Interesting Windows 8 Report - Page 3

No.

I didn't use it until about 6 months ago but it has been around for way longer than Win8 so I see it as another example of M$ stealing other programmers ideas and putting them out there as their own. Nothing new here, M$ has been doing it for years.

I actually find it slower than it was with Win 7.

My Windows 8 PC does not have UEFI and it boots much faster than my current Windows 7 PC (also non-UEFI). My HTPC uses Windows 7 and does have a UEFI motherboard and it still doesn't boot anywhere near as fast as my Win 8 machine.

I don't know where this thread is going, but if anyone could shed more light on the UEFI setups I'd be thrilled

I don't reboot very often, maybe 1-2 / month

I have all the same hardware as I did with W7, but my boot times are slower in W8 Pro

Asrock z77 Pro4-m

Asrock makes an instant boot utility, but I'd call it a farce. All it does is reboots after every shutdown then enters S3, so if you didn't know that you'd think your cold booting when you resume from S3. It would seem really fast, but it's not showing you what happens between power off and power on. If you lost power and had to cold-boot you'd see the real boot time is much longer

Unfortunately all my searching for "W8 supported UEFI" along with Asrock or w/o leads nowhere. I'm not sure which manufacturer UEFIs W8 talks nicely to ? ? ?

They should remove the Universal part of the name though, because they don't appear universal to me

My mistake, it was never universal

U for unified? aka unique to every model

That's what Microsoft gets for focusing only on mobile devices/touch screen computing.  Our organization is going to skip Win8 in hopes Win9 will be desktop PC friendly.  The company my brother works at will be doing the same.

Oops..

I, like you, rarely reboot my PC. Probably when I do an update that forces me to. Unlike days of yore, Win7 is very stable and doesn't grind to a halt if you don't reboot it. Because I rarely reboot and when I do it is about a minute with all the start up apps I load I haven't really spent any time to make it boot faster. It seems that the time to do that would probably outweigh the time to reboot as I can synchronize that with grabbing a new cop of coffee or bottle of beer.

My company probably has about 3000 windows licenses. Until a year ago, they were all XP. New computers with Vista or W7 stickers on them were downgraded to XP

This year, they started "leaving" windows 7 installed for new hires and replacement computers. Probably at about 2% W7 and 98% XP

We are all on Win7 now with the roll over occurring over the last 2 years. We are still on IE8 because some internal webpages/software will not run under IE9. I snuck a copy of Chrome Browser on my PC..

Same here for both. Did you have to use the offline installer?? http://support.google.com/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=126299

I just downloaded it and installed it. I was quite surprised though.. hope I don't get in too much trouble.

I just downloaded it and installed it. I was quite surprised though.. hope I don't get in too much trouble.

The typical chrome installation is web based, which may or may not be blocked. In my case it was blocked

if you look at the people who are leading edge with upgrades and technology, the gamers, things are fine with Windows 8. gamers are the ones making hardware upgrades every few months. they were the driving force for video cards, CPUs, RAM, SSDs, etc. they were the first drivers of the move from 32-bit to 64-bit. gamers are the ones spending the most money and driving the hardware market forward. they are a very good barometer for where the market goes.

look at the steam hardware survey (your hardware is automatically read by the Steam service):
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey



Most sales of Windows are through sales of new PCs. You don't look at corporations as the movers of a new OS. Heck, corporations take forever to do any migration. I still see companies with Windows 2000. Most people don't have cars that old.

What is that picture purporting to disclose? It is just a bunch of random percentages. Percent of what?

Makes sense, when I was gaming I couldn't care-less what people said about vista. I wanted DX10 and nothing else mattered. I really didn't have any show-stopping problems with it either

I've had a few growing pains with W8, but I couldn't pass up getting pro licenses for $40. I'm again in the minority who see it as an improvement, but I'm not doing a lot with the UI. Most of the things I do are in virtual box or running on their own in the system tray

I am sure it is an improvement but IDK if it is that much of one actually.. Win 7 was way ahead of XP IMO. I'm not so sure about Win8.

I wouldn't pay for it personally (I have a technet sub), but I prefer 8 to 7. On the desktop/laptops for 4.99 I bought Start8 and it does everything I want it to do. I don't care much for Metro on a desktop.

On my HTPC I upgraded and am very pleased with it. I run WMC (got the free keys when they were offered).

I keep my build simple with Live TV via HdhomeRun Prime, MediaBrowser, My Channel Logos and Media Center Themer. I use LAV splitters for MKV playback and audio bitstreaming, and DirectCobSub for subs on my mkvs. It performs a bit better than 7 and is more stable. The only thing I miss is 10 channels in my TV Guide because you can no longer edit the DLL to get more, but I'm fine with that.

Bootup (which is rare) is faster and its great.

I am not a fan of their more restrictive licensing, however. Not one bit.

Well fine, that's you then, but UEFI was meant to improve boot times, and in my experience, it does in both Windows 7 and 8, but 7 doesn't have the extra optimizations that 8 does, so it's obviously still a bit quicker, but as I said before, how many times do you really reboot a PC these days?

If you took a fresh build of 7 x64 and another of 8 x64 on a modern SATA3 SSD with UEFI BIOS, I think there wouldn't be much in it.

I just got a brand new Intel 180GB 330 Series SSD, and I happen to have a new motherboard with UEFI. If I have some time in the next few days, I'll install Windows 7 Ultimate x64, record boot times after it's fully patched with my standard apps installed on it, then I'll do the same for Windows 8 Pro w/Media Center. Then we'll have some data to use for analysis.

You want to bet on the cars as old as Win2k onlysublime. I know quite a few people that have cars that old, and either they are a beater still running, or have restored them and run better than they did, when they came out of the factory.

Okay, I found out what was going on with my setup. Old bios

After upgrading to the latest, I now have the following Boot options (Normal, Fast, Ultra-Fast)

Fast and Ultra Fast will only look for GPT boot disks

My W8 installation asked if I'd like to use GPT formatting, but it returned an error so I went ahead with the legacy mbr

The reason it returned an error, is because I booted from a legacy "mode." In your bios, when installing W8, you have to select a UEFI device (CD or USB) instead of the legacy CD-ROM or USB devices. This is why they show up twice (UEFI: USB-SanDisk-bla bla) and (USB: USB-SanDisk-bla bla) unless you have "Legacy boot options" disabled. I've heard legacy bios options should stay enabled, but if you want to install W8 to GPT you need to select the UEFI options. This is silly to me, since it's the same USB stick and it's formatted the same way but it won't install W8 to gpt partitions unless you booted the installer from a "UEFI" bios boot option.

The way I use the server, I do want to achieve "Ultra Fast" boot times (since they are right in front of me ) so I'll likely be re-installing W8. I was going to swap SSDs and CPU coolers anyway, so I'll just re-install rather than clone my existing installation. I don't believe cloning the installation to a GPT formatted SSD would work, and there are conversion steps out there that use GPartMagic but they look a little too messy for my taste