Ubuntu

[ancient_mariner]

Thanks. At the time I didn't have access to a working computer without getting off my lazy butt & starting one.

*edit*
Having read through, I'm pretty sure I didn't get the option 'sign in without a microsoft account', else I'd have gone with that.

 

[trencheel303]

I recently downgraded my account from a windows live one to a standard local one on Windows 8 because it logs in much faster. Being that I use an SSD the entire process from "ON" button to desktop literally takes <15 seconds and most of that at one point was waiting for the account logon.

You may not have seen an option to sign in without a live account because it's not made very clear, and when you do select it they try to push the "benefits" of a live account one more time, IIRC.

 

[ancient_mariner]

I did look quite hard and followed the route given in that article - pretty sure if it had been there I'd have seen it since that's exactly what I was looking for - but I was tired so maybe I missed it? I was able to convert to a local account without difficulty, and that's how it's staying.

W8.1 is really snappy, and I was quite impressed with how responsive both the OS and Lightroom were. After upgrading the Macbook to Mavericks a couple of days ago it has been less responsive than before, beachballing occasionally, even though indexing has completed. Looks to me like Microsoft have some aspects of this very right.

 

[arad85]

Looks to me like Microsoft have some aspects of this very right.

I am running 8.1 on a Asus Transformer T100 which uses the new Intel Z7340 Atom CPU. It benchmarks about 1.5-2x quicker than the last Atom processors, so kudos to Intel for such a performance hike. In day to day use, the only thing that lags is program startup (the "HDD" is actually eMMC that has a relatively low transfer rate). Memory use hovers just below 1G (2G fitted), snappiness and general usability (I'm 100% desktop not tile interface) is pretty good. Not only that, videos play nicely hardware-accelerated too without the issues that exist on Ubuntu I'm very happy with it - it has now consigned my Nexus 7 to be a remote for the xbmc systems here...