Arnoxthe1 said:
Actually, I'm curious now, what benefits specifically have you found? A lot of people, besides the Metro UI and slightly faster startup speed, have noticed no difference between 8 and 7.
As mentioned in the disclaimer in what you quoted, 'If you are a power user' applies here ;-)
Anyway, there's a lot of administrative advantages for those of us who works in IT (although they are far from as useful as the advantages we saw in the move from Vista or XP to Windows 7).
For me as a personal user, the new start menu (especially in 8.1) is actually a huge advantage. People spew a lot of hate against it, but when you think about it, the new Start Menu is actually customizable to your own preference, where the Windows 7 start menu typically just ended up being loaded with a million random folders. It gives easy access to your needed software and only displays what you want it to display. Also, from an administrative (work-related) point of view, i can actually set up the start menu and then lock it down, so it only contains the software the user of the machine needs.
This is by far superior to the Win 7 start menu in terms of launching software, and it's also superior to the desktop launching scheme, since that either requires you to minimize all windows, or use the Win-D shortcut (which is still an inferior solution since launching a piece of software from the desktop still ). Also desktops tends to get cluttered easily with all sorts of random files and stuff.
For users of screens with really DPI (like 4k screens, or small Full HD screens), Windows 8 also introduced scaling of the user interface, where Windows 7 only offered scaling of text.
Then there's touchscreen-devices, which doesn't need to be tablets these days. A lot of laptops are starting to support this, and it's actually a great experience with Windows 8.
Then there's multi-monitor support. A few small benefits in Windows 8 there, like multi-monitor taskbars (personally not a feature i use, but it's still there). There's also some inherent advantages if you use USB 3.0. I've had a lot of issues with Win7 devices and USB 3.0 drivers, especially for performance-critical applications like audio-managing. Windows 8 just works out of the box on that one. Storage Spaces, which works similar to the linux feature LVM (Logical Volume Manager) allows you to move away from the traditional Disk-Partition scheme, which is a great advantage, especially in desktop PC's who usually have the capability to contain many hard drives or solid state disks.
Also some disadvantages obviously, but to me they are rather minor. Most importantly though, Windows 8.1 actually runs very smooth, which is an advantage on older computer hardware. We actually had 60 PC's at my workplace that we were considering throwing out due to speed issues (processors were fine, but RAM was sparse and hard drives were slow). Tested them with Windows 8.1, and they ran much much better, so we reimaged them all and shipped them out into use.
