Windows 8 for £25?

Originally Posted by Mark_h

1.5 TB drive en-route for £55

Guess this weekend I will be mostly watching progress bars slip slowly by.

Runako, when you upgraded was there an option to burn the image to a DVD as ideally I'd like to do a clean W8 rather than rebuild XP then upgrade again. However I suspect it will need to authenticate against the original XP license so may be onto a bit of a non-starter.

Yeah something like that. From memory, there was an option for DVD Install or something (which may be what you're referring to - I thought they would send a DVD with the OS as backup) but it cost an extra £12 or so and me not being too fussed couldn't bothered with all that.

As for the install, it was all automated. It only asked if I wanted to save preferences and personal files. The only other thing to note is that some functionality and apps won't work (some of the Vaio stuff and Google chrome requires a reinstall). Other than that the process was easy peasy.

i grabbed it with a £10 off coupon so for £15 i took it. i did a fresh install and its ok, you can download the iso and burn to DVD.

the metro is more for phones / tablets and not much use without touchscreen. but the live tiles are nice for weather and news.
oh and it didn't need a good license to upgrade for me so an extra plus

[pookie]

It installed on my tablet and is much faster, intuitive than win 7. Boot speed is faster. They have removed media centre from it and it is a paid upgrade. Currently you can get the product key free from Microsoft for now
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/w.../feature-packs

Big bonus of hyper V when i get it on my desktop

[muzikill]

Ive got it dual booting with windows 7. I have to keep 7 as there are driver issues with external hardware i have. There are plenty of tutorials on the net on how to prep your drive for a dual boot and if you are getting a new drive i used acronis to image and move across my current install. The downloadable file from ms allows you to fresh install btw and installs the dual boot os option menu.

[Mark_h]

Originally Posted by muzikill

Ive got it dual booting with windows 7. I have to keep 7 as there are driver issues with external hardware i have. There are plenty of tutorials on the net on how to prep your drive for a dual boot and if you are getting a new drive i used acronis to image and move across my current install. The downloadable file from ms allows you to fresh install btw and installs the dual boot os option menu.

Can you do a fresh build even from the upgrade license? How does it validate your XP license?

Ideally I'd like to do a fresh W8 then dual boot my old XP from another partition so I have all bases covered.

Originally Posted by Runako

One thing that is clear is W8 is a massive advertising platform for MS. They sell it to you as being "customised to you" when in fact what this means is that they'll take every opprtunity to sell you stuff from Apps, to Movies to Music directly through the interface.

Ah so someone has finally twigged it! 8 is just the Xbox dashboard update that came out nearly a year ago! It's a bizarre mix of advertising space and making navigation of the interface a little more difficult for no reason!

[muzikill]

Originally Posted by Mark_h

Can you do a fresh build even from the upgrade license? How does it validate your XP license?

Ideally I'd like to do a fresh W8 then dual boot my old XP from another partition so I have all bases covered.

Yes you can do a fresh build. Plenty of tutorials on how to do it. Xp needs to be the main installed os. When you install win8 put your key in during the install. If it doesnt activate give me a shout coz i know the workaround to get a fresh install to activate. Backup and image your xp install first before you start mucking around with it!

[Mark_h]

Stage 1 Underway. New 1.5TB drive arrived today. Bargain £55 from ebuyer if anyone is doing similar. Got a cheap usb-sata adapter off ebay (£4 delivered) which came with enough leads to let me plug the new drive onto a spare sata port on the motherboard so should be a lot faster to swap data around than using USB. Is taking an absolute age to format though. 90 mins in and still only 45% done!

Next step shuffle some data around so it's all on the right spindles and backed up before I kick off the upgrade.

[muzikill]

Yeah my 500gb drive took ages. Quick format is the key. Its a new drive and shouldnt need it?

[Mark_h]

6 hour format, 3 hour download, 1 hour install and my clunky old XP desktop now goes from off to browsing faster than Joe M at a Lambo convention!

The Win8 desktop will take a bit of getting used to but with a few mins messing you can make it all look like W7 anyway and still have super-fast start-up.