I have been playing with the Windows 8 preview on various platforms and I have to admit, I'm really starting to like it. Everyone seems to be criticizing Microsoft over the UI, but it seems to me that this some change is necessary if Microsoft wants to go after the tablet market. I will say it is a PIA on a track-pad
I first started messing with it on my early 2009 Mac Mini because I was just curious and wondered if Diablo III would run a little quicker under Windows. I was reading how sluggish the game ran OSX (although I thought it ran pretty well given the age of the machine), so the Windows version would probably run even better.
The machines specs are:
early 2009 Apple Mac mini
9400m video
8gb RAM
128GB Crucial SSD.
DVD removed, replaced with 750gb HD
W8-64bit boots and seconds. It was having some frequent freeze-up problems (especially when using chrome), but enabling Hyper-V fixes that for whatever reason. The OS runs great on that hardware, but that's pretty expected as the machine still has pretty decent specs...
Diablo may be slightly faster under W8 than OSX, but the real interesting thing is that I was able to run Diablo III under Parallels desktop. Virtualization has come a long way!
I liked W8 enough that I wanted to give it a larger partition on the SSD, but I got a deal on a Corsair Force Series 3 240GB SSD. My original pan was to then take the 128 and put that into my netbook because using that thing with W7 is just painful.
I cloned the 128 to the 240 and the Mac mini just seemed to be running much slower. Benchmarks proved that the Cosair was not much faster than a standard HD. System Information showed that the drive and MB were only negotiating SATA 1.0 level and some searching forums confirmed that it is a known problem and I could not find a fix.
That was really unacceptable so I decided to put the 240 into the Netbook. The netbook seems to run horribly slow with W7 but the stock HD is surprisingly fast. The stock drive turned out to be a WD Scorpio Blue. I thought the writes were high 60s and the reads were high 70s (I use ATTO benchmark). I don't know why W7 seemed so slow. I guess I just have gotten accustomed to faster machines...
The netbook is a Asus 1015PN
dual core Atom CPU 1.5ghz
2GB RAM
Nvidia ION chipset (9400m me thinks)
Here is where I messed up. When I put the SSD into the mini the partition system got changed to GUID and I forgot to change it back. After cloning(XXCLONE) the W7 system to the drive and swapping the drives, the netbook simply failed to boot. Stupid... That should have been obvious as I had to remove the 200MB EFI partition on the command line with "diskpart"
The copy of W8 preview I downloaded was 64bit, and I did not even think my netbook supported 64bit but apparently it does. I installed the OS and all I can say is that I'm impressed...
Very fast... boot in seconds. Part of that is the SSD. ATTO puts the drive at high 170 write and high 270 reads... Everything seems way faster.
I'm downloading the 32bit version on my steam-powered DSL connection now. Unfortunately 2gb is the maximum amount of RAM the specs say the netbook can hold.
Anyway, when you look at the specs on the netbook and the performance of W8, the new UI seems to make sense because it would run pretty well on a tablet.
Also I would not recommend Corsair Force Series 3 240. Not even at $135... First there was the SSD 1.0 issue in my Macbook, but I also tried the SSD yet another machine (Toshiba Qosimo) and the speeds where not that great. low 160s write and high 170s read. Other SSDs are typically in the 270 range for reads on that machine. Also the temp monitor on that drive always reports that its running 128 degrees :/