Windows 8 pre-launch adoption rate not looking good

I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to Windows 8. I'm rocking Windows 8 until there is a reason to upgrade.

If I buy a new laptop then has it, I will give it a try. If I don't like it, I will just downgrade.

 

lol wut?

 

The effect on power usage is minimal to positive.

If programs are pre-loaded to memory, it will decrease hard disk access, benefiting power consumption.

Your logic makes sense, for a human. If I'm holding two boxes, but have to carry four to the car, yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to switch pick up and set down all four boxes everytime I take a step...

But a computer is much faster than that. The computer can move those things almost instantly, and many times per second.

As soon as a program asks for RAM, Windows (Vista, too) instantly dropped some used RAM to give that program some memory. Which is why, despite its bad reputation for memory usage, you didn't actually have people getting out of memory errors (well, any more than usual).

Truth be told, Vista was hated because it introduced a lot of things people weren't used to. It introduced a more ubiquitous search, which requires some indexing (and thus hard disk access, read: thrasing) to maintain. It tintroduced a more advanced version of prefetch (superfetch) to make load times better.

It failed by giving developers DX10, with which they simply made games slower for very little benefit. It failed by not encouraging driver developers (printers, especially) to develop drivers before it came out. It failed on a number of fronts, but the commonly cited ones are not them. The commonly cited reasons for Vista being bad are based on a lack of understanding.

 

Actually it makes no difference to power consumption since most power schemes don't power down HDD's, therefore they are always spinning.
SF does however cause disk thrashing whenever it loads programs into memory since the r/w heads have to move all over the platter to find the files.
This is repeated every time files are unloaded then reloaded back into ram as per your comment below.

See above....

Superfetch and Prefetch are very different. Prefetch is supposed to reduce boot time by preloading startup apps from the HDD.
Also, indexing is helpful on servers but useless on a home computer.

The most common complaint users have regarding Vista (other than poor performance and driver support) is about the overzealous and difficult to use UAC.

It was a clunky, bloated, resource hogging, over protected (by MS) OS. W7 is what Vista should have been....