Windows 7 or 8

I'd personally stay with Windows 7. I found a thread on our forum with some helpful links for both OS's. Here it is

 

I use W8 and am using Start8 from Stardock. I am not that satisfied with W8, I hope that W8.1 will be better. But I am not holding my breath.

As for DirectX 11.2, I am not worried about it. Apart from Microsoft itself, I doubt that many company has yet to fully master it. And by the time the other game companies do, most of us would have upgrade to a newer laptop.

PS: I do not know of any games that are even using DirectX 11.1.

 

Bend Windows 8 to your will instead of letting Windows 8 bend you over. Take control and make it everything Microsoft never intended it to be.

Spoiler

 

I have actually found Windows 8 surprisingly great. The way the Metro UI functions meshes with how I've been using the start button for years, so I feel no Start Button nostalgia.

However...

The split between Desktop and Metro apps means it can be awkward to figure out what you still have running at any given time.

Lack of a 'close' button in the Metro UI drives me nuts. Ctrl F4 works, but the need to use it is a UI fail.

Win 8 alienware respawn does not like USB 3 devices (?!)

8 is very stable and lean. Seems to boot and run faster overall than 7.

Overall I have no nostalgia for 7, but am looking forward to 8.1

 

It's definitely a love/hate type of scenario. I tend to look at it in terms of "what have I gained" and I can't really identify anything meaningful that gives me a sense of having benefited from it. If I had to use one word to describe it, it would have to be "meh" for sure.

I honestly don't hate Windows 8, but I do hate a couple of things about it, for example: (a) I find the appearance of the Modern UI very unattractive; (b) I find navigation terribly inefficient and slower in the Modern UI. Although, it is easy enough to completely avoid it. Working from the desktop is not remarkably different than Windows 7; and, (c) I loathe the Modern apps for the most part. Many are just adware garbage with limited functionality, tacky-looking pastel colors, bloated, screen-hogging text, thick borders and huge buttons. Everything is so exaggerated in size that you darned near need at least a 2560x1440 display to feel like you have the same amount of usable screen space as a 1600x900 display. The UI makes it feel like a really, really cheap device no matter how fancy the machine is. I share your sentiments about having to use Ctrl+F4. That's just stupid. But, I am glad Ctrl+F4 works because having to swipe or drag down to close apps is beyond stupid.

Booting feels a tad faster to me also, but that's not adding much value since booting from SSD with Windows 7 is already blazing fast. Waiting 1 or 2 seconds more is kind of meaningless to me, personally. After running hundreds of benchmarks, it is unmistakable that Windows 8 hinders overall system performance, especially where the CPU is concerned. It is typically not a huge hit, but enough to measure in most circumstances.

Now, having said all that I need to give credit where it's due, and there are a few features that I really love about it. The one thing that I find the most awesome about it is the the Win-X menu. I thinks it's nifty. With my own tweaks in place, I find it completely tolerable and unworthy of being hated as an OS. I have been using it for 10 months, daily for 8 to 12 hours every day, so I am as used to it as I will ever be in this lifetime. In 20/20 hindsight I would not have wasted any money migrating all of my machines (except for the M17xR2, which was not migrated,) to Windows 8.

This past weekend my wife asked me to put Windows 7 back on her Dell laptop. Her system was the first one I installed Windows 8 on. She had been using it daily for a couple of weeks longer than I have. She wanted to like it and was a real trooper at giving it a fair chance. In the end, her personal preferences never adjusted to the extent for her to be able to say that she liked it. With Windows 7 on her machine for four days now, she loves her laptop again as she did when it was brand new. Upgrading her Inspiron from 4GB to 8GB of RAM and replacing her HDD with SSD when reinstalling Windows 7 was certainly a boost to her happiness-factor, too.

As a true geek, I am always curious about new tech and will generally give any new stuff a fair shot at impressing me. I am using Windows 8.1 preview on one laptop now. I don't find it all that different than Windows 8. Nothing better really, but nothing worse either. It has the worthless new (fake) Start button that is just a taskbar mounted shortcut back to the UI that I hate. That's OK, because Stardock Start8 has been updated for 8.1 and puts a real Start menu back where it belongs... so, no loss there. The 8.1 Modern UI has more adjustments for tile size and you can get all of the tiles you use to fit on one screen by shrinking them down. Although minor, that is an improvement. Instead of swiping left/right, it is up/down now. Sort of like watching "Karate Kid" LOL. It is still mired heavily in inefficient navigation and wasted motion. I use two systems with touch screens running Windows 8, and I don't find the Windows 8 experience more pleasurable on the basis of having a touch screen as some folks do. Touch is an interesting technology and I know some people like it. That's fine. It seems to have more of a pop-culture panache than offering anything in terms of added value. Reaching across a keyboard just feels awkward and having a filthy screen all of the time is just an ugly, nasty, grungy, unsanitary-feeling to me. (I know it's actually not more unsanitary than a keyboard, but it just feels that way. I don't own or want a tablet for this very reason.) I like having the display squeaky clean and using the keyboard and mouse/touchpad is much faster and more efficient.

 

I recon you touch on something real interesting there.. because for all the pomp and bravado that 8.1 is surrounded in what exactly does it do differently to 8.0.. Very little in my book.

I myself am also always curious and will test new stuff as much as possible. I've stuck with win 8 since getting my M18, and found it just as stable as Win 7. Furthermore, I've not been unhappy with the performance in any way, as opposed to my old M18R1 with Win 7. Still, there is nothing keeping me from downgrading.

The tiles are pointless on anything but a mobile phone or tablet, and the few apps that I would like to have used are pointless outside of the USA simply due to no content or relevance. I hardly ever use the tiles, instead hit the Win button and switch to the 'proper' OS for starting all my programs and performing any admin tasks. Still, it *is* just an OS and not something I really notice or interact with that much on a day-to-day basis.

On second thought I will probably dual-boot. Changing my SSD to Win7 and keep Win8 on my AW supplied HDD. Just in case the final release of 8.1 suddenly adds value.

Oh and for petes sake, why did "they" have to go and make AlienRespawn all b*tt-ugly as well. It looked great the way it did

 

Hi Guys

I am running an MX18R2 with 7970's. Thing is I am getting horrible lag and rubber banding in BF4 and have seen mentioned that windows 8 will fix that.

So before I change from a reasonably stable win 7 64 bit install and venture into the great unknown I thought I would ask if there are any issues with win 8 install I should be aware of? Instal order? Specific Drivers? Video drivers I need? I think I am on 13.11's at the moment.


Cheers for your help

 

The biggest benefit I've derived from using Windows 8 is the ability to login from all my Windows 8 devices with the same account and have all my settings etc sync'd across them all including backgrounds, contacts, favorites, etc. Otherwise, for me it's as stable as Windows 7 but boots with an SSD in under 8 seconds.

Cheers,

 

I was intrigued to try Win8 when it shipped with my first R2, but I just felt that I wasn't as efficient with it as I was with Win7. While this was expected with a new interface, I didn't feel the urge to deal with it, so I'm back to using 7 for the time being. I may go to a dual boot setup again down the road, but right now I'm perfectly fine with 7. I didn't like having an app screen and a desktop to switch between, nothing was very easy to find and I kept catching myself scrolling to where the Start button should have been. On a positive note, it ran very smooth.

 

I'm currently on Windows 8, It's taken me 3-4 fresh reformats and installs, and at this point of time, I can say I've loyally used windows 8 for at least 10 months. However, In a few hours, I'm going to be back to windows 7. Main reasons, Windows 8 drivers, especially for network cards like the killer n-1103 is pathetic. I haven't been able to game without lagspikes for almost a year, and after months of investigating, thinking it's a problem with the internet, it finally occured that the problem is and always has been windows 8. Not just that, when i try to update to 8.1 i get mocked by tons of errors. That, and it's unbelieveably convenient to have a start bar. I don't think i've ever used any of the windows 8 features and found them useful. I think the two main ones i would ever find useful was the windows 8 built-in pdf reader, and the windows 8 built-in iso reader as well. However, these are very minor conveniences considering all the huge inconveniences it's caused me. I'll gladly be going back to windows 7, and probably getting windows 7 ultimate just because of the limit on how much RAM win7 home can support.

 

Which is the gadget in that pic for the Hardware usage? (CPU, RAM, Etc.)

Any other similar that you could recommend me?

 

That is the HWiNFO64 desktop gadget. OpenHardwareMonitor also has one. Both work well.

If you want to restore the desktop gadget functionality that the dummies at Micro$lop stripped out, use 8GadgetPack and you can have it all.

Their excuse was that desktop gadgets posed a security risk and they are capable of being exploited. Meh... maybe so. I'd rather be at risk with my machine working the way I want it to work.

 

As I mentioned above... Identical BIOS settings... Windows 8 is measurably slower where CPU performance is concerned.