Windows 8 Pro, Ultimate Upgrade $39.99

[ICXRa]

I installed 8 yesterday, upon installing my free media center key my install suddenly became de-activated. I call the MS support number and had to enter a series of numbers via the phone, then have them give me a series of numbers to enter to reactivate it.

This I found annoying, but I like the OS a lot. I've only played around with it a small amount, coming from Windows 7, but I can already tell that I'm glad I got it.

 

[nickbits]

I installed 8 yesterday, upon installing my free media center key my install suddenly became de-activated. I call the MS support number and had to enter a series of numbers via the phone, then have them give me a series of numbers to enter to reactivate it.

This I found annoying, but I like the OS a lot. I've only played around with it a small amount, coming from Windows 7, but I can already tell that I'm glad I got it.

I had that problem too but when the activation screen came up, I picked "change product key" and put in the media center key and it reactivated. I think it said that was already the current key but forcing a change fixed it nonetheless. Guess I wasn't the only one with that issue. My original key was from MSDN, I thought that was the issue at the time.

 

[darkewaffle]

With regard to WMC, apparently you're not familiar with cablecard. If you use a cablecard so you don't have to use the crappy box from the cable company (which also saves money), WMC is the only game in town. Without it, no cable card.

It might not be a big feature for everyone (or even for most), but certainly for me it is. Why should I pay a ton of money to upgrade to a new OS that lacks features that were there previously and doesn't bring much of anything new to the table? Metro is utter crap.

I have no doubt it's useful to a small segment of people, but it's far from the selling point you seemed to indicate.

Actually, Win 7 brought lots of features. Well, Vista technically brought them, but win 7 was essentially vista done correctly. Also, Win 7 didn't take away stuff you had in prior versions (like Aero, WMC and so forth).

But none of them sold Windows 7. I doubt people purchased Windows 7 for Aero or for WMC or for UAC or 64 bit. They're all valuable, sure, but hardly must haves. People bought it because they A) couldn't avoid it on new machines and B) because all the people on WinXP were inundated with talking points that the WinXP ride was coming to an end. It's not that simple really, but point being people didn't buy 7 for features, they bought it because it was the new version of Windows. I don't know why anyone expects 8 to have some killer app.

But it does have noticeable polish compared to Win7. Lots of little things work better (search, file transfers, desktop UI, DPI scaling are the big ones for me so far) or just feel nicer. And sure it did, one of my biggest pet peeves about Win7 was how it moved Show Desktop off my Quick Launch and how the "Folders" bar in Explorer is organized. Trivial? Of course, but so are most Win8 complaints; use it for a little while (without being needlessly closed minded) and it's a non issue.

Last night, downloading W8, I was impaled on the dread "we can't install until you provide additional drivers but we won't tell you -which- drivers are needed" issue (reported by many on the web). The only work-around was to open the computer and pull hardware. (I could finally get past the msg after disconnecting my RAID array and two other drives.) Ignoring that tedious hell, this was the slowest installation process I've experienced since those days when we did it off floppy disks... and here I was dumb enough to think the install would FLY with my new Samsung SSD.

Installing any version of Windows with more than one hard drive active is asking for trouble, always been that way. Additionally I seem to recall the screen where you select the drive / partition to install to making some mention of RAID drivers; that's really to be expected. And, again, is not specific to Win8.

I threw a 60 GB Intel SSD into my HTPC to install Win8 on and it went extremely quickly for me, like 20-30m? Did you enable AHCI on your mobo for the SSD? And did you load drivers for the SSD? (I'm pretty sure you don't want to typically, but if you do it could cause problems. I ran into that the very first time I used a SSD and tried to use AMD's AHCI drivers with Win7, it was bad.)

Long story short is my machine got rebooted before it could be transferred. Can the download be found or can I re-download without paying the $199.

Pretty sure if you run the Upgrade Advisor, select "Install Now" it'll prompt you for your key and either offer to download it again or create the media. If it asks you what 'stuff' you want to keep, just select "Nothing", it won't actually install (if you're doing a direct upgrade) until a few screens after that iirc.

 

[Basilisk]

Add info

Right click in the bottom left hand corner for system tools. Quicker than in 7.

Oh buggers... I kept Left Clicking. That really is a win! Much thanks.

And if you still can't find what you are looking for, just start typing in what you are looking for when you are on the Start Window.

Well, yeah, if you've a good search string; if not, you can get a HEAP of irrelevant hits.

It's easier to do almost everything in 8 once you learn a couple things.

As writ before: this boy has some serious learnin' to do to even cope with W8, let alone master it! RtClicking the lower-left corner doesn't verge on obvious. It will be interesting find the other "cookies".


My current teeth-gritting:

• "help" generally seems obscured, so while, say, I can intuit how to Add a town to the weather tile, I can't grasp or find out how to Delete the default "London". (Yeah, I'll Google it later.)
• I've previously mentioned Installation and Support problems that weren't well handled. Now I'm vaguely impaled on this new (and irritating) email-link to the Uber Welt of the Cloud, MS Stores, etc., and LOGIN!! [WTF, LOGIN!?] Various components of MS-world want me to Verify my email address by replying to MS-originated emails, BUT I never received the original emails, nor have I received requested re-sends of that email (about 10 times over 2 days). I CAN login to MS-world with that email, but I can't do much because I haven't [bet you saw this coming!] Verified using the email I can't receive! [...@comcast.net]. They even PREVENT you from changing your email-link -- perhaps because you haven't Verified -- ARGH! (I slightly lied above: I did get ONE verify email toward the end, and clicked the link, but it didn't seem to change anything -- I seem to remain unverified. Sigh.)

_________________________________
Edit: PostScript

There remains no explanation for my receiving only 1 Email-Validation from MS (after ~10 requests for one). However, some 2 hours after my Clicking on the Validation-link in that email I was finally recognized as validated and could now change my account entries and enter their store.
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[Basilisk]

But none of them sold Windows 7. I doubt people purchased Windows 7 for Aero or for WMC or for UAC or 64 bit.

By the numbers, you are probably correct and so it may make economic sense for MS to abandon those of us who bought W7 for WMC.

If you saw WMC ads for W7, you were more attentive than I: I recall WMC computer [Win XP OEM only] ads and Vista [WMC] ads, but none for W7. For my ATSC tuners WMC was -very- troubled under Vista, only maturing with W7 and having additional features under W7. [I had to do 4 clean-reloads of Vista to repair problem-creep in its WMC which noone could resolve.] There was no groundswell of happy customers to encourage WMC interest before W7. Alas, by the time W7 came out the dream of Cable Cards was fading with years-delayed products and increasingly cable companies becoming known for making it diifficult to get CC. [I spent hours talking to 6 ComCast staff, pointing out the miss-information they were handing me and struggling for 5 weeks to get the CC.]

...point being people didn't buy 7 for features, they bought it because it was the new version of Windows.

We can disagree: I think -large- numbers of people bought W7 to get rid of Vista. Sure, not for New features but for ones which were more stable or improved.

...use it for a little while (without being needlessly closed minded) and it's a non issue.

I'm giving it that chance, but the start-up overhead of figuring out how to do -simple- things is arduous. Wish there was a one-page cheat-sheet of tricks... I'll be searching for it.

Installing any version of Windows with more than one hard drive active is asking for trouble, always been that way. Additionally I seem to recall the screen where you select the drive / partition to install to making some mention of RAID drivers; that's really to be expected. And, again, is not specific to Win8.

Only one drive was "Active" in the DiskManagement sense. If you mean "powered up and readable": I've never had installation problems for that reason before, and that covers many years of installations.

I was NOT doing a clean-install because I had too many packages with data I didn't want put at risk with a clean-install. Yeah, an update takes longer than a clean install, but I was appalled at how long, and, again, been there and done that before.

...I ran into that the very first time I used a SSD and tried to use AMD's AHCI drivers with Win7, it was bad.)

This was long-running h/w (save the SSD which had run 2 days). The m/b was configured As Necessary for its RAID, with the non-RAID drives using the same RAID-required settings. (I vaguely recall AHCI was necessary for RAID.)

I'm not damning W8, but seems to me MS has created more problems with this installation that I've ever faced. I've only fled screaming from ME, and I tolerated Vista, so I can hang in there and try to luv W8, but I'm not installing it on my other computers I've developed proficiency that so far eludes me.

 

[13Gigatons]

I think Windows 9 will be much better. Vista kinda sucked and then 7 came along and saved Microsoft.

Windows 8 feels like a Jack of all trades, master of none.

 

[BustaBust]

I'm using Windows 8 Pro that I received for free from the DreamSpark account I had given to me from an old professor. I'm still getting used to it, but I see potential.

Edit - I was using Win 7 Ultimate and would say that Win 8 is more suited for tablets. They have these swipe features, all-in-one access to tiles in Metro that display live feeds and messaging. I'd say this is designed for tablets over phones or all-in-one PCs that have touch screens like Gateway and HP...anyway just my 2 cents.

 

[mikeford]

Today during day two of "see if I can make sound through Toslink" I decided to try some MP3's and noticed Win8 was only showing one of my 2TB drives, the empty one. About an hour later I stumbled across, Disk Management (bottom left corner, right click to see), and it seems Win8 didn't like the drive letters or some such (J and K in Win7 due to all the flashcard etc removeable drives) and arbitrarily decided not to show me the second drive, and changed the first to D. Changing the drive letters back to J and K seems to have worked.

OTOH I think I am done with Win8, just no more time to fool with it right now. Good thing I did all my installs on different drives, out goes the Win8, in goes the SSD with Win7. Thinking about kissing Win7 drive before it goes back in the system.