Win8 upgrade experience

lehnerus2000 said:

Maybe if you move the Pagefile to a different partition you will experience less fragmentation.

I have my W7 Pagefile and Linux Mint Swap partitions on different HDDs from the operating systems.
My XP pagefile is on a RAM disk.

That's how I get a contiguous page file - move it, cleanup the drive, move it back. I've played around with agefiles long time ago and found that the page file does best on the boot drive between the OS and the Apps. Trying to keep it that way or redoing it every time I installed or upgraded was more trouble than it was worth.

Funny thing... I don't recall Win7 pagefile fragmenting much. but I had a static size on that. I'll see how Win8 plays with what I have now and try your suggestion if the pagefile continues to be fragmented beyond what I expect. This is a fairly new install (4 days) so it might take a while for Windows to optimize itself.

I just evaluated Lucid Puppy, Peppermint, and Linux Mint Mate. Peppermint wouldn't boot on my machine and Lucid Puppy wouldn't load some drivers. Mint Mate worked beautifully, but it's much larger.

Are you saying that you have Win Page and Linux Swap each on different parts or are you saying that both are not on the boot part, but on the same part? Curiosity only

Thanks

Bill
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@Greg,

I don't think they are claiming any advantage. It is just something a bit different to have a play with for a little while.

Far too annoying for long term use.

SIW2 said:

@Greg,

I don't think they are claiming any advantage. It is just something a bit different to have a play with for a little while.

Far too annoying for long term use.

It's difficult to have an opinion if I never used win.8.1....
But for the most part it's just another toy I have disk space so I said what the heck win-8 was a freebie so there's really no out of pocket thanks for that Robin and Brink for the setup tutorials

One very odd thing is If I'm coming from win-7 and boot to win-8 it's very fast,
Coming from win-8 and booting to win-7 it's very slow,
Win-8 boot manager looks to me to be much slower than win-7 boot manager,
I did run system cleanup on the win-8 side and that got rid of allot of update files did defrag too,
So hopefully that will change,
Out for a few days so this weekend I'll be able to test more,
Cheers.

gregrocker said:

What advantages does Win8 really have over WIn7?

My experience with installing it a dozen times is that its ugly, the start screen is useless unless you want to pretend you're a phone, the crApps won't shut off and if you install a Start menu it still defaults to all the crApps. So by the time I get everything sorted its really worn out its welcome in my Dual Boot and I delete it.

I do not see it being faster at all. An SSD is fast. The Explorer copy graph is cool and would be welcome in the overdue SP2 for Win7.

SIW2 said:

@Greg,

I don't think they are claiming any advantage. It is just something a bit different to have a play with for a little while.

Far too annoying for long term use.

ThrashZone said:

SIW2 said:

@Greg,

I don't think they are claiming any advantage. It is just something a bit different to have a play with for a little while.

Far too annoying for long term use.

It's difficult to have an opinion if I never used win.8.1....
But for the most part it's just another toy I have disk space so I said what the heck win-8 was a freebie so there's really no out of pocket thanks for that Robin and Brink for the setup tutorials

One very odd thing is If I'm coming from win-7 and boot to win-8 it's very fast,
Coming from win-8 and booting to win-7 it's very slow,
Win-8 boot manager looks to me to be much slower than win-7 boot manager,
I did run system cleanup on the win-8 side and that got rid of allot of update files did defrag too,
So hopefully that will change,
Out for a few days so this weekend I'll be able to test more,
Cheers.

Greg,

Si is correct, I started this thread as a post-mortem on updrating to Win8, nothing more.

I expressed my opinion on some things (no start menu - OMG!) but there isn't any Win8 advocacy or evangelism intended - just recording my experience.

Mike also has a valid point - how can any member come to their own conclusions and build an opinion on Win8 unless they try it.

I really don't see much difference between Win8 and Win7 - sure you have those crApps that bug me, but I don't use them. The desktop applications can be installed and they seem to run fine.

There are always detractors with any new Windows (except 1 -> 3 ... everyone liked that change )
(DOS -> Win3; 95 -> 98; 98 -> 2000, mill, or XP; XP -> Vista; XP -> Win7; Vista -> Win7)

The base OS hasn't changed all that much since Vista, but the GUI sure has.

There are things I like about Win8 and some things I don't like, but it's just an operating system.

Now I'll return to recording my experience updrading to Win8.

My external HD (Seagate GoFlex Desk 2 TB) goes to "sleep"

This was also an issue on Win7 when I first connected the drive. This really drags down performance when the drive has to "wake" up. I have Libraries locations on that drive, so the delay is very noticeable.

I don't recall what I changed to improve the disk up time (or prevent it from sleeping), but here are the steps I do remember
Seagate Dashboard - do not sleep
-> can't use on 8.1 (not for this OS @ install)
Win 7 / 8 - adjust power plan (never power down disk, sleep after 30 minutes, USB selective suspend=disabled)

I looked through the event logs (new Dev mgr tab takes you directly to the event log), but haven't found anything useful.

Can't think of anything else.

Slartybart said:

I just evaluated Lucid Puppy, Peppermint, and Linux Mint Mate. Peppermint wouldn't boot on my machine and Lucid Puppy wouldn't load some drivers. Mint Mate worked beautifully, but it's much larger.

On my PC, Linux Mint MATE's overall size (~8 GB) is much smaller than Windows 7 (~22 GB).
Both are 64 bit and those sizes include software.

I do have more programs in Windows, but the total size is only ~6 GB.

Slartybart said:

Are you saying that you have Win Page and Linux Swap each on different parts or are you saying that both are not on the boot part, but on the same part? Curiosity only

I have 3 HDDs:

• (1.5 TB) 3 x OS + other partitions
• (2.0 TB) Linux Swap + other partitions
• (2.0 TB) W7 Pagefile + other partitions

The Swap file and Pagefiles have their partitions solely devoted to those functions.

DavidW7ncus said:

So they don't have a new version of Seagate Dashboard that works with 8.1 ?

Win8 yes... downloaded and tried it

I don't know why or see a reason for that not to work other than the test for the install is just wrong.

Dashboard didn't have many settings and seemed more like bloatware than anything else anyway. But I did have that one setting I thought might affect this issue.

I'll see if there's a new firmware update on Seagate, but I'm fairly certain it's a Windows setting.
Sleep, spin down drive, USB suspend, Drive policy....can't find the one I'm looking for.

The driver is std Windows 6/21/06, but has a 6.3.9600 version tacked on.

Thanks

Bill
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