I've heard some say that upgrades to the engine (not interface) in Windows 8 make it worth an upgrade from 7. I haven't tried 8 and am curious as to just what these improvements are that make it superior to 7. Would appreciate an intelligent, informative response.
I posted this link in another Windows 8 thread I think:
http://arstechnica.com/information-...er-on-the-inside-under-the-hood-of-windows-8/
Below are excerpts from the article, kinda lopped out of it for each item. If you have questions or want more information about those items, click the link and read it, there are several paragraphs after each of these items.
Playing in the sandbox
First up is sandboxing. Metro-style apps are all sandboxed: by default, each app can only read from and write to its own private storage area. If the app needs to do anything more than this—access the Pictures library, say, or connect to the network as either a client or a server—it must explicitly indicate that it needs these extra capabilities in something called a manifest. This prevents apps from being able to read each other's files, documents that you haven't explicitly granted them permission to read, and so on. This serves two purposes; it helps safeguard user privacy, instilling greater confidence in apps downloaded from the store, and it also reduces the impact of security flaws in those apps.
Power preservation
Preserving battery life is one of the key goals for Metro applications. Unlike desktop applications, Metro applications aren't in general allowed to run in the background; unless you're actively looking at a Metro application, Windows suspends it after a few seconds. If memory becomes low, Windows will quietly terminate the app. Switching back to the app, whether it was suspended or terminated, resumes it.
Tick tock
Windows 8 has a few tricks up its sleeve even for systems that don't support fancy new stuff like Connected Standby. In a move that can't have come soon enough, it gets rid of the kernel tick.
Securing memory
Software bugs are, alas, a fact of life. Some kinds of software bug can be exploited by hackers, a problem that has plagued the world of computing for literally decades. Modern operating systems therefore provide mitigations for software bugs, employing various techniques to try to make the bugs harder to exploit.
ForceASLR
Windows 8 has a feature called ForceASLR that counteracts this. When ForceASLR is enabled for a process, Windows will try to load all DLLs at a random location, even the ones that don't claim to be compatible. There are still some DLLs that can escape this randomization, however: DLLs that can only be loaded into their preferred memory spot, which lack the information required to move them around should that spot be taken. ForceASLR has two options for these DLLs; the weak option allows them to load at their preferred location anyway, the strong option simply refuses to load them entirely.
HEASLR
HEASLR, like ASLR before it, unfortunately requires applications to opt in: DLLs have to tell the system that they support HEASLR, and if they don't, they'll get the old level of randomization. And while Visual Studio defaults to enabling regular ASLR, HEASLR defaults to off, so developers will have to explicitly opt in.
Better DEP, too
Protection provided by the CPU is an important part of these exploit mitigation techniques. DEP is fundamentally a hardware feature (though Windows does have a kind of weak emulated software DEP, Windows 8 makes hardware DEP support mandatory for the first time), with the processor itself trapping attempts to execute memory that isn't marked as being executable.
Proactive defense
Windows 8 also takes steps toward eliminating access to a kernel component that has been a consistent source of trouble over the years. win32k.sys is a Windows driver that's responsible for providing core services to GUI applications; it implements portions of both USER, the Windows component that handles the creation and manipulation of windows, and GDI, Windows' ancient 2D graphics API. Once upon a time, win32k.sys didn't reside in the kernel; prior to Windows NT 4, it was a non-kernel component. However, to improve GDI performance in Windows NT 4, it got moved into the kernel, and it has remained there ever since.
Slimline memory usage
In another one of those "motivated by the needs of tablets, but useful for everyone" features, Windows 8 is designed to use less memory than its predecessors. Slightly surprisingly, one of the techniques Microsoft is using to make Windows work better on small, low-memory machines is also important for huge, high-memory servers running dozens of virtual machines: memory deduplication.
A better operating system for all
Beneath the user interface, Windows 8 is in almost all regards a more efficient, more secure, more reliable operating system. From
high-speed, hibernation-powered booting to Connected Standby and a tickless kernel, it takes the solid Windows 7 foundation and makes things better.
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