Startup
The very first thing you’ll notice with Windows 8 is that it boots a lot faster than Windows 7 (or Vista or XP, if you’re still part of the significant minority hanging onto either). This is partly because of the shift to UEFI (from BIOS), but primarily because of a clever tweak to the boot process. If you’re still using a mechanical hard drive, your boot time will probably go from around 30 seconds to 15-20 seconds. If you’re using an SSD, boot generally takes less than 10 seconds.
Security
While exact details of the Windows 8 kernel are fairly hard to come by, we do know that a lot of changes were made to ruggedize Windows 8 against malware and rootkits. For the most part, these protections take the form of memory allocation safeguards (see below).
