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Bought a laptop last year that came with Win 8 on it. As soon as I got it out of the box I formatted and installed win 7 ultimate. Now I'm getting a MX100 512GB to replace the 1TB HDD and i'm wondering if I should upgrade to Win 8.1.
What do you guys think? I really like Win 7 but I know that Win 8.1 brings some performance increases. Is it worth the trouble?

I use win 8.1 update 1 with classic shell on my acer netbook and its quite nice.

I rarely ever use the metro interface but it is there if I need it.

I use it just the same as I would use my other win7 machine with ZERO frustration.

(the 120gb ssd helps a lot as well... )

I tried using 8 recently once again and just hated it. So 7 it is for me. I guess the classic shell is a decent fix. The question is, why use 8 that looks like 7 if you can just use proper 7?

Synchromesh wrote:

I tried using 8 recently once again and just hated it. So 7 it is for me. I guess the classic shell is a decent fix. The question is, why use 8 that looks like 7 if you can just use proper 7?

Start8. Yes, it's stupid to pay more to get functionality that shouldn't have been removed in the first place, but it's $5 fricken bucks, and it fixes everything.

Note that 8.1 gets most of the way there (can go straight to desktop from login, have an actual 'start' button to click), but you'd still want Start8 (or equivalent) to completely restore the Start Menu from Windows 7 and previous. It work so well that many organizations have started rolling it into their default distributions (see Chrispy_ here on TR).

Synchromesh wrote:

I tried using 8 recently once again and just hated it. So 7 it is for me. I guess the classic shell is a decent fix. The question is, why use 8 that looks like 7 if you can just use proper 7?

The win8 kernel does have some nice improvements over the win7 kernel.

The win8.1 fall update (update 2) is supposed to give you back your start menu with some nice metro metro thrown in if you need it. This gives you a more active start menu rather than a start screen replacement for your desktop. We will have to wait and see what M$ comes up with.

Aranarth wrote:

The win8.1 fall update (update 2) is supposed to give you back your start menu with some nice metro metro thrown in if you need it. This gives you a more active start menu rather than a start screen replacement for your desktop. We will have to wait and see what M$ comes up with.

Start menu isn't due to return til 2015.
http://www.neowin.net/news/start-menu-w ... until-2015

It really depends how you wanna use it.

I can often just press windows button to switch to metro and check my emails. Or start a program/game from there, while my desktop is mainly clean of any shortcuts.

Besides that, I do not see any visible reasons for an upgrade, but what's done behind the curtains may be more compelling.

glacius555 wrote:

Besides that, I do not see any visible reasons for an upgrade, but what's done behind the curtains may be more compelling.

That's my point. Is there any improvements under the hood that make Win 8.1 better than Win 7? Specifically SSD-wise?

7 for me, until they totally get rid of that metro crap and give us back Aero. 7 made the right moves in starting to use GPU to make the desktop look better, and to do useful stuff like Aero peek. 8 going to a flat, mobile-style desktop is a step backward.

Why not 8.1+Start8? Well because I prefer to vote with my wallet. Buying 8 sends a message to Microsoft that what they did is ok, when IMO it's not ok at all.

KamikaseRider wrote:

glacius555 wrote:

Besides that, I do not see any visible reasons for an upgrade, but what's done behind the curtains may be more compelling.

That's my point. Is there any improvements under the hood that make Win 8.1 better than Win 7? Specifically SSD-wise?

Well, I remember Anand testing my M500 SSD on Windows 8 and saying if one has UEFI motherboard, bitlocker is hardware-supported.
Also, if you live in the US, xbox music should let you stream free music with ads.

Guess I'll stick to Win 7 then. Thanks for the help.

KamikaseRider wrote:

Specifically SSD-wise?

There are only a few known documented changes with SSD support in Win8. Many of them are quality of life changes (convenience).

A built in way to initialize TRIM through the graphical defrag tool or the defrag command line tool. Windows 7 does not have any built in tool for this. You would be required to buy a third party tool for such on demand functionality.

Automatic resizing of the pagefile.sys based on commit usage over time. In a system with a large quantity of RAM this will have a impact on reducing disk space consumption of the pagefile.sys on SSDs. This can be done manually in Windows 7, but requires proper testing, baselining, and a small bit of basic math applied to the collected results of the aforementioned baselining work.

Smarter automatic adjustment of background services for SSDs. Windows 7 made the mistake of disabling SuperFetch and Windows 8 corrects this. This fix can be done manually in Windows 7.

The Disk Cleanup utility and command line tool DISM offers more options to free up disk space from unneeded drivers, patches, and general clutter. Allowing the OS to have a smaller disk footprint than Windows 7. They backported some, but not all of these options to Windows 7.

UEFI + Win8.x + SSD will have the fastest boot times and will provide an experience significantly closer to the instant on of mobile devices (smartphones/tablets).

I bought a Yoga 2 Pro back in February when Best Buy had the 8 Gb i7 models for $1200. It comes with Windows 8 and a Toshiba mSata 256 GB SSD drive. I already had paid Stardock $5 for Start8 on my desktop so installed it on the Yoga 2 and haven't looked back. That machine is the fastest booting Windows machine I have ever seen, maybe 10 secs.









\.

I'm of the opinion that if you already have a perfectly good Windows 7 and aren't strapped for system resources, there's no compelling benefit in upgrading to Windows 8. It's an OS, not a fashion statement.

KamikaseRider wrote:

glacius555 wrote:

Besides that, I do not see any visible reasons for an upgrade, but what's done behind the curtains may be more compelling.

That's my point. Is there any improvements under the hood that make Win 8.1 better than Win 7? Specifically SSD-wise?

Yes, NVMe. Win 8.1 supports NVMe based SSDs "out-of-the-box" as it were. Of course you'd need an NVMe capable SSD for it to matter but they're starting to get launched. SATA Express users particularly will want to go NVMe where possible. I'm not sure what the driver situation is for Windows 7, there's been 3rd party drivers but I don't think Micorosft is going to officially backport its 8.1 drivers to Win 7... not even vanilla Windows 8 is getting it.

NovusBogus wrote:

I'm of the opinion that if you already have a perfectly good Windows 7 and aren't strapped for system resources, there's no compelling benefit in upgrading to Windows 8. It's an OS, not a fashion statement.

That's pretty much my opinion- I picked up 8 when MS was letting upgrade keys go for $15, and that's what I thought it was worth. Unless you're buying a new license, there's very little reason to pay to go to Windows 8.1, especially on a currently well-functioning system.