From reading more, it seems that the Ł25 'upgrade' is not the value it appears. Apparently your older Office does not work with Win 8 so you have to fork out Ł180 for the 2012 version.
What version are you running? I think everything from 2007 onwards works fine in 8?
And to get rid of the, IMO, ridiculous 'Metro' start page as much as possible, you have to purchase third party software, but you still lose the start menu, I personally find that menu useful. I don't want to work around, adjust, get use to a useful part not being there!! Whatever way anyone tries to paint it, that's a down grade.
Start8 is $5 (Ł3) and basically turns Windows 8 into an enhanced version of Windows 7.
You can have it disable Metro
entirely - no more Metro start screen, no more hot-corners, and it brings back the Windows 7-style start menu. (or alternatively, a Metro-style one that stays on the desktop and doesn't fill your screen)
I'm not sure how my XP PC could be faster, it starts in about 60 seconds and shuts down in about 20sec so maybe that could be but its not an issue as the modem takes more than a minute to get going.
I boot to the desktop in about 10 seconds with Windows 8 compared to about 45 seconds for Windows 7.
That might not seem like a big deal, but I would often just leave my PC on idling rather than shutting it down due to the delay. (I don't like sleep as it tends to have issues with some of my hardware)
My PC, according to the 'wall wart' Wattmeter uses 45W in normal running with a peak of about 85W.
You're only measuring the idle state (unlikely to change) and the peak power consumption. (also unlikely to change) Those kind of power meters are often inaccurate with PCs as well.
Windows 8 allows the system to get into an idle state much quicker, and for longer periods of time. It will also support better power-saving states in upcoming processors. (Intel's
Haswell architecture for example)
I am also noticing that power management seems to be much more dynamic and responsive in Windows 8. In Windows 7 my system basically only ever jumped from being completely throttled at 1.6GHz, to running full-tilt at 4.5GHz. There was never any intermediate, and there were a number of tasks which caused the CPU to stay in the 1.6GHz state, even though they were considerably slower when doing so. On Windows 7 I ended up disabling CPU throttling, which is very wasteful.
In Windows 8, my CPU is scaling anywhere between 1.6GHz and 4.5GHz depending on the demands being made of it. I've often seen it running at 2.x or 3.x GHz rather than only switching between 1.6 & 4.5
I haven't noticed any performance drop when enabling all the power-saving features in Windows 8, unlike Windows 7. XP is much worse than that, even.
Memory usage is down, leaving more memory free for applications.
In general the UI just seems more responsive than Windows 7.
File transfers are noticeably quicker, and there is now an excellent status display giving you information on their progress. (Windows 7's information was useless at best, and estimates were often wildly inaccurate)
People keep say how much faster Win 8 is than Win 7. Was Win 7 slow?
It wasn't slow, but 8 is faster. That's never a bad thing.
Not a fan of it, for tablets sure, but for desktop I don't see the point. I think its going to be eventually known as vista 2 sales wise.
I'm quite sure Microsoft will be happy selling another 60 million copies of Windows then...