Know what you mean. I wont be moving to Win 8 in the future. But may end up doing what your doing.Im my case just in case i need win 8 at some point or play in vm like you haha :)

I am currently running Win7 and Win8 side by side (achieving that was a bit of a PITA, I think due to the damn UEFI secure boot or something, but I finally found a solution that worked for me). My original idea with the dual-boot was to check whether Win8 backwards compatibility is good enough for moving completely to Win8 (some minor findings so far, e.g. some quirks with GTA3 on my Win8 system), but for now I've left Win7 as my testbed where I can install all kinds of crap without giving much of a though. If it breaks the system, fine. I try to keep the Win8 partition more pristine for now.

A couple of weeks ago I used almost exclusively Win8, but now I'm using mostly Win7 because some of the crap I've installed there is actually useful, and I've also installed most of my GOG games on the Win7 side. Seems a bit redundant, but oh well.

My original motivations to install Win8 was to check whether the claims of better (gaming) performance of Win8 are true (they aren't at least on my system, and googling Win7 vs Win8 gaming benchmarks gives a similar picture, the gaming performance between the two is pretty much the same), and to check out the Windows Store. Other than that, I could have stayed in Win7 for all I care.

Win 7 and Win 8 are so similar that you probably won't notice much of a difference. I prefer 8 over 7 because I never used the start menu and the "metro start thingy" is actually pretty helpful. Also, the new task manager is a huge bonus.

But if you are happy with seven, there is no real reason to change to eight. For me it was mostly curiosity and I am very happy with it. Not that seven is bad to start with. Win 8 is faster in all around usage. Eg. pushing my "on" button and seeing the login screen takes about 7 seconds.

The apps are not really important. as those are intended for the tablet usage. They are fun to play around with, but that is about it.

Im curious, '7 seconds' on windows 8 is that on an SSD drive?. I mean is the improvement in terms of performance noticeable?.

That's because the "shutdown" in Win8 is not really a real shutdown, but a partial hibernate mode. If you disable it, the boot times are similar to Win7. Naturally you can use hibernate or sleep also in Win7, if you wish faster startup times. :)

I disabled it because it caused two problems for me in Win8: preventing me from entering the BIOS setup when powering up the system (may be a specific problem with ASUS G75, other G75 users have reported it too), and corrupting my Win7 partition when running that hybrid shutdown from Win8. Due to the latter problem, Microsoft has stated that people who dual boot should disable the "fast startup" in Win8.

Fortunately they made it selectable. I don't mind it that my Win8 boot times are now "merely" Win7 level.

Woah... That really sucks. Is it turned on my default?. I had actually been considering trying a dualboot as well for various reasons.....lucky im finding out the downside now..

You just added a whole operating system to your backlog?!

Man, I thought I had problems. :P

Nah, normal HD (which is feeling the age otherwise).

"Noticeable" is very personal. I think I've noticed it. But I also did some spring cleaning while changing OSes, so that might have also been the case.

What is noticeably fast is the "usage". Once you studies a bit the changes and the shortcuts, Win 8 is very smooth and fast to use.

Edit:

In the end, Win 8 is a glorified service pack. You don't need it, but it is nice to have. (actually, it is less important than most service packs. ;-).

i got a win8 upgrade for Christmas. Using XP now. Am dragging my feet to make the change, though i do look forward to finally using the 64-bit hardware on this machine... and being able to play huge maps of the FfH2 mod for Civ4. But still, i drag my feet on this.

Someone in another thread just told me that Windows 8 is one of the reasons that we need to "destroy the USA". Does he make a good point, or am I to assume he's just having a bad day?

The guy is a well known troll and idiot. Ignore him.

It is turned on by default, but as said, you can disable it. "Settings" => "Control Panel" => "Power Options" => "Choose what the power buttons do" => "Change settings that are currently unavailable" => under "Shutdown settings", untick "Turn on fast start-up (recommended)". So just do that as soon as you get into Win8, if you dual boot. I haven't had any problems related to that afterwards.

I think it can be left enabled if you don't dual boot (either to Win7 (which it can corrupt), or Linux (which it may prevent you from accessing, unless you go through "Restart" instead of "Shutdown => power on")), and you don't see any problems accessing BIOS setup in your system with it on.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/W8ITProPreRel/thread/1be71590-1f43-4525-a341-26bdbccdb9df

The funny thing is that if you run "Restart" instead of "Shut down" in Windows 8, it does a proper shutdown in that case, even if you have the fast start-up enabled. I presume this is because some Windows updates may require a proper shutdown + restart, not just the partial hibernate shutdown. I think Arkose mentioned something about this earlier too.

Hahaha. Thats cool. I was actually kind of just having fun with him but it's getting silly. I'll take your advice and ignore him. Thanks!

Hey, Minecraft seems to run better with 64bit Java too! The game even complains to you if you are still running 32bit Java.