From a couple of websites that reviewed Windows 8, it looks like MS did make quite an improvement speedwise. Do you guys concur? Does windows 8 feels faster than windows 7?

I concur. I am extremely impressed by Windows 8. I will be running it full time on my T430s when it arrives.

I'm running Windows 8 RTM on my x100e and the speed improvement compared to Windows 7 is truly impressive.

Booting, shutdown, hibernate & resume (especially that, eventhough I have 4gb RAM) as well as common usage is perceivably faster.
I didn't expect that.

Boot times are faster
Wake up from sleep are nearly instant

Agree on what QWERTY Andreas said.

A friend of mine has got W8 as well on his old HP laptop. Makes it much quicker. As soon as I get my SSD for my W500, I'll put Windows 8 on it.

much faster, quicker boot even on a nearly 4 year old W700. I do hate the new "metro" interface for a non touch device but i installed classic shell which works well and gives you back the nice old start menu, but can still use new style if you wish. impressive speeds, stupid decision to remove start orb and menu and the menu hack from RTM.

Faster. Hmmmm. But what is this metro interface junk???

I bought my HP 8300 Elite desktop recently, which entitled me to buy Windows 8 for $14.99. I plan to take advantage of that and install it on my 5-year-old Toughbook CF-Y7, which is running XP now. Hopefully Windows 8 will make it a bit faster.



Thousands of people have complained about the Metro interface and Microsoft doesn't seem to care. In fact, the Developers' Preview version of Win 8 still had the classic start menu, but subsequent versions did away with it. Metro is great for phones, tablets, and conventional computers with touch screens. I bet Microsoft believes that these devices will dominate the market very soon. And for those of us who are stuck with non-touchscreen computers, we will be happy with Windows 7 for many more years and wouldn't want to upgrade to 8 anyway. (I am upgrading to 8 on my Toughbook though, because I have grown to hate XP.)

Leave it to ms to mess up something that could have been good all around.

x100e - How old of a machine is that? What specs/ year?



- I run Win7 x64 without any aero etc. as a bare 'Windows 2000/ 95' look alike.
- Running Classic Shell to SIMPLIFY my Shell & Windows Explorer etc.

Given the above 2, will Win 8 be faster/ better for me?

From my experience, if you have an SSD installed there's not much speed difference between Win 7 and Win 8.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Just put Windows 8 on my X220 with a Samsung 830 SSD. I was too lazy to do a clean instal, but the upgrade process was surprisingly fast. I did not measure the time, but it certainly took less than an hour.

Installed Lenovo system update and downloaded the relevant driver updates, and everything works.

Performance wise, I don't notice any app-wise performance difference. But startup/shut down and sleep/wake are noticeably quicker. Overall I am very impressed. MS impressed with with Windows 7, and they did it again with Windows 8.

upgraded from windows 7 to windows 8 on my thinkpad e520 with an ssd. it boots and runs a lot quicker. the metro thing takes some getting used to, i miss my start menu otherwise i do find it faster.

I did a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on a spare hard drive on my T61p. My production hard drive and my spare hard drive are both 7200-rpm.

I then upgraded this to Windows 8 Pro 64-bit. It might start faster, but the machine performance when fully running is about the same as Windows 7 for me. Now my Windows 7 machine is very fast indeed and does not hamper me. That is one reason why I still keep using my T61p.

I never shut down my M90p, so start up and shutdown are of no consequence on that machine.
I start up the T61p once in the morning and shutdown once at night. I suspend in between. So start up times and shutdown times are of no consequence on this machine either.
I know SSD drives are fast but (a) there are not yet large ones that I have seen and (b) failures remain catastrophic (and precisely when you don't need it). So I have not yet drifted to SSD drives.

... JDH

You might want to check out Start8 ( http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ ).

I installed it on my Win8 desktop computer and things are back to normal. All the goodness of Win8 with the good old Win7 start menu.

Only real speed difference I noticed is in reboot and resume from standby. It'll reboot I'll look away for a second and wonder if it actually rebooted because it will be sitting at the login screen already. Day to day speed is about the same (or slightly worse because Chrome wants all the RAM!!)

I have noticed a Little performance increase in games on my thinkpad W500 from 7 to 8.. But it could be because of something else...

I find Windows 8 to be ridiculously fast compared to 7. It's especially quick on booting and waking from sleep. 7 was a massive improvement on XP, so I'm impressed that Microsoft found so much more headroom to grow.

I am thinking of taking advantage of this and use Classic Shell / Explorer to make it Windows 7 look alike.