I decided to take a plunge and upgrade from Vista to W8 Pro for £24.

Install was the best I ever experienced and when it finished all was working fine.

As I do play BF3 a lot this was my forst port of call of course

On Vista it was jerky more often than not. PC Spec is rather dated 2.66 Quad core with 8GB RAM and HD5700 gfx all on Raptor HDD.

I was really gobsmacked on how good BF3 played on W8 Pro. Smooth as silk, perfect frame rates and it looked like graphics looked better as well!

I don not mind all the tiles etc and fishing round screen corners for menus. One thing missing is the programs button etc but Iread there is some 3rd party soft addressing this.

One major cheese off is MS Office 2003 did not automatically port to W8 as I chose to keep everything during install.

Now I will have to either d'load everything back from servers or hunt for that pesky *.pst file...

Is OpenOffice compatible with W8? Anyone with direct experiences using OpenOffic eon W8?

Re. Open Office, you should find what you need here:

http://www.openoffice.org/development/releases/3.4.1.html

I think for those on Vista it is a no-brainer - a far more stable OS. For those on Windows 7, not so much of a must have, but still nice.

Only thing holding me back is lack of drivers for a specific printer hub that links three of our printers into the network.

Come on, Belkin. Get with the programme!

Libra office is better than Open Office these days. Oracle has kind-of abandoned it.

Oracle no longer play any part in the development of Open Office. They sold the rights and code to Apache who are now developing it again, and the current version is fully Windows 8 compliant.

I don not mind all the tiles etc and fishing round screen corners for menus. One thing missing is the programs button etc but Iread there is some 3rd party soft addressing this.

One major cheese off is MS Office 2003 did not automatically port to W8 as I chose to keep everything during install.

Now I will have to either d'load everything back from servers or hunt for that pesky *.pst file...

pst should be easy enough to find, usually located under C:\Users\*********\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

Spoke to HP and I am going to have to wait for the BT driver, oh well. Still loving the speed of boot

Oh and the programs are in the tiles, just pin the ones you need to the new start menu

Consequences of staying up to late or a short tale of momentous clumsiness!

I installed W8 with the option ticked to keep everything. I just wanted to pick up what I needed from old documents folders etc - yes, I know, I could have used DVD's or other hard drives to dump the staf temporarily. #

So I freed up as much space as was needed for new install etc, all went well.

With W8 happily runing I took to cleaning the Windows.old folder.

Al was going well until I thought I didn't need the old Windows directory - all the stuff I needed was sitting in Users dir.

So I deleted it. Problem is I was in the WRONG FOLDER and deleted the W8 windows directory!!!

Since the disk is brimming now none of the repair options worked so I have no OS now.

At least I have a good excuse to buy SSD now - trip to local PCWorld lunchtime shoud cure my problems

I am a bit of a hardware person and not so much of a soft geek :(

Consequences of staying up to late or a short tale of momentous clumsiness!

I installed W8 with the option ticked to keep everything. I just wanted to pick up what I needed from old documents folders etc - yes, I know, I could have used DVD's or other hard drives to dump the staf temporarily. #

So I freed up as much space as was needed for new install etc, all went well.

With W8 happily runing I took to cleaning the Windows.old folder.

Al was going well until I thought I didn't need the old Windows directory - all the stuff I needed was sitting in Users dir.

So I deleted it. Problem is I was in the WRONG FOLDER and deleted the W8 windows directory!!!

Since the disk is brimming now none of the repair options worked so I have no OS now.

At least I have a good excuse to buy SSD now - trip to local PCWorld lunchtime shoud cure my problems

I am a bit of a hardware person and not so much of a soft geek :(

Most of us have been there - whether we consider ourselves hardware, software or all round geeks - tiredness is usually the culprit, and we either disconnect or delete something, and usually notice our mistake just too late!

You do, of course, know how many software engineers it takes to change a light bulb?..................

Answer......Software engineers don't change light bulbs. It's a hardware problem.........

Ha ha, good one

Bought this one:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/ocz-agt3-25sat3-120g-agility-3-internal-2-5-sata-iii-6gb-s-11965481-pdt.html

Looking forward to clean install and blisteringly fast OS and BF3 load times

Bought this one:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/ocz-agt3-25sat3-120g-agility-3-internal-2-5-sata-iii-6gb-s-11965481-pdt.html

Looking forward to clean install and blisteringly fast OS and BF3 load times

Got the very same one myself, loads very quickly.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

Got a new Dell XPS8500 last week with Windows 8 on the 2TB drive. Trouble is I wanted it on my 128GB SSD. Now new PC's have secure boot for windows 8 so you can't just clone with any normal cloning software that I have!

After much f'ing and blinding i finally found HD Clone 4.2 which lets you clone secure boot partitions!

So now have Windows 8 on my SSD - used Easy transfer to transfer accounts and docs from old PC and all is working well!

From pressing power button to Metro - 9 seconds!

Guys and Gals,

I need your advice please.

As I wrote above I first installe an upgrade over the existing system. This went sour and I was not able to do anything about it as the drive was too full to even conduct any repairs form the bootable USB media I created based on the ISO provided by Microsoft.

Then I bought that SSD, run the install last night. It is increadible how finnicky "old" motherboards can be. I had no end of problems with SATA ports and AHCI (or whatever the acronym is for Advanced sth sth Interface) as this is supposedly required for SSD drives (and any more modern drives) to fulfill their potential - turnd out that not all SATA ports on the MoBo are equall and not all are bootable from! How stupid is that?

Anyhow, W8 clean installed to new SSD drive from the ISO, boots with unbelievable speed and everything runs fantastic. One problem, will not let me activate! It says it is only for the upgrade and not a clean install!!!

Do I really have to wipe it all out, install Vista on it and then install upgrade ?????

Please tell me there is another way as this would be the pinnacle of stupidity!

Thanks for your time

not sure about 8 but with older versions you could just do another clean install over the top, and it would then let you activate.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/why-activate-windows

Acc to Necrosoft I have to install previous version of windows first... it is stupidity galore after all.

Why would they let me buy an upgrade (which I did using upgrade advisor etc so Microsoft HAVE CHECKED that I was running a previous version oftheir operating system? If they did surely it is obvious that a clean install is a preferable option ,especially they make it possible themselves! I just cannot follow the logic there, assuming there is one of course

I will try your advice ljp01, thanks!

not sure about 8 but with older versions you could just do another clean install over the top, and it would then let you activate.

Last night performed an upgrade on a clean install of W8 already performed previously on the SSD. It went well and for some reason has not asked me for activation so far and I am not able to find the activation option anywhere in the settings. So far so good, see if activation request pops out.

One thing bugging me is inability to erase the "Windows.old" directory. It keeps saying that I do not have "SYSTEM" permission and other similar error message. I am logged in as Admin. Any advice on this one as it eats away quite a chunk of the limited space on my 120GB SSD :( ?

Can't believe there's no thread on this on the day that they launched win 8. So I bought a new PC in the last two months so I'm entitled to a £24 upgrade to Win 8 Pro. Anyone used it? Is it worth doing? This is my main work PC so I have to live with the OS every day. Don't want to make the change and then find I hate it!

If your device is a touchscreen device, then it's pretty good.

Otherwise I wouldn't go near it.

Just IMHO of course.

Last night performed an upgrade on a clean install of W8 already performed previously on the SSD. It went well and for some reason has not asked me for activation so far and I am not able to find the activation option anywhere in the settings. So far so good, see if activation request pops out.

One thing bugging me is inability to erase the "Windows.old" directory. It keeps saying that I do not have "SYSTEM" permission and other similar error message. I am logged in as Admin. Any advice on this one as it eats away quite a chunk of the limited space on my 120GB SSD :( ?

as far as activation goes I had to google it, it's there but you gotta find it, and the default admin account was weird until I made another, might help your other problem

^^?

^^?

On my phone lol I noobed it

Hope you are not driving LOL

I created one accounbt for SWMBO and another for my son. I will see what is going on when I get back home.

Also, with clean install, after first reboot it deafualted to activation screen and each time I rebooted it was asking to be activated.

Now, after "upgrade" install it hasn't done it so far, weird...

I stumbled accross a "Media Upgrade" or soemthing, you can but for circa £7 from apps shop - anyone did that?

If your device is a touchscreen device, then it's pretty good.

Otherwise I wouldn't go near it.

Just IMHO of course.

Upgrading from Vista makes a lot of sense to me

Just loaded it onto my HTPC with a SSD - Its Mighty Fast!

Trying to resist the urge to use an after market app for a start menu!

Apart from the missing start menu it seams ok so far (Uptime 2HR)

Quick installation and no crashes or driver issues took less than 30mins to set-up!

I'm using a *cough* Downloaded version

Adam

For £25 no point in using "downloaded" version. One sensible move from Necrosoft . I am having drivers problems with my Creative webcam. Old tech but what is disappointing they will not develop W8 driver:(. One way to make u upgrade...

Doesn't work with me-will be buying Microsoft webcam

I got it about 2 weeks ago, I haven't had any problems yet other than one session where it was repeatedly rebooting because it failed to install an update, left it for about an hour and it was fine (funnily enough one of the updates was something to fix the error causing it to not install updates properly :p)

All of my hardware has connected fine and it all working.

I haven't gotten as far as upgrading to visual studio 2012 yet though, will do ASAP, I want to have a play with ModernUI apps, all my experience has been console based and winforms. MinGW and Code::Blocks for when I prefer to lark around in C installed fine aswell, compiles correctly too.

All my steam games are running nicely too, no issues there.

F1 2011 has problems but fix is easy.

Old hardware may struggle for drivers, as I am finding now. Otherwise excellent really, at least compared with Vista

Java threw the odd wobbly but generally worked. I uninstalled and reinstalled it though and it was fine. Seems to be the fix for most software on win8.