Last September Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky published a blog promising quicker boot times on Windows 8. Simply put, Microsoft has delivered. Now I’m sure that you’re all well aware of what overclocking entails; from playing with unintuitive BIOS settings, to watching numerous blue screens of death, to hitting F10 on your keyboard and hoping that maybe upping the voltage just a bit more will make your system stable.

Overclocking can be a boring and tedious process that takes hours upon hours. Luckily, Windows 8 eases that pain to some degree. In the amount of time it takes me to boot Windows 7 twice on the exact same hardware, I can boot Windows 8 approximately five times. That’s quite an improvement, especially considering how fast Windows 7 booted on my SSD in the first place.

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So at the very least we have some anecdotal evidence that Windows 8 isn’t limiting overclocking anymore than previous versions of Windows. The takeaways here are that quick boot times make tweaking your BIOS settings to find the magic numbers less tedious; and that Windows 8 takes a hit to the chin, in the form of an unstable overclock, in stride.