"Now I have Win 8 loaded on a two month old Toshiba laptop I upgraded to 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB Crucial M4 SSD."

Dude, Windows 2000 would scream on that hardware. The performance says more about your hardware than the OS.

I don't have that caliber of system available for testing. I've got W8 on a four-year-old Dell D630 laptop, 2 gig of RAM, 80 gig of mechanical drive. It performs admirably, as far as I can tell. But it doesn't matter if it handles like a dump truck, since I can't figure out how to navigate it effectively. I'm still looking for the 'W8 for Previous Windows Versions Users' Guide'. I don't expect full help documentation in a beta, and I'm sure it will be there in the final release. In the meantime, I'm stumbling around in the dark; if I wanted to spend time on Google to learn an OS, I'd be playing at Linux instead.