Not sure I agree. Windows has some proven times in their server market and Windows 8 is not dramatically different. Where is the data you have for this claim?

I've never seen a Windows Server machine, so I'll stay away from that one...

I think I disagree with the part about Windows 8 not being dramatically different. It sounds like you've had experience with Windows, so I'm assuming that you've had experience with both Win7 and Win8. I looked up pics of Gnome2 and Gnome3, and I think it's fair to say that the change from Win7 to Win8 is similar to the change from Gnome2 to Gnome3. I wasn't using Linux at the time, but from what I've read there was a big dispute over the new look because it was too different, and IIRC there was a fork. I'm not sure I would label the change "dramatic," but it is definitely a significant change. (And from what I've seen of the world's response, the change was too much for a lot of Windows users.)

That's absolutely fair to say, the change is very similar. And in both cases, it was a gigantic step backwards IMO. I refuse to use Gnome 3. I've tried it, I hated it. Distros that offer Gnome 2 (or Gnome classic I think they call it now) I'll use, otherwise it's xfce for me. As for Windows, 7 isn't too bad, but I dread the day when I have to use 8 because 7 isn't an option anymore. The only computers I buy are laptops (the rest of them I build), and they're generally business grade, and most of them still offer Windows 7 as an option so I'm not hosed yet, but the day is coming...

That said, user interface and memory management are two distinctly different aspects of an operating system.

True, what I meant was the underlying design of the OS and not the gui.

Installs and use are the only way to test. Hardware is so different between users that almost no compare can be made.

I still have a few copies of Windows 7 to help keep me off the Windows 8 radar.

My experience of them is greatly different.
windows XP seemed to run 30 mins - 2 hours for a setup/reconfigure. This was an improvement on the 6 floppy windows 3.1 but not much different from win 95/98
Windows vista approximately doubled that.
Windows 7 seemed around the same. I only ran one install of that.

Windows 8 spends ages after it has installed anything sorting itself out. It is amazing how long it takes. There was a warning to leave the thing plugged in, and now I know why. Reversing updates took about 6 hours. Installing them also took about 6 hours. No danger of them downloading one, installing it while downloading a second, etc. No it was a plain sequential bash script type thing, except slower.
I think they have discouraged piracy by slowing down the install so much.

BTW my technical questions are answered and my decisions made, but you guys chat away, and don't let that disturb you.

I'm sitting here on my work owned windows 7 laptop. It has 8G of ram so it takes a good 5 minutes to resume from hibernation in the morning. Then its up but you can't use the mouse or keyboard for another 5 minutes while it run the hdd. Then finally you can login and then the taskbar is greyed out for another 5 while it runs the hdd crazy. I still miss windows 2000 when windows was fast.

Get a SSD

Its a work owned laptop so I wouldn't buy any hardware for it.
Besides I swapped the drive in my personal laptop for an ssd and while its a little faster they don't make that much of a speed increase. Its hardly noticeable under Linux since Linux does efficient memory management and doesn't try to swap all the time. Windows biggest issue is it wants to swap all the time so no matter how fast the drive disk i/o is still slower then ram.

Hi,
I find a SSD that has been optimized for the system does provide a major time advantage for either Gnu/Linux or Windows OS. Not just boot times but operational duties are much faster than a HDD. As to swappiness, you can control that with Gnu/Linux and MS Windows. Running swap on a SSD is no longer a issue with newer SSD controllers and cel type (MLC or SLC) having better MTTF & MTBF numbers.
Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

I looked at those threads where people talked about if an ssd needs optimized or not and is doesn't seem there is anything that needs to be done. I can see a slight speed different when booting my personal laptop but I rarely reboot. If I install new packages its a little quicker but i don't do that a lot either. Day to day use hasn't increased any. But again the i/o is the limit now, the sata bus speed on older laptops will limit speed that data can flow to the ssd.

WRT to swappiness in Windows, Windows 2000 had the reg key to control that and it worked well as a virtual machine host but XP and newer removed support for that reg key and ignores it.

I have an ssd for some time. The "Optimisation" I read about was about concerning atime, to stop endless disk writes to the same sectors. Day to day you don't notice a lot. But run a large cp, run slocate -u or e2fsck and you will notice a huge difference. I suppose gamers would notice it. But that is not me.