I was on the testing team for W8. More secure, less Windowy, more suited to screens you smear with fingerprints, more, well: Post-Modern and Surfacy. Fast and easy, I thought.

From an artistic point of view the flat-field tile interface is plain ugly on a 22" monitor, and with no touch screen, it annoys. Yet the live tiles are sort of fun, if you like fun. But it is all a bit Fisher-Price and necessarily simplified for mouse-free living.

I also have a Windows 8 smartphone. On a 4" screen Windows 8 is (for me) almost perfect: live tiles are useful instead of being annoying and the touch screen interface works well. It seems smarter than my Android tablet, which feels dumb in comparison.

So; it's W7 desktop and mouse v. W8 touch-screen. Which will win? Most of the under 30's I see now get most of their computing needs from mobile devices.

So here's my Windows 8 tip: down-size your desktop monitor to a 4" touch screen. :-)

Windows 8 does have better memory management than Windows 7, I feel, and it both starts up and runs faster on low end CPU's like Atoms and older Intel mobile CPU's if anyone still uses them. W8 also supports ReadyBoost if you're using a mech. hard drive, using an SD card or USB stick as a ReadyBoost cache speeds things up a tad.

Current W8 users are said to be getting a free upgrade to Windows 8.1 'soon', by the way.

(On the upside, Dell and others recently dumped thousands of W7 CoA's into the Ebay marketplace (in the UK) and licensed 64 bit versions of W7 Pro are now about £40.00 or so. )

Here's one W8 Tip. If you want to quick-launch the Task Manager it used to be Ctrl+Shift+Esc, well, on my [Italian] keyboard that no longer worked. In W8 have to specifically use the right hand Ctrl key+(any)Shift key+Esc.

This tip, H/T to HenkM, is not necessarily restricted to W8, but it's worth knowing about anyhow. Someone was asking how to remove registry entries that relate to the start of BOINCMgr [can actually be done inside BM Tools > Options] and boinctray, which is needed to run on Windows so the program can detect mouse / keyboard activity and pass that information to the core client [no idea why one would want that to stop happening]. The solution given was Microsoft-Systinternals AutoRuns for Windows tool: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Reading the description, you can even see in what order programs and services are queued to start... and that is interesting. Preferred for me would be if BOINC was loaded last [you can set it with <start_delay> via cc_config anyhow to postpone core client start to well after everything else is running like your favorite communication tool. Also in the service properties of Windows you can specify "Automatic with delay".

Enjoy.