>You say,"...no visible speed improvements...". Do you not perceive any "non-visible
>speed improvements"? Like boot times - cold boot and wake from sleep. On my
>tablet, I noticed a definite speed increase over Windows 7 with Windows 8 when
>booting. To me, that's the best part about Windows 8.
Boot times are faster in Win8. While nice, that's pretty minor because it only happens every so often. You typically boot your computer a time or two a day where you'll note the faster times. But, you use your computer all day. I haven't seen anything notably faster with Win8 where I said "Oh, that was nice" for regular use.
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Also, some may not know this. With a virtual machine running Windows, you generally don't have to boot it up when you use it.
I have been exclusively using Windows running in virtual machines (VirtualBox) for a few years now on all personal equipment. For work I still use Win7 and have evaluated Win8. In theVM, I very rarely reboot Windows, but instead just suspend them wherever they are. When I come back to use it again, I resume from where I was and all my screens are up, all my files, all my network connections, everything. I do this all from inside Linux and the controls which run VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is copyleft protected open source (GPL v2):
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/DownloadsA demo (from 2010) showing Ubuntu, OS X, and Win7 in VirtualBox:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BtpNRgAERE
