Winner: Windows 10, by a whisker, but only if you count the small potential time saving of facial recognition. These cameras, alongside fingerprint scanners, are fairly common in business-oriented notebooks, though, giving Windows 10 an advantage over its older counterpart. We should note that this feature isn’t available on all Windows 10 devices, as the device in question will need a special Intel RealSense 3D camera preinstalled.

This biometric layer of security would allow a user to quickly hop into their system by just sitting in front of their PC, given there’s no need to enter a secure password, as required under Windows 8.1. Windows 10’s facial recognition tool, however, might serve as a means to shave a few seconds booting into the desktop. Both devices loaded the login screen in exactly eight seconds with both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1, with only milliseconds between boot times on either machine. This is at least true for the two devices we conducted tests with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Microsoft Surface Pro. There doesn’t seem to be any real difference in the boot times between these two operating systems. If you haven't made the upgrade already (or even if you have but you're not quite sure what has changed), you'll find below a comparison between some of the features offered in Windows 8.1 and how they've been tweaked for Windows 10.

Time is running out, however. Now that Windows 7 has reached end-of-life, it's likely many of those users will be making the leap to Windows 10, and those left clinging on to Windows 8.1 have until January 2023 before it too is killed off by Microsoft.

As always though, there are some die-hard fans of previous operating systems who have yet to make the jump. Windows 10 is almost five years old at this point, and although many users initially resisted the change, it's proved to be one of Microsoft's most successful operating systems.

Windows 10 has ruined my laptop