Cant say anything about 8.1 but windows 8 had a bug in it that made it extremely slow. So i hope they fixed that. Took me 5 minutes to open a browser while iam running a ssd system with a good quadcore.
I have 8.1. Works great. @Rick - You must be doing something wrong. I have an ssd, and I have never had an issue with anything being slow in win 8.