[gabemart]

I find it hard to imagine someone in the hacker news crowd rating 8 over 7 on developer hardware. From my limited experience, the only major improvement I noticed was the improved task manager (which is really nifty). What other substantial improvements over 7 do you think Win8 provides?

[isaacwaller]

(I am not the original poster)

  * improved file copy dialog, including pausing    
  * much faster boot    
  * improved task manager (as you said)
  * better multi-monitor support (I have 2 monitors)

It's not much but was worth the $30 upgrade. I don't mind the new start screen but I understand that is subjective.

[MattDL]

Isn't the faster booting thing just exactly the same as only using hibernate on Windows 7?

Granted I haven't looked into it fully but I doubt the actual cold boot speeds vary wildly between the two.

[magic_haze]

The hibernate is only for ring 0: user space still gets wiped out.

[nwh]

That's correct.

[suby]

I think Win8 is a downgrade in almost every aspect, but it does boot faster. Granted, I think that it's doing something akin to hibernating in Windows 7 and not actually shutting down.

[CamperBob2]

I wonder if people are comparing the boot time of year-old Windows 7 installations to brand new Windows 8 installations.

I know my SSD-based Windows 7 system could boot to the desktop in less than 10 seconds when it was new, but now that it's over a year old with dozens of additional installed programs and drivers, I'm lucky to see the desktop in less than 30 seconds.

[MetaCosm]

As a developer, I care about some of the under the hood changes, new features and improvements:

    - lighter memory usage
    - better power management
    - address space randomization (forcible) 
    - full hardware (direct-x) rendered UI
    - storage spaces
    - hyper-v 
    - incremental file histories
    - mandatory DEP
    - system refresh

Of course, at the UI level, there are various changes that are a mix of good and bad IMHO, but overall, I would say more parts of the UI suck a little less than before.