Question. Will Win 8 be fast if users have antivirus and anti-malware loaded to scan the drive / memory on start-up?

We're all running systems these days with at least a couple of cores in our CPUs, right? And we want to take advantage of those cores too. Windows 8 will do that in a way that Windows 7 doesn’t – in the turning on and off of your computer.

Windows 8 will leverage multiple cores in parallel to work together when the system is preparing itself for hibernation and resume. In previous versions of Windows, this would only matter for those who were hibernating their systems; but for Windows 8, nearly all shutdown and boot sequences will use some form of hibernation.

In previous versions of Windows, every boot and shutdown sequence would be a completely fresh start for both the kernel and user sessions. The developers of Windows 8 deem the complete shutdown and reboot of the kernel session every time as unnecessary, so Windows 8 will instead hibernate the kernel session and only shutdown the user sessions.