Windows 8 for £25?

[Mark_h]

Calling the forum geeks.

My main desktop PC at home is still running XP and is due an OS refresh as it's getting slow.

2 Options.

1. Refresh it's XP build and keep with a fairly stable OS that folks tend not to bother writing new virus for or...
2. Upgrade to Windows 8. It seems currently you can upgrade for just £25.

Now I know W8 is brand new so bound to have a few issues but this sort of upgrade offer is pretty unusual for Microsoft.

I was thinking about upgrading the physical drive in the PC anyway so how about this....

Get new 1TB drive for about £50
Do a fresh XP install on it using the recovery disks that came with my PC (or more likely restore the backup I did after I refreshed it last time, applied all the SPs and installed office etc but same end result of clean and legit XP build)
Get the W8 upgrade offer at £25
Upgrade the new install
Run W8 for a bit and see if world ends
If it's a nightmare just put the old drive back in for now and consider options
If it's all good then keep old drive on shelf in case of emergencies and have a fresh build PC with W8 and a bigger drive for the princely sum of £75.

I suspect some of my ancient hardware (Canon Scanner etc) will have a moan about drivers but I should be able to get away with most of it.

I'm currently running the assessment software to see just what will be expected to work but thought I'd ask the random cross section of folks on the ORG for an opinion.

Oh and if you want to check out if the offer applies to you too, you can download the assessment software <Here> then click on the "Download upgrade assistant" button which will tell you what does/doesn't work and how much it will cost when it's done. Tested it on my netbook and it said £25!

Appreciate this may come across as an iffy post possibly linking to some random virus or other but in an attempt to provide a bit of self-authentication to show I'm not some random Chinese spam-bot, I ride a loud SV1000 and my throttle body recently fell off. If on the other-hand the Chinese Spam-bot is good enough to have come up with that level of authentication then we're all well and truly buggered anyway!

Thoughts?

Oh and anyone got a good deal for SATA drives about the £50 mark?

[Stuuk1]

Personally I would just yet.

I would upgrade to Windows 7 from XP. Although the cost may not be worth it.

[tigersaw]

Read a few reviews, all positive.
Most say to turn all the metro crap off and do a few tweaks so it functions like windows 7 but quicker

[andrewsmith]

Spend the extra and get a windows 7 OS disc!
Windows 7 from a XP build machine is stable, just needs a bigger HDD for the OS (15GB compared to the 4GB of XP)

[Tomor]

http://www.ebuyer.com/146082-wd-1tb-...ive-wd1001fals ???

[Kenzie]

Someone at work got 8 but didn't like it so took it off. Like the others have said, get it then skin it to look like 7 and you will be ok. Metro is a pile of poo by all accounts and there are instances where multiple clicks are needed to do something in 8 whereas 7 would be two at most.

[jambo]

I've never really been a fan of this "skin it so it looks like the old one" approach.

I remember people skinning XP to look like 2000, skinning 7 to look like XP, and now we're skinning 8 to look like 7. If you don't get on with the OS at all then I can see this, and where you've got a corporate roll out it can save a huge amount on retraining staff. For you, me and anyone else I rather enjoy playing with a new interface. I spend about 2 hours annoyed that things aren't where I expect them to be, and then start using it in the way it's meant to be used. Generally it's at this point I start seeing the improvements over the last version. And when you're googling for help, having a fairly vanilla interface helps out.

Either way, if your hardware can run it, I'd go for Windows 8, but then I've rebuilt a lot of PCs by getting bored and putting alpha releases of an OS on them and watching the thing brick itself, so I'm not the best voice of restraint on these things.

Jambo

[Steve_God]

If I had a touch screen monitor, I'd upgrade.
Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

That said, as soon as my old netbook dies, I'm 90% likely to replace it with a Win8 tablet

Originally Posted by Mark_h

Calling the forum geeks. Oh and if you want to check out if the offer applies to you too, you can download the assessment software <Here> then click on the "Download upgrade assistant" button which will tell you what does/doesn't work and how much it will cost when it's done. Tested it on my netbook and it said £25!

Thanks for that. I just followed your instructions and suddenly this morning W8 is on my PC. An interface is an interface. As long as I can do what I want, even if it does take a little retraining, then that's fine. In the little 5 min play I had with it, its seems OK.

Yes its missing shortcuts to the thing that you do 90% of the time when you use your PC but I'm guessing its a matter of customising the settings. the only thing that seems "long" is the power off option which is now under settings. The only other thing I'm interested in learining about is the multi tasking shortcuts. Other than that, its seems ok for £25.

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. But again, for me its simplay a case of turning this **** off.

[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.