And he was never heard from again....

Leo. get the best browser    Ice  DRAGON  http://icedragon.comodo.com  HAS ALL  THE  SECURITY you  want  plus all Firefox ADD- ONS Farst to works grate on w8 & w81  too

To me, it's refreshing and enjoyable to play with something new after 7...................plus all the Stardock apps are great add-ons and compliment the whole OS from both the 'eye candy' and productivity points of view. 

Now why would yer wanna go n' do that?  Silly man!  All that work to set up Win 7 and all the proggies again?  Just to find it's slower and more cumbersome?  Silly, silly man!!!  Ya knows which side yer bread's best buttered... and when yer on a good thing, stick to it, my good man, stick to it.

Yep, Starkers..........Everything flies faster on 8 on my rig...........No complaints here.

Not enough 

What!!!!  Nothing! 

5-4-3-2-1.... End of Communication.... Disengage.

Pleased to hear it.  It's like I've said to a few people, give it a fair go and you might find you actually like it.  I mean, if you set it up right, it is no different to Win 7... just faster and crisper to use.  I have a nephew who kept bitching about Win 8 a and what a pig it is, so when he was here last I let him have a dabble on my spare rig with Win 8.1 installed.  I soon had hime eating his words.

"Now that's more like it," he exclaimed: " a decent OS with a decent start menu. See, I told you you'd go back to Win 7."

After he'd been on it a while and had sung it's praises over Win 7, I said: "Adrian, press the Windows key and see what happens."

Yeah, well, the Metro Start Screen popped up, didn't it.  Hehe, I had him back-pedalling and making all sorts of excuses to worm his way out of it.  As it so happens, Ady has installed Win 8 on his home PC and is loving it.  Hehe, all that hate for nothing.

Yeah, orright, dual booting with Win 7 is okay if you need it [skinning, etc], but I don't need it so just have 8.1 on my rig, and 8.1 on my 2nd rig, but I still have my copies of Win 7 if ever I need to install it.  Anyhow, you're probably aware that I was just fooling around with you, so I won't apologise or grovel on the ground and beg your forgiveness.

Interesting that you 'turned' your nephew, Starkers..........My two IT guys were 'nay sayers' a few weeks ago and they got a a couple of licenses and now you'd have to break their arms to take 8.1 off them............

Jim...........sounds like you are running the Star Ship Enterprise with all those rigs 

I can't imagine why anybody would want to run that many OSes at once... and XP fer crying out loud.  I used it, but I never really liked XP that much.  I couldn't stand that Fisher Price look that kind of made it look like a kids toy.  Without WB and Iconpackager to dress it up it was almost intolerable to look at. I think that's why I welcomed Vista with open arms... could run it without window dressing.

As for dual booting, I have done it in the past, but I have no need to do so anymore.  These days I stick with Win 8.1 on my main rig and that's it. If I ever needed to Run Win 7 I could put a machine together for it from the various spare parts I have.  However, I have built an XP rig for gaming. Some of our games do not like anything much after XP, so I put this one together to connect to a 42" HDTV.  I'm not worried that XP will be dropped by MS later this year, it's perfectly functional as is and won't be connected to the net anyhow.

Yeah, the look on his face was priceless... as was his being lost for words when he was faced with the blunt reality that he'd been using and enjoyed Win 8.1, an OS he professed to hate, for the last 20 minutes. I had my rig set up so that it was obvious I was using Win 8.1, with the Metro start panel making several appearances while he was dissing to OS with every breath.  Anyhow, when he asked if I had a Win 7 machine he could use, I directed him to the Win 8.1 rig upstairs and let him have at it.  He had no idea what he was using because I had disabled the lock screen and had it set up with Start 8 to mimic Win 7... so it hit him like a ton of bricks when he was confronted with the "oh shit, this is Windows 8.1"

Simple....testing skins. As a skinner, I like to know if my work works on the OSes used.  Ubuntu, of course, is excluded from my skinning.

Reason #2....because I can. Most people can't understand why I run 5 monitors plus a 32 inch LCD HDTV.

Because I can.    As for XP, yeah, yuck, but I did buy IconX, and Right Click, and Tab Launchpad, which still work fine on XP. As well as Hyperdesk, choke...cough...

I still have the first Stardock Podcast, in which the speaker talks about Rogue Proton Gold, and how it's not a daily useable skin, you'd run it when you want to show off to your friends as to how "damn cool" your computer could look.

My friends are amazed when they see me running 5 OSes at once from one PC.

It is cool, even if it is unnecessary.

After a year, I still boot from desktop to desktop in about 45 seconds, with 8.1 and an SSD. Cold boot, or reboot, takes about the same amount of time.

Really? 45 seconds?  That seems like an eternity, especially with an SSD.  My rig boots to a working desktop in about 6-8 seconds, but then I've performed a couple of tweaks in BIOS and Windows start-up.

I seem to remember you talking about using a UEFI mobo some time ago but I'm not sure if it was you who had it or someone else.  Anyway, you can reduce that time considerably if you do in fact have UEFI and go into the boot settings to enable Quick Start. There are two settings available on mine, Standard and Express, but you need to read up in your owners manual if you're going to use Express.  Enabling Express could mean that you can only access the BIOS from an icon on the desktop because there's no menu at boot-up, just a quick flash before your desktop loads, so until you become accustomed to it all you may want to use the Standard Quick Start.

The other thing you can do is disable the Lock and Login screens.  By the time you swipe off the Lock Screen and type in your password you've wasted 8-10 seconds... more if it's a long password, so why not dispense with them both?  I did and my boot times are super quick.

As to your question GeomanNL, I expect that Windows 8 will slow some after a year or so of use, but in my experience I'd say not as much as previous editions.  That may have something to do with running it on a SSD, but I ran Win 7 on an identical SSD and I feel it had slowed more after 12 months of constant use.  Also, I believe that running any OS on a mechanical drive will slow it down more rapidly than on a SSD, which is static and does not require defragmenting, thus better maintaining file integrity.

Nope, I always hard shutdown my machine, so every turn-on is a cold boot.  I don't like hibernation as I has issues with my rig waking up when I didn't want it to, so it's disabled. 

I believe the reason you're not seeing faster boot times is that you multi-boot and do not use UEFI Quick Start.  When I press the on button I do not get the BIOS post or boot menu, just a blank bootscreen with the whirlygig for about 4-5 seconds then my desktop loading, which takes 2-3 seconds... to load desktop icons and Winstep Xtreme.

I suppose it is when you're muti-booting and have a standard startup enabled in the BIOS, but that's a choice you've made so you can access the various OSes for skinning and the like.  Me, I like it simple these days.  One OS per machine and a fast, uncomplicated bootup.  I got yrag to thank for that. There was a time when I triple booted XP, Vista, Win 7 and had 6 drives installed, but he suggested I would get more out of my machine if I got back to basics and didn't bloat it with multiple HDDs, and he was right...of course.  These days I just have my SSD and a 2Tb HDD internally.  All my other drives are now externals and are connected only as needed.  So yeah, the more drives/partitions you have, the more your BIOS has to read at boot, thus preventing a faster start.

Yup, simple and uncomplicated suits me.

Point being, you are not actually shutting down completely.