I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 8 with leg key, can I burn ISO and put 8.1 preview on a blank partition or does it have to go on top of the Win 8 I have now, thanks.
From what I read, if you attempt to install via ISO, it will automatically write over your Windows 8 partition, You probably need to pull out your HDD and install on another one. Or you could try to delete the Windows 8 partition on your current HDD, install the 8.1 preview and then restore the partition you previously deleted. If your thinking that is crazy, I have deleted me partitions a few times and successfully recovered them. As for install 8.1, I am not sure how it detects the older 8 install so it still may find the OS and write to it.
Yes, you can burn the ISO and install the preview to a blank partition, in which case a dual-boot environment will be created.
In uefi mode, with a graphics card having a GOP uefi vbios, the boot time is around 2-3secs on W8 but it's only interesting if you are overclocking a lot. Other than boot times I like Windows 8 more than Windows 7 where you always get the message "the performance of your pc isn't enough" then freezing for a couple of secs and changes the aero theme to basic >.< The only moment you actually get in contact with the metro interface is just at boot or if you want to launch an app, other than that I barely use the metro interface..
I figure windows 8 (apart from the fact it's obviously designed for touchscreen phones and pads) is that it will probably be somewhat like windows vista in that it's quite different from its predecessor and therefore will need to be streamlined in the future (windows 7) but that's me just speculating. I'm wondering the same thing about the price though I recently bought a new copy of windows 7 and noticed that windows 8 was significantly cheaper surely the newer and what we're lead to believe "better" OS would be more expensive...