Win 8 performance any better than win 7?

Hi guys,
For those that have upgraded to Windows 8 - have you experienced any noticable performance improvement?
 
I'm on Win 7 and have no desire to use a touch interface, so I'm wondering whether there's any reason to take advantage of the upgrade price deal or leave my stable system well enough alone for now.
 
Thanks
Russ
 

Just before Christmas day I upgraded my Win 7 Pro system to Win 8 Pro in place.

It has not been an easy process for me to get things the way I like them.

The actual update took some time to prepare because I had to uninstall some things.

The upgrade takes about an hour and started up OK.

But the user interface experience is quite different on the start screen (compared to the desktop) and I've not used any start screen apps. I generally stay on the Desktop.

I've had to update quite a lot of stuff and I've had a number of weird things happen.

I've been backing up with Acronis 2013 and I've had to restore things once - when I tried to update my USB WIFI drivers to Win 8 Beta drivers (I have a Netgear WNA110 USB adapter for my home wireless network connection). After that I could not get any network connections and I could not remove the Win 8 drivers - it would not roll back and would not let me use the Win 7 drivers. So I restored my system image to the previous backup.

I went to the local computer store and there were no available USB WIFI adapters that have Win 8 support. So I will just live with until one comes out.

I've had little time to run audio stuff yet, but I think I have things stabilized.

My system is probably a lot different from most - I do a lot of software beta testing, so I had a lot of system tools installed. I check registry settings, event lists, perform frequent chkdsks, etc. I back up with Retrospect and Acronis.

I've had to update to Acronis 2013 and Retrospect 8. Acronis has problems if you disable the Nonstop Backup Service and Retrospect 8 seems to have problems with its older backup sets so I'm generating new ones now.

Since my WIFI is the only network adapter I use, and it's not Win 8 compatible, I don't see any Network connection interfaces or protocols, but somehow it still works. I guess the in-place upgrade shovelled in place some kluge.

I've seen some flakey things - like driver letters changing, I can't execute BAT files, but I can rename them to .CMD and run them.

My login account is in the administrator group, but it does not seem to be an administrator in some ways. I don't fully understand this yet and the older user account controls are not the same in Win 8.

I've managed to eliminate just about all the errors in the event list - I just get one for DHCP probably because I don't have real network drivers.

I think if you install from scratch (and have Windows 8 drivers for all your hardware - especially the boot drivers) you probably will do fine.

But I have so much software it would just take too long to re-install, so I took this route.

In short, if you're prepared to tread carefully do it.

But Windows 7 is a fine OS - no need to upgrade at all if you are happy with what you have.

As I said, I still have not had much time to play audio, but I see that the startup processes are stages so that things seem to startup faster - actually you have to wait some time before everything is actually running up to speed.

The user interface load balancing is very good - you don't have to wait long for screen inetractions - I guess that is what is needed for touch support - very fast user input reponse.

Audio in Sonar X2a runs fine - no problems with any of my audio stuff - Sonar X1, X2, Live 8 32-bit, Live 9 64-bit beta - all the NI Komplete software, Kore, Maschine, Zebra, Alchemy, Omnisphere, etc.

I upgraded my Focusrite Firewire interface, NVIDIA drivers, and few motherboard drivers, and many other things.

I have about 20 pages of chronology documenting what I did.

I've uninstalled the Win 7 SDKs, Windows debuggers and symbols, Visual Studio 2011, Windows Network Monitor, and pretty much every developement tool I had for Window 7. I probably won't upgrade them to Windows 8.

My C drive is now a lot smaller without all that stuff.

I use the Revo Uninstaller and it has not let me down, Driver Detective is great for finding solid drivers - it has also never failed me. I uninstalled and re-installed Perfect Disk 12.5 - it runs fine. I also use Perfect Registry sparingly and don't always take its advice, but it's pretty good as these cleaners go. CCleaner is solid and a great tool.

Windows updates seem to come in every day, not just for Defender, but for other stuff.

I don't usually run any antivirus or firewall software or even software restore points, but I have allowed them on for now in Windows 8 until I get more experience. 

I hope to have everything solid by New Year's.

I could go on, but you get the idea, I'm writing all this while I'm waiting for a backup to complete and it's done now, so farewell for now.