Nvidia, I'll admit, from what I've seen, already has better drivers for Windows 8 than AMD does, but there may just be something to AMD and win 8, at least for the time being.

I thought at first that it had something to do with my SSD, but disabling that feature in CCC not only strangely makes IE10 easily the fastest and best all around performing browser I've ever used (Then again, I haven't tried the absolute latest edition of Chrome yet), but I've noticed a pretty damn nice average fps boost of anywhere from 20-40 fps in every game that I've tried since. I setup win 7 on dual boot just to check and see what was up, but I'm not seeing this kind of performance on win 7. Now, either my radeon 6870 has just been underperforming in windows 7 this entire time for whatever reason, or windows 8 is giving me a pretty solid boost.

I want to see someone else try this out to see if they get similar results. I'll prob sign up on one of those forums and point this out. Doubt it's unique to my system.

I guess it could also be the case that maybe AMD's drivers were just always flawed (which is something that many could certainly easily believe), and so I suppose what I'm noticing now in win 8 is just the result of improved drivers. What got me messing with that feature in the first place was this weird and super annoying mouse lag that I'd sometimes notice in IE10 with my AMD GPU, but never with my core i5 2500k's onboard GPU. It never occurred whenever I moved my mouse up and down where there was no text, but it would always show up whenever I tried to move my mouse really fast over large blocks of text, so needless to say I couldn't stand a lot of my very own posts on this very forum ;). It's only later that I decided to test out BF3, and then that's when I noticed the game related performance improvements. Firefox was my favorite browser in Win 7, but IE10 is easily my favorite browser now in win 8, although I still don't like the way the browser handles the organization of favorites and history. Chrome is still my favorite in those two areas.

IE9 had potential in win 7, but it always annoyed me how my cursor would just stop working on specific forums that I frequent use often, making it simply unusable for me altogether.

Most def, I know Chrome is superior to IE9 in Win 7, which is why I was careful to point out that, even though I find Win 8's IE10 to be pretty damn impressive, that I have still not, as of this moment, tested out the new Chrome on windows 8, which could very well continue the trend of Chrome being better than IE for all I know. Also, from what I've heard, the new Chrome actually takes away the touch based version of IE10, even though I exclusively use the superior desktop version, from the start screen if you make Chrome your default browser, and instead replaces it with a Win 8 Style version of Chrome, but one that seemingly still has as many features as the desktop version of Chrome. I don't know, I would need to see it for myself. Still, really pleased with IE10, though. First time in a long time that I found myself not desiring to switch to or use a different browser in Windows.

I found Firefox my favorite on Windows 7, because it seemingly had support for things that Chrome or IE just didn't appear to have. For example, on certain forums with Firefox, you could use keyboard shortcuts such as CTRL + B, among others, to automatically bold your text, perform spoiler wraps, etc, but the same wasn't true for Chrome on the same level, and because I love to visit certain forums that support this, Firefox had an advantage with me for this reason. IE9 in Win 7 was always the browser whose speed and snappiness I loved, but little bugs killed it for me. I also liked that Firefox had built in support to, at your leisure, increase or decrease the size of the text input form of most, if not all, websites, which was a touch that I really liked. I found Firefox as the browser to use if you wanted to make sure that you had the greatest wealth of usability options along with consistent and predictable performance, without any surprises.

Chrome was the browser to use if you just wanted a flat out, faster browser that had the best HTML5 support. It was also my go to browser for testing web code.

IE9 was the browser that was fast as hell, seemed to have better memory management than Chrome over an extended period of usage, but was just let down by small bugs here and there, most annoying among them being the fact that your cursor can literally disappear entirely as you're typing into text input forms on various websites, forcing you to have to use your mouse to click and find out just where the heck your cursor is at. That made IE9 totally unusable for me. I looked at all sorts of solutions online, some even going so far as to state that a fresh install would fix it, but that never proved to be the case for me.

Okay, that looks pretty damn impressive. I'll download and check it out.

I'm glad the metro design is still there, because I can't get enough of it. Hmm, tested it. Vey good idea, however, I don't like that it disables the larger more traditional start screen. I was hoping I could, if I wanted to, use a combination of both, not one or the other.

I think they should create their own user interface for the start menu that is inspired by the windows 8 style UI, but make it unique to their software. Dropping the exact start screen in there seems kinda rough, as good as they managed to make it look. I suppose it's pretty much perfect, though for anyone who wants to use the traditional Windows 7 Start menu. So, for people who want the old Windows 7 start menu back, this thing seems like a winner.

Whoa, wait a minute! Just found something on their traditional Windows 7 menu. At the very top they have a button that goes straight to the full screen start screen. This definitely has my stamp of approval now. This way I can use both at my leisure, but without losing the ability to dive into the original start screen without making changes in the software's configuration.

Now, that would be perfect. Checking that out now to see if I can do it.

edit:: Nice, just did that, this pretty much makes it a keeper. Left windows key brings up oldschool start menu, right windows key brings up start screen.

wow, reading through this thread is like an archeological dig. 😅

sounded like a steal at the time but $40 for windows 8, is just awful.

at least windows 7 lasted a good long while, and got free upgrades to windows 10. 😁