Seems same for me to except Journey Man Project 2 was pretty dodgy and crashing at some point but I don't think its officially supported on Windows 7 either so I'm not sure whats at fault.

Just save alot and all is fine I guess

Ah, I was wondering why the Windows key still existed in the new Windows 8 keyboards if there's no Start menu in Windows 8. That's good to know; looks very convenient.

Compatibility update: every single program or game I tried so far, works perfectly, even some older ones. Divine Divinity had to be set to Software mode or it takes a while to load (still works fine otherwise, mind you).

I imagine that, for many regular people, it will be a bit of a shock though. By tying all standard file formats to Metro apps, they'll confuse a lot of people and while it asks you if you want to use another program if it detects any, a lot of people will be a bit lost. It's a non-issue for anyone who isn't clueless, though - want to load PDF files? Get Adobe Reader. MP3 files? Winamp. etc.

Also, I still feel that Microsoft made a big mistake in Windows 8 by making several crucial elements hidden like the power button and making other functions not that obvious to discover. I can imagine that a lot of people will be stuck trying to shut down their PC ...

So far, I'm pretty happy - despite discovering after installation that I could no longer go back to Windows 7 (it causes disk corruption - probably linked to the recycling bin and paging files being shared) I'm just happy where I am.

Could you clarify this statement a bit? Do you mean to say that you are unable to revert an upgraded installing of Windows 8 from 7, or that installing windows 8 actually physically damages your drive to the point of not being able to even format and re-install Win7? I assume you mean the former, but I just want to double check.

Neither. I meant that, once I installed Windows 8, there was no dual boot option to Windows 7 despite me installing it on a parallel drive. When I then force-booted to my old drive (my motherboard is awesome and lets me target any drive to boot from by pressing F8 during start up) Windows 7 booted up fine except that I got several errors concerning page file and recycling bin. Which isn't surprising since I put the paging file on the exact same drive (hint: don't put a paging file on a SSD drive) and most likely, it got confused when it found a paging file that it couldn't read. It also said my recycling bin was corrupt which it wasn't - it just got replaced by Windows 8 recycling bin.

When I then went to save a few files inside Windows 7 to one of my hard drives and rebooted back into Windows 8 (they were mainly pictures that showed settings), I discovered that those files didn't appear in Windows 8. A bit of investigating showed me that saving the files in Windows 7 actually corrupted part of the drive where I had these files saved -a chkdsk fixed it but the files were gone. What causes this, I'm not 100% sure but it may be tied to both Windows 7 & 8 saving certain files in the exact same location.

Hm, I have Windows 7 and 8 dual booting on my gaming PC and I didn't get any problems like that - although I am not using SSD. I just partition off 50gb and installed windows 8 side by side with 7, and then after making Windws 7 the default for booting it's been good ever since. :-|

I believe that's only true for Modern UI applications, not desktop applications.

Not true. Like in Windows 7, Windows 8 keeps software loaded in memory even after you close it depending on how often you use the software. It's actually the opposite of what you say. It's only when memory becomes low, that Windows 8 will unload loaded files but even Windows Vista did this - it's logical after all. It will use your pagefile to store the program's info until you need it.

As I recall, that is only for Metro apps, and they are cleared from memory after some time (5 mins? 10 mins?). More or less the same thing that happens with your phone applications, they will automatically close after some idle time.

Nothing has changed regarding desktop applications.

WinRT applications need to start in 10 seconds, else the OS will kill them.
They need to wake up from suspend in two seconds, and need to suspend in 5 seconds.
When suspended, they don't use the CPU, but remain in memory. In case the available memory goes thin, the OS may start removing them from memory.

(don't take my word 100% about the numbers, its what I recall, things may have changed recently)

Just adding another cent or two of mine: I tried out some 20 games, older and new ones, installed all my software without any problems too.

I'm starting to warm up to the metro interface for when I want to play a quick game of whatever. There's actually quite a few fun games on the marketplace including a very smart Minesweeper game. I added a screenshot to show you how my Metro page looks like to give you an idea.

If you have two screens, it's perfectly possible to use your desktop on the right one and keep an eye on all your stuff or watch a movie or whatever while Metro is on the left one.

One question about the "game app".

I have a Gamertag on a different e-mail than the one I used to create my windows 8 account. Is there any way to merge those? Or move the gamertag from one e-mail to the new one?

Thanks for the info everyone, I guess I must have been reading about the UI/Metro programs and misunderstood.

Win 8 is now calling every program "app", so the confusion is inevitable ...