Windows 7 is my preferred modern OS. For a time in work I was using a windows 8 machine and I found it bafflingly bad. What were the 2 steps forward you mentioned? I'm curious. In my experience it was just 2 steps backward, period.
There's big ticket improvements for performance [1] and a huge step forward for multiple monitor support [2]. I've given third-party multiple monitor utilities the boot. Multiple monitor support in Windows 8 is squarely in "good enough" territory.
There's smaller improvements too, like the new Task Manager [3].
There's also mundane stuff like rejigged NTFS this and that [4].
Thankyou for a very informative response!
My reaction to that stuff..
1. Good! 200Mb of extra free memory, but big whoop! (when you have 16 gb)
2. Dont care. I never use multiple monitors, cus I only have one set of eyes.
3. Basically the same stuff as before arranged differently (they have just moved some stuff from msconfig into task manager)
4. That does seem like a good improvement
One thing I had heard was that game performance was better on windows 8 and 8.1 compared to 7. Though after looking up some benchmarks investigating that, it does not seem to be the case. There are some differences either way depending on game/graphics card but they are very minor anyway.
