Actually, that doesn't work exactly like it did in Windows 7. In Windows 8, the search feature is divided between apps and settings.

So, in order to find something in the control panel like "Add/Remove programs" you'd have to switch to the start screen, then select "settings" instead of "apps" and then start typing what you are searching for.

Very much a step backwards from the Windows 7 search experience.

My experience is pretty much identical to yours. My accounts with gmail and hotmail are both very old with the Hotmail account going back to 1998. The Hotmail account seems to get about 2x as much incoming spam sent to it and I very rarely see spam making it into my Inbox. With Gmail I can't recall the last time a spam email ended up in my Inbox.

However, Hotmail has a pretty significant false-positive rate in comparison to Gmail but I can't make an apples to apples comparison because the Hotmail account is essentially now a throw-away I use for signing up to websites vs my Gmail account which I'm a bit more leery of giving out.