Difficulties with SP2013

I'm a little late to the party this time, but I've finally carved out some time to play with SharePoint 2013. I've noticed two things so far:

1. SharePoint 2013 chews CPU a lot more than SharePoint 2010 did.
2. The install has been flaky for me, perhaps due to point 1.

I've had several failed installs so far and they present weird errors when they do. The first failure I had wouldn't let me create managed accounts. I did a reinstall and failure number two wouldn't provision site collections correctly .

The site I created using the wizard resulted in this:

I created a new web application and then got this during the site collection creation:

That Correlation ID led to this error in the logs:

A large block of literal text was sent to sql (length 93794).  This can result in blocking in sql and excessive memory use on the front end.

I did three things that seem to have addressed the issue:

1. Uninstalled SharePoint and deleted the 14- and 15-hives.
2. Upped the RAM on my dev box from 4Gig to 8Gig.
3. Reinstalled SharePoint