debate today. However it is a case of Software that Drives the hardware. So when you next Laptop/Tablet/PC it will probably be reconfigured to be used as a touch device.
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, anyone who disagrees with you is a sycophant or astroturfer. You speak the unimpeachable Truth and all others are Damned. Please spare me this BS. I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I hate the demonization of those who disagree with you. Dissent is healthy.
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I didn't mention "anyone", or intimate that disagreement meant anything in the way of sycophancy or astroturfing, so I suspect your strawman may need a bit more stuffing. ;)
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest trouble I found was lack of documentation. Trying to figure out how to use Metro on your own is not trivial. While one article touted that you really didn't need start menu after all and that you could do the same thing with Metro, it took me a half hour to find a slow way to get up a menu, and another half hour to find a fast way to do this! If you're used to Windows or any other mouse based desktop system you may think that you can use the right mouse button, or maybe bring the mouse to the various sides of the screen, or click left or right on any blank spot on the screen (very few places not covered with "click here to buy stuff" icons).
I was baffled until I found a tiny spot to move the mouse where something happened (all the way to bottom right, size of a hanging chad). Eventually I found the _real_ way this is intended to be used. The Windows Key. You know, that key that most real computer users laughed at when they first found it and have not used it since. Just push it by itself and release and something happens. Sure some Windows experts may have memorized things like Windows+S for start menu or things like that, but most people I know never use it, or consider using it by itself and not as a modifier key. It's an extremely inconvenient key for touch typists as the placement is awkward. I always though it was a bit underused in most Windows versions, compared to the Command key in MacOS. But once you know to push this key all sorts of things can get done with metro, including popping up an amazingly ugly menu full of tiny black boxes. If you want to use Metro effectively you will need to learn a set of keyboard shortcuts!
That's the weird thing. How is anyone going to know based on their past experience to push this key as the primary means of UI interaction? On my android phone that came with zero documentation at least I saw three buttons at the bottom I could tap with my finger and eventually things would happen. Even the Nokia Lumia with the same basic look as Windows 8 comes with some buttons to push. But a windows user would naturally assume they need to click stuff with a mouse, and there's nothing to click except the default applications (not even real applications, they're more like smart URLs such as a "travel" icon with photo of eiffel tower, most of which no professional will ever use).
In the past people with visions were sometimes called mystics, sometimes called possessed, and sometimes locked up for their own safety. Today though people with visions are put in charge of product design.
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More importantly, how are tablet uses going to press the Windows key when they don't have a keyboard?
All Windows 8 tablets are required to have a physical Windows button.
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I wouldnt call it an improvement though.
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Funny)
BTW as a sidenote I actually really like Ubuntu Unity.
You don't, like, wear argyle golfing pants and a paisley polka-dot tie to work, do you?
I promise I'm not trying to be insulting, but I am curious now... :)
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Funny)
I would not insult Ubuntu Unity's style...if it had one.
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Funny)
This will be the new Ubuntu Unity marketting pitch: "At least it's not Metro".
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If OSX gets any more big-brother, I'll proba
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I'm guessing you've not tried it. Win8 is actually better on multiple displays because the task bar is on both.
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I'm guessing you've not tried it. Win8 is actually better on multiple displays because the task bar is on both.
you mean like it's been on my Linux box for years ?
Wow, seems like windows is finally catching up to some Linux features !
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Some of the features may seem like they are just catching up but in most of the important ways Windows is just plain better. Sorry but that's a fact. Linux is free while Win7 costs over $100. If something that is free still can't compete *at all* then there is very little room to say it's better or even nearly as good.
Maybe you like it better. A few people do. That's fine but you are not typical.
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In RTM, hotspots are there on all monitors, so you can just swipe till stopped.
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You don't have to use the apps store on OSX. The app store exists but you can still just download stuff from the web, install from a shared drive, or stick a DVD in the slot.
Re:Paid for (Score:4, Interesting)
So here is the deal, I get a worse user interface, get to pay more for an operating system that offers virtually no benefit. Man I am so glad I shifting to OSX and Linux around the time Windows 8 was announced and released to devs. This is going to bite them in the ass and IMO with what I am experiencing with OSX and Linux, Microsoft really does suck!
Don't fucking use it then as you obviously have done. Why the hell are you complaining about an OS you're not going to use?
I'm still running Vista, which was slated by just about everyone. It's stable, runs what I want, and I really can't complain about it. Dropping a few services makes performance comparable to 7, and I've got a decent system anyway that doesn't suffer from slowdown because of Vista being a hog. I've had about 6 months uptime on this system, which I use for gaming, work, surfing, etc.
If you don't want to use the software, why are you moaning about it? I'm not going to use it, either - there's no reason for me to upgrade at the moment.
Re:Paid for (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell are you complaining about an OS you're not going to use?
because he's joining a conversation about it on the internet to voice his opinion?
If you don't want to use the software, why are you moaning about it? I'm not going to use it, either - there's no reason for me to upgrade at the moment.
so you complain about him complaining about an os he's not going to use, but yet you feel the need to post about his post when you also are not planning on using it?
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get to pay more for an operating system that offers virtually no benefit.
More than what?
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Worse for Games (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Worse for Games (Score:5, Insightful)
The new version of windows always sucks for games until nvidia and ati get around to tweaking things. Give it 6-8 months for everything to catch up. If you plan on installing Win8 on day one and expecting everything to work as good as, or better than the 36 month old Win7 ecosystem, you're insane.
Re:Worse for Games (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this necessarily the case?
The driver's job is to talk to the hardware.
The API's job is it talk to the driver.
Windows 8 uses Direct X 11 as the API, same as Windows 7.
The driver is the same the hardware is the same, there's been no major change in the driver systems in Windows 8 which has been documented (unlike the move to Vista).
Given this why am I not right to expect Windows 8 to perform identically to Windows 7 from day one?
Answer please (Score:2)
- But are there real tangible performance differences compared to Windows 7?
- TechSpot has grabbed the RTM version of Windows 8, measuring and testing the performance of various aspects of the operating system
Expected a "... and" followed by the TechSpot answer! /. writes interesting summaries based on interesting stories.
What the point of TFS if one has to read up to TFA?
No Chrome on W7 (Score:5, Informative)
The sly omission of Chrome on Windows 7 from the browser benchmark is face-meltingly biased.
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Similarly the "Windows logo to desktop" seems like a strange benchmark as the benchmark result would be improved by simply showing the Windows logo later. Why wouldn't you just compare the time from power on to desktop (which is presumably what people actually care about)?
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Shenanigans. Using the same bench system would rule out any differences that the bios would make in a simple comparison such as this.
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(I admit I didn't read the article, or even the summary)
Except, when comparing two identical machines like they should have done, there should be zero differences except for the OS. So, from the first push of the button to the desktop is a good metric.
But, what I think is an even better metric, is from push of the button to USABLE desktop. I noticed that Win7 seemed faster to boot than XP on an equal machine, but I think Win7 may just in fact be faster to get you to a desktop, and it keeps loading things in
No real difference (Score:5, Insightful)
So after reading through the entire article (wait, was I supposed to do that?) the bottom line is that there is no significant difference that any regular user would care about.
I don't think shaving a second or two off of boot time is going to impress people when they see the user interface is "all different" now.
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It boots 2 seconds faster, and then you spend 20 seconds asking what the fuck is this shit when you don't get a Start menu, and you can't figure out where your stuff is.
What a great tradeoff.
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That's why everybody says MacOS is so fast - because it *feels* snappier not because 10GB files copies faster. That's what the developers should strive for, not a win in some synthetic "how long does it take to do X" benchmarks.
BTW In my definition responsiveness, loosely, is the time b
Where is that first post (Score:2)
Where is the first post from a uid above 2600Hz uh, I mean 2600000 praising windows 8 ?
Did we get rid of them ? Slashdot will live for ever, forget about the 6 digits or lower uid posts that say /. has come so low they will never come back. They are lying. /. is too addictive and funny also.
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That's it /. has come so low... I'll never come back!
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damn (1510) you can't be yelling at the kids :) you don't own the lawn at the retirement community
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Goodbye cruel world.
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Benchmarks don't really tell the story... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well done, but job not finished.
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Wait, there are old Windows users who don't know about Alt+F4? (it also works for Metro apps)
Polish a turd, it's still a turd. (Score:2)
I don't really mean that. Wait. Yes, I do. Sort of.
Windows ME was awful. Windows 2000 was pretty much the first version of the platform I would call usable. Cairo was very buggy, then a little more buggy, then a little less buggy a degree at a time through SP3. Vista was the ME of NT (ie, bloody awful). 7 is a fairly decent platform. By that I mean, I haven't had a kernel crash in over a year of using it on a daily basis, and that is saying something - every single other OS I have ever used has had a kernel
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That's reasonable. There's no reason everyone has to use the same OS, and no reason a user has to buy into every new version.
Lots of people skipped Vista.
I don't mind when companies swing and miss. I like to have lots of choices, and I don't think three is nearly enough for desktop operating systems, especially nowadays since desktop apps are a little less important.
Between my wife, my daughter and me, and all our different projects and careers, there are at leas
Re:Polish a turd, it's still a turd. (Score:4, Informative)
Vista was the ME of NT (ie, bloody awful). 7 is a fairly decent platform. By that I mean, I haven't had a kernel crash in over a year of using it on a daily basis, and that is saying something.
Did you ever use Vista? It got horrendously bad press because it was dog slow on crap machines. It should never have been installed on them.
I'm still using it, and have had over 6 months uptime. 7 might be better, but Vista was only catastrophic because it was run on low end hardware and had every possible service enabled as default. That's Microsoft's fault, completely, but Vista isn't the turd you make it out to be.
ME on the other hand, I agree with.
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I did eight years of support, Vista was without doubt the worst of the bunch - and yes, I had to learn it so I knew the shit of which I spoke. I would say it was even worse than ME; at least you could fall back to 98 drivers for ME if push came to shove, you couldn't use 2k-specific drivers on Vista. If it didn't come with Vista drivers, you were screwed. xp drivers were more miss than hit on Vista, by a very wide margin. As to performance, I insisted on dog's bollocks machines for my support gear, and Vist
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I don't know. I have a piece of petrified turd that has been polished. It's kind of pretty and you can't tell that it was a turd a million years ago.
Might as well be a BSOD. (Score:3)
*But* the 'Metro' launcher is an abomination. Having something fill my entire screen with glaring colours and toybox tiles when I am looking to launch an application is the exact opposite of the discreet, unintrusive interface that I'm looking for on a workstation desktop.
What did users complain about with Vista? UAC. They hated that every five minutes all your colours went grey, and you couldn't continue without clicking yes on a box in the middle of the screen. But UAC did that because, love it or hate it, there was a reason for it to demand your attention and draw you out of whatever you were doing.
The 'Metro' launcher has no such reason. It completely breaks my flow of thought every time it swallows my desktop. It breaks the illusion that I am working on a constant surface. It is a jarring alteration to the consistency of the desktop experience. It causes the eye and the mind to pause, to catch, and to wonder what the fuck is going on. It might as well be a BSOD for the effect it has on my concentration.
Now with time, I accept that the 'where did all my stuff go?' feeling will dissipate. The interruption will become familiar and not shocking. We'll get used to it. But I fundamentally refuse to accept that a glaring fullscreen, interuption is a step forward in UI. Stick it on a tablet by all means. But it is simply not suited to genuine cognitive multitasking.
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If you use OSX consider what OSX was like with regard to the Classic box. You are, using your metaphor, upset that your workflow with classic works worse on OSX than it did on OS9. Well yeah, of course.
And I would suspect for GDI applications Windows 9 is going to be even more uncomfortable. Where it will shine is Metro applications. And that's the point to start shifting the development community over to the new interface. Apple hit tremendous resistance as they moved people from Classic to Carbon to C
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The difference is that it was clear with the OSX transition that the new APIs would be viable replacements for the old
I hope you check back. This was a good comment. You should get an account.
Before 10.0 was released. No it wasn't clear at all. And wouldn't be for a while. 10.0 was much rougher than Windows 8 is today and was being met with far more hostility. For example http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html [asktog.com]
Some of that stuff like multiple monitors I'm sure will be added with service
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What did users complain about with Vista? UAC. They hated that every five minutes all your colours went grey, and you couldn't continue without clicking yes on a box in the middle of the screen.
That never happened. It happened when installing drivers, programs, everything, because it should happen. Perhaps people got a bad impression early on because that's when they were installing the programs.
UAC is fine. It only throws up when you're trying to something you should need administration privileges to
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I actually think I am a Luddite. I tried to join the official Luddites once but gave up because they don't appear to have a web site.
In my experience (Score:2)
boot is faster the windows 7, and file transfers, including torrents, are faster.
I have a dual boot with 7 and 8, so the machine is the same. Especially extremely large file, or large groups of files.
Weird benchmarks (Score:5, Informative)
Something feels wrong about comparing Windows 7 /w Office 2010 and Windows 8 /w Office 2013. Will Office 2013 not be available for Windows 7 or something? Why would you compare two different Office products in two different operating systems? Seems like an unreliable metric if you're trying to compare the performance between operating systems and not different versions of Office.
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Maybe because the interface for office 2013 has been updated to match Windows 8
If they compared Windows 8 w/ Office 2010, you would have complained about the interfaces not matching.
Stop nitpicking. You were going to hate it anyway, so why even pretend there's a real reason behind it.
Also incomparable JS benchmarks (Score:2)
I also noticed that the JS benchmarks were completely incomparable. Each benchmark was for a different browser, and the browser company that made each test suite won (firefox won the kraken suite, and google won the V8 suite).
I would have been interested to see Chrome on Win7 VS Chrome on Win8, or FF on Win7 VS FF on Win8, but alas.
Some features i actually want (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate the new metro interface, but i like some features like: easy restore (refresh and reset), windows to go, virtualization, shorter boot times and newer windows display driver model. Let's see how it does
any way to back port the core speed ups to 7? (Score:2)
any way to back port the core speed ups to 7? or get 8 without the new GUI?
Windows 8 is for post-PC world (Score:3)
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Is it worth upgrading from Win7 for a standard desktop or standard laptop? For most users, probably not. Windows 8 is designed for hybrid tablets, Kinect-style PC-interfacing, unusual monitor configurations, etc. It's for "non-standard" computing, generally. If benchmarking were updated to capture "usability" in many different computing environments, this is where Win8 would awkwardly hobble before falling over and obstructing the path while shouting and pissing itself ahead of its predecessor.
FTFY
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There is no post-PC world. There is just the same PC dominated world we've had for the last 20 years, and some tablets. It mostly works fine.
This must be some new use of the word "fast"... (Score:2)
So the article shows that Win8 gets from the Windows logo to the desktop in 18 seconds. On a Core i7-3960X. With a Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD. This is regarded as fast.
I have Win7 running on a several-year-old netbook. It has the cheapest SSD I could find, a Corsair 32GB. Time from hitting the power button to desktop is about 20 seconds.
(That's with a very stripped-down Win7 install, courtesy of RT Se7en Lite. So far I haven't noticed any loss of functionality in this lite version).
So it looks l
How about really stressing it? (Score:3)
The OS is supposed to manage the available resources. It's easy when you just run one thing at a time.. I want to know how Windows 8 performs when you have 3 number crunching jobs, each requiring 2 GB running at low priority, a different process which loads 6 GB of data into RAM, a steady stream of IO from each process, interactive use, and maybe some music or video too. Throw in a VM too, to really push it. Does it still manage to be responsive and interactive?
My Win 7 laptop with 4 GB RAM becomes unpleasant to use when I start a VM which uses 2 GB. My Linux box has 16 GB and it handled the above scenario pretty well, but adding another instance of the 6 GB fitting job caused it to crash! (I was swapping to something that wasn't meant to be used as swap, so my fault). Admittedly, testing OSes under stress isn't easy to do reproducibly, but I think a subjective opinion would be really interesting....
Their Conclusions (Score:5, Informative)
Since the summary is a teaser;
* Generally the same performance as Windows 7, sometimes marginally faster
* Faster startup and shutdown
* Games and web browsing the same (IE10 no better than IE9)
* Multimedia slightly faster (x264 encoding/decoding)
I'm sure corporate group policy will take care of the faster startup and shutdown times :)
Re:Window 8 (Score:4, Informative)
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Why does everyone assume Metro Apps are mandatory? Metro is only mandatory for the ARM version. The 64bit version I use on my laptop can run Desktop Mode, and it works great, much improved over Windows 7. Other than a Metro looking lock screen and wireless network connect screen, you could hardly tell the difference by looking.
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Then tell us, how do you disable Metro and return to the regular start menu?
He said Metro Apps aren't mandatory (as in you can run any non-Metro desktop apps you want), that doesn't have anything to do with the start screen.
Re:Window 8 (Score:5, Interesting)
Two steps, 1) Click the desktop app, 2) Install Vistart, a 3rd party start menu replacement. I am not trolling, I am being serious. I can stay in desktop mode for weeks. After you wake up your computer from hibernation, type in your password, it returns you right to where you left off, in desktop mode. Default file associations might go to metro apps, but you can change those too. OK Vistart won't let me right click on anything in the start menu, but that isn't a huge deal. I don't know why that guy called me a troll. I've been using windows 8 on my home laptop for months. I am in desktop mode 99% of the time. As far as the ugly theme in desktop mode goes, no big deal. Someone will come out with a nice themeing program or hack for it at some point. I've been saying this for months. I've been using windows 8 since before they even had Metro in the leaked builds. I've had lots of time to notice the nice features.
Seriously, use windows 8 with Vistart. It's a free program. You may miss a few advanced features of the Windows 7 start menu, but you will like all the positive changes of Windows 8 more than the negative ones. Here is just one example. Windows 8 does not interrupt your presentation to remind you to reboot your computer to install an update. It gives you days worth of warning before it nags like that. Another example, if you are copying a bunch of files and one can't copy, you can just hit skip, and it will continue with everything else. You can also pause fie copying. Plus, Windows 8 doesn't have that nasty explorer refreshing bug that Windows 7 has. I haven't tested this, but I bet it doesn't have the nasty failed backups if you use a custom library bug that Windows 7 has. What is Windows 7 biggest missing feature? Native ISO mounting? Windows 8 has that. I've reinstalled Windows 8 several times over the past year, 2 or three leaked builds, then three official betas, then the RTM. I never had to install Daemon Tools or Security Essentials as part of that process, because those features are baked right in.
Plus, Internet Explorer 10 is nice. It is standards compliant. I am developing a website and targeting Chrome/Safari as the recommended browsers, but I would like it to work in IE10. It mostly works in IE9, but that required a lot of work, some features will never work in IE9. My modern HTML5/CSS3 website using canvas and FileReader API works just as well in IE10 as Chrome.
If you only mess around with Metro for a couple hours, how do you expect to notice all the changes under the hood? I have been using Windows 8 for months. Actually, I have been using Windows 8 for over a year now. I am still discovering nice new features. I've been using since you had to hack Metro into it, because it came disabled in all beta builds before developer preview.
Come on moderators, give me a few points so people can read this. Windows 8 in desktop mode with Vistart is a very nice experience. You can't review an OS in a weekend, I've been using it for a year and a half or so.
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1. If a product comes out of the gate needing a hack to bring in critical but missing functionality, there's something seriously wrong. Vistart is a nice tactical fix, but it doesn't change the fact that the only reason microsoft removed the start menu was to force people to interact with metro. This was done for marketing reasons. It's in users' best interests not to support this behavior with their money.
2. presentation interruption/file copy bugs/iso mounting etc. all of these are simple additions that
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+1 insightful to you sir.
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I shouldn't feed trolls but I'll bite. I've used Metro. It *is* a steaming pile of crap. This is coming from someone who is relatively OS agnostic. I use Win 7 and love it. I use various flavors of *nix and love them for various reasons as well. I have on OS X box, it's pretty cool. I'm not too fond of my iPad (it's mostly a lab device anways for me) but I love my Asus Transformer Prime. I use many OSes.
Windows 8 is OK on a tablet device. On a desktop it is a steaming pile of turd. There is absolut
Re:Real use of the OS (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're right, nothing you said was an obvious troll. I just find Metro to be such a horrible interface that I tend to knee jerk when someone praises such an obviously bad upgrade option. There is not one compelling reason for any PC user to upgrade to Windows 8, but given Microsoft's track record Windows 9 will be out in a couple of years and will address that. I'm looking forward to it. Windows 8 is a non-starter. It won't gain much traction in the tablet market even though Metro is well suited to it,
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Naw, don't read the article. It's just another site that is all fanboy over Windows 8 while pretending to do unbiased tests (like compare several fast browsers on W8 versus a different browser on W7).
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Oh no. Are we going to start this crap again?
It wasn't funny after the first person did it for Windows XP (2000 SP), nor was it funny for Windows 7 (Vista SP). Chances are good that it's not funny now.
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It's not meant to be funny, it's meant to show the similarity between this and previous operating systems. No one claimed that Vista was XP SP4
But - new operating systems are built atop old versions. Ubuntu 11 was like 10 was like 9 was like... what purpose in pointing out the obvious?
So I assumed he was going for "+1 Funny" rather than "-1 Redundant" when I made my reply. Unfortunately, he only succeeded at the latter.
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will be available again in sp1?
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I love how every review mentions how startup and/or shutdown times have improved slightly, as was the case when Windows 7 was released. However, they seem to miss two somewhat important aspects of this:
1. It is not very common for users to turn their PCs on and off several times during the day. Also, there's hibernate. I, for one, keep my PC on for weeks at a time unless I'm somehow forced to reboot, which brings me to...
2. While a regular startup has been getting a second or two faster with every release, the new Windows Update subsystem (introduced in Vista) means it takes BLOODY AGES TO SHUT DOWN THE DAMN OS if there happens to be updates pending, and if you're lucky IT WILL ALSO TAKE BLOODY AGES TO START THE DAMN THING UP AGAIN AFTERWARDS, as the update process is finished. And if you turn off the computer while this is happening, you will probably have to reinstall Windows.
I've hosed a few systems by shutting down a laptop after a meeting or presentation, only to find that Windows wanted to spend the next half an hour or so installing updates.
If you can even get the damn updates to install... I stopped using W7 when after several fresh installs it hung on a few critical vulnerability fixes. Fuck that, I already feel like I'm browsing around with a bullseye on my back, I'm not strapping dynamite on too -- Windows 8 sounds like adding blinders so I won't even know what hit me...
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Windows update has always been dog slow.
I never understood why. On Debian unstable, I can go a couple months and then apt-get upgrade half a gig of packages in less time than my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine can run some routine updates. Downloading the files takes forever, which I suppose could be caused by a lack of server capacity on Microsoft's part, but why does it take so long to check for new updates or install an update?
It's been that way ever since they first implemented it. I thought it would
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Windows Update has become a non-issue for most users since it mostly does it's thing in the background and during idle time these days. Clearly MS just left the broken old implementation in place because there were more impactful things to fix.
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These days, yes, although I disabled automatic updates on my girlfriend's computer because it wanted to reboot the machine at night after certain updates, and her motherboard is flaky and doesn't reboot right sometimes.
That doesn't explain why it was slow for more than a decade.
I'm not complaining (anymore), since I no longer work with Windows machines except for a few family computers. I'm just curious as to what it's doing that makes it so slow.
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Boots much faster than Win7, otherwise so similar that you won't notice outside benchmarks.