If you just recently bought Win7 (purchased after June 2), then upgrade to 8 is discounted -- $14 instead of the usual $39.
Windows 8 is a whole lot more than a facelift. I don't remember the specifics since it was back during the MSDN beta that I watched the video where they explained it (available on Microsoft's Channel9 website), but they made some big changes to the low level architecture of the kernel to address some long standing issues with code execution. So it's best just to try it and see what happens, preferably with the free trial before paying for it.
After asking around, I was told that there are "under the hood" improvements when going from 7 to 8. This was after my post above and needing to find some objective reasoning from outside sources. Mainly it runs comparable or slightly better than Win 7 on equal hardware and bit of faster cold boot times. There is a trade off in that you will have to relearn how to use Windows to a certain degree. That is for the end user. If you are a developer supposedly it is a bit more friendly as far as developing "apps" for Windows. Gotta call em apps now since the mobile space is driving the market, heh. Still, if you are happy with 7 and you are on a tight budget, I was told even at $14.99 it would be best to save your money and wait for Win 9 as you are just going to get an incremental jump in performance that might not even be readily noticeable. If your computer is old and slow, it will still be old and slow. If your machine is already quick, it might end up being slightly quicker or at least maintain its current performance. Win 8 was not designed to upgrade the PC environment. More like bridge the PC and mobile environment with one boiler plate OS so that you only have to learn one OS for a phone, tablet or PC as compared to 2 or 3. If you hate the "metro" smartphone-esque interface you can supposedly turn it off and then you are left with.... a slightly improved Windows 7. So if you have the money to burn, it is not going to hurt you to get Win 8, but law of diminishing returns applies. It is just an incremental upgrade for most people. EQ will run the same or maybe slightly better. If spending some money for very little noticeable improvement is A-OK, than pull the trigger and upgrade. /shrug.
I don't think anyone should upgrade to Windows 8 if you have a desktop, if you want a tablet that's different. And just to refute any claims that Windows 8 is faster in games, Tomshardware ran a test 2 days ago with the Windows 8 release edition that refutes any improvements in Windows 8 related to gaming performance. W7 is exactly as fast, anyone claiming their games run slower or faster, is lying or hasn't actually done the benchmarks, no code changes happened to the base kernel that impact gaming performance in any way, don't be fooled by marketing tricks. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331.html "performance under Windows 8 is indistinguishable from Windows 7" Sleeping dogs didn't work on W8:
VALVE, Blizzard, and SoE are all blasting the closed-nature of the OS currently... Hold off a year and it'll be as good as Vista was after a year.. Without being a memory hog, hopefully.
Win8 seems amazing if you love Xbox Live or your Windows phone. If you have an iPhone or Android or other phone, or don't use Xbox Live, then Win8 is like... useless. It's more of a tablet OS than a PC OS (hence the touch screen compatibility).
Upgraded last night, really nothing changed on the front end like others have stated. EQ runs just fine on this new update, and i actuallyt like the Tile screen setup they have thats on Windows Phone / Tablets, I still get the start menu but the classic windows icon is gone. But, once you get things customized you really dont see a difference and it moves pretty cleanly. I feel the price point of $14.99 was agreeable, i would not pay $39.99 or higher for this, just doesnt feel like a huge front end upgrade like prior versions of Windows.
I read of a possible killer feature in Win 8 for Boxing EQ. Memory de-duplication. http://arstechnica.com/information-...ifications-make-for-a-better-user-experience/ "Windows 8 will include a new mechanism to allow these pages to be shared. The system will periodically scan memory, and when it finds two pages that are identical, it will share them, reducing the memory usage. If a process then tries to modify a shared page, it will be given its own private copy, ending the sharing." So, if you are running multiple copies of EQ on one box, it may be able to compact the multiple copies of things like code, zone data, models, etc. into single copies, making the CPU cache more efficient (instead of swapping out Instance A's copy of EQ's code to load the identicle code from Instance B, it can just leave it there) and leaving more free memory for disk cache/other processes... I havn't tried it myself yet (I got 2 win8 upgrade disks, but was planning on using them for laptops), but it I do, I'll try and take measurement of free memory, swap rates, etc. before and after while 4 boxing.
If other memory de-duplication implementations are any indication (Linux has supported this for almost 2 years now), then the application must mark its pages as candidates for de-duplication. Scanning all memory (and keeping hashes of every page) would be quite expensive. So, if EQ is not marking its pages as such, there's likely to be no benefit.
