Ken1943 said:
My question is, is it better than win 7 and as stable. I don;t need a new
os for looks.
KenW
All I can tell you is, something I was doing on WinXP the other day,
failed after processing about 500GB of data.
When I reran it on Windows 8, the job went smoother (in terms of the
machine remaining responsive while it was going on), and the compute
job actually finished. (It would be pretty hard to "compare performance",
when the WinXP run never finished :-( )
On the WinXP machine, the NTFS file system seems to be to blame,
using up more and more cycles as time passes (it seems like it's
a memory fragmentation problem, related to file systems). I've had
this problem before, while using my WinTV card (uncompressed video capture).
It got so bad this time, that I got a "Delayed Write Failure" which
caused the program running in WinXP, to exit (while I wasn't sitting
in front of the machine).
So Windows 8, does seem to be a bit better under the hood, in this
one tiny example.
Windows 8 differs a bit, in terms of memory management. Which I hope
is why the whole test case went smoother. I refuse to believe the
scheduler is that much better. There really shouldn't be that much
room for improvements in the scheduler (my machine is only a dual core
with shared L2, so you can't be too crafty with that setup, in terms
of scheduler innovations - whether a task bounces around should make
no difference with such hardware).
On the minus side, when Windows 8 has a problem, you tend to not
get a nice BSOD to look at. More likely a black screen, with
a terse and useless English text with the equivalent of
"better luck next time". I prefer to see piles of hex digits,
because I can do something with those. I haven't looked into
disabling all the automatic reporting in Windows 8, so I can
actually get a crash dump for my own usage instead. It took a
bit of work to get that working in the other OSes. So that remains
an area of concern (getting a crash dump for personal inspection
and resolution).
For me, the ChassicShell add-on makes the thing palatable, whereas
if that were to break, I'd be "out of there". Same thing happened
to my interest in Ubuntu. That "tile crap" is for the birds. As
a bonus, in Ubuntu, the usefulness of the "tile crap", changes with
your screen real estate. So when two people discuss how bad it is,
the person with the small screen is really suffering, because they
can't even see all the graphic elements someone with a larger screen
can see. Someone with a larger screen in Ubuntu, might say "what are
you complaining about ?", when the two of them aren't seeing
exactly the same thing. I don't know if Windows 8 has any cases
like that or not.
I only have one machine here, which is rated well enough to run
Windows 8. My secondary machine, has a good enough processor, but
there's no driver for the video card on that box, and Microsoft
decided it would be fun to freeze the screen at a resolution of
1024x768 if there's no driver. And the monitor on that machine is
1440x900, so the screen looks pretty bad. So that's what happens,
if all the hardware isn't new stuff. So it would cost me
the price of Windows 8, plus another $50 video card, to get
a decent looking screen on my backup machine in Windows 8.
Paul
NOT!). I don't