<p>Microsoft has a Windows 8 Pro upgrade promotion for $39.99 at their website. It is good until January 31, 2013. Windows 7 Pro is $269 and the OEM version, if you can use it, is about $140. The Windows 7 Pro Upgrade is no longer available at Newegg.</p>
<p>I also have a Home version so being able to upgrade to Pro is nice. It adds, Remote Desktop, free XP Virtual Machine license and some other things. I’m currently running Windows Vista and it’s pretty bad so here’s my chance to get Microsoft’s latest with much better performance. Of course the downside might be the User Interface. Time will tell.</p>
<p>One friend did the upgrade and it went smoothly. Another tried the upgrade and it wouldn’t install. These are technically sophisticated users. The one where it didn’t work will be contacting Microsoft Support.</p>
<p>The Upgrade Assistant said that I have ten issues with my system. A few require driver or software updates and there are a few things that won’t work (these are new Windows 8 features). There’s some work that I had to do before the upgrade and there’s work that I will have to do after the upgrade. I have my trusty 27 inch iMac handy in case something goes wrong.</p>
<p>Microsoft also has a Windows Media Center package that they are providing for free for a short period of time for playing DVDs. Apparently the ability to play DVDs is a paid-for item in Windows 8.</p>
<p>I use “PowerDVD” for playing DVDs on my computer. I just bought a new computer with Windows 8 on it. Once you get playing with it, Windows 8 is easy enough to figure out for the most part. It works similar to Windows 7 from my experience. I made the jump from Vista to 8.</p>
<p>Operating System upgrades often times don’t work perfectly well and are not worth the bother.
I get a new PC about every three years anyway, so I don’t mind waiting a little longer for the latest and greatest.</p>
<p>I’m up and running though I’m typing this from a Mac. The upgrade blew away my installed applications so I have to reinstall everything. The upgrade process overall was pretty smooth. I had to update a few drivers.</p>
<p>Our upgrade cycles are getting longer as hardware is fast enough and getting faster compared to software demands. My laptop is five years old and I’ll keep it as long as it runs. My wife’s desktop is about seven years old. My home desktops are running pretty old processors, several generations back.</p>
<p>I’ve done hundreds (maybe thousands) of OS installations so I’m used to dealing with oddball problems with applications, drivers, etc. I’d guess that this is something that is better for the somewhat technically-inclined person would do. Others might want to have an expert or professional do this for them.</p>
<p>The performance improvement on this upgrade was worth way more than the price I paid this afternoon for it. Vista made a very fast machine feel sluggish.</p>
<p>BC, you deserve a gold medal for your patience. We installed Vista on one of our computers, and after that experience decided to stick with the XP on the others until Win 7 came out.</p>
<p>On the fence about the 8. I guess I will be a guinea pig of sorts for the Surface when it comes out with the new Intel processor.</p>
<p>I run Vista on a few computers - it works fine. I also run Windows 7 on a work computer which works okay as well but really isn’t very different from Vista. I won’t go out of my way just to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 or Windows 8. The OS upgrade can happen when I get around to upgrading the PC (already more than a few years old but still works fine and does what I need it to do).</p>
<p>Agree with GolfFather that upgrades have never been worth the trouble for me. I use quite a few non-MS programs and they just don’t always work. So I wait until I absolutely have to upgrade. In fact, I just about a year ago finally transferred from XP to Windows7, skipping Vista completely. S2 (who had Vista) and I had all kinds of issues. Now all office and personal computers are W7, and a remote desktop and laptop are still on XP. Had to give up a couple of softwares that no longer work with W7.</p>
<p>We’ve been using the beta version of Windows 8 for months. Son installed the pro version a few days ago. We like it but it did take a little getting used to.</p>
<p>I just finished spending most of T-giving weekend setting up a new laptop for my dad that came preloaded with Windows 8. If you are just using a desktop or laptop (not a touchscreen), my advice to you is to NOT update if you can avoid it. The user interface is god-awful. Sort of half aimed at the touchscreen, half at the laptop. It takes a lot more clicks to get to things in Windows 8 than previously. I have 25 years of experience in the IT field, and thought it was a major pain. Since 8 is fairly new, some stuff does not work with it (for example, my dad has email through his AT&T broadband connection, and the standard email interface they provide that is supposed to work with 8 does not work through Internet Explorer). We spent an hour on the phone with AT&T while they worked on it; then they finally fessed up that that is a known problem with Windows 8, and he just has to use a different browser like Chrome for email access. They said that “eventually” they will put a fix on their AT&T servers. No biggie to a lot of us, but baffling to my 84 year old dad to go to a different browser for email.</p>
<p>The user interface is so poor that I think I am finally going to get a Mac when I upgrade my own laptop later this month. Microsoft has finally driven me away.</p>
<p>I have to share this…(and I’m sorry for going off subject)…When I saw the title of this thread, I jumped on it. You see, we are looking for new windows in the den (French doors) and looking to upgrade our interior doors. </p>
<p>I’ve been running Oracle Enterprise Linux on this system for a few
years. My daughter took my home desktop so I brought this old system
home from the office and have been running Vista for a few weeks. I
had to fix a hardware problem with it last week and decided to give
Windows 8 a try this weekend.</p>
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<p>The benefits of Windows 8: performance, secure boot (if you have EFI
boot capability), security in general. The negatives are learning the
new User Interface. I’m learning as I go as things aren’t necessarily
intuitive but I can figure things out with help from the web. In general,
you can do what you did with previous versions of Windows but you have
to make a little effort at initial setup. I think that things will be
smoother once I get things set up the way I like them.</p>
<p>The special offer gives you Windows Pro. Windows Pro gives you Remote
Desktop Protocol Server, Bitlocker (whole disk encryption), Boot from
Virtual Hard Drive, Domain Join, Group Policy. Remote Desktop Protocol
Server allows you to run your desktop from an iPad, iPhone or Android
tablet.</p>
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<p>I’m about 80% through the Windows 8 upgrade on an old desktop and it
has been relatively smooth. There were a few driver updates and I had
to reinstall all of my applications but once I figured out how to
configure the Metro desktop, everything made sense.</p>
<p>The problem with the Windows 8 UI is that they removed the controls
that we are used to. You could get to everything from the Start menu
that was installed. Things that weren’t installed could be accessed
through the command-line or Explorer. The Start menu is gone in
Windows 8 so the main question is: how do you do anything? You can get
to your installed applications including things like the Control Panel
and the Console by right-clicking in the Metro desktop and then
selecting All Apps and then you get a list of all of your apps and
then you can pin them to the Metro Desktop or the taskbar. The thing
is how would someone know to right-click in the Metro Desktop to get a
list of programs that they can run and configure? How would you then
know to select All Apps and pin what you want? Once you do that,
though, the UI is rather nice. The Metro Desktop replaces the Start
menu. You can switch back and forth from Metro to the traditional
Desktop using the Windows and Escape keys.</p>
<p>My feeling is that it’s a pain to understand the new UI paradigm but
once you do and set it up for yourself, that it’s actually pretty
nice. I imagine that a lot of people will have trouble doing this
though. My feeling is that Microsoft should have shipped a 100%
Windows 7 compatibility UI mode. But they didn’t.</p>
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<p>I find that it’s faster launching applications from Metro with the
same number of keystrokes and without having to hover to open up
applications within folders or subfolders.</p>
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<p>I keep a Windows XP Virtual Machine around to run stuff that doesn’t
run well on newer versions of Windows. I don’t know whether or not you
can still buy Windows XP licenses.</p>
<p>By the “Metro Desktop”, do you mean the Desktop icon that shows up on the touch-screenish start menu? Yes, and every flipping little thing you ever want to use has to be installed on it as an icon, unless you want to go through the charms to the start screen, select “all apps”, and dig through the almost randomly organized rows of icons for things like the Windows accessories. I do not see how this is “pretty nice” that we now have to dig out and add everything we want to the desktop. I think in the rush to support touchscreens, Windows forgot that almost everyone still has a laptop or desktop as well and the OS needs to support that smoothly (on a new machine) as well.</p>
<p>Yes, it was called Metro but I think that the name changed. It’s the desktop that looks like a bunch of tiles of varying sizes and colors.</p>
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<p>Yes. But there shouldn’t be a huge number of things to add there.</p>
<p>New program installations automatically get a tile there.</p>
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<p>I actually haven’t used any of the mouse gestures like charms - I don’t even know how you do them.</p>
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<p>Well, that part isn’t fun but once you get it set up, it’s easier to start the application than going through the old start menu. You just have to hit the tile, which is a pretty big target, and you’re running.</p>
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<p>Microsoft wanted to stand out from the crowd (Apple and Google) and they felt that they had to do something radical whereas Apple and Google have separate operating systems for desktop and mobile. I think that what Microsoft did was too radical - they have a lot of legacy customers and applications and companies like that shouldn’t rock the boat. They should build a new boat but keep the old one around for those that like it.</p>
<p>I have limited experience with Apple products, but it seems to me Microsoft was trying to copy the Mac and the Ipad, Iphone, etc. The Start Menu reminds me of any of those products with all their “apps.”</p>
<p>Apple has some known problems with their current laptops in the form of video drivers. These are mostly seen in Boot Camp and the results are process and system crashes. I believe that they are seen in Mac OS X too. We’ve stayed on Snow Leopard because of reports that Lion and Mountain Lion exacerbate what appear to be graphics driver issues.</p>
<p>These are seen more with gaming applications. I’ve never run into these problems on my MacBook Pro.</p>
<p>Some of those tiles did not work on this laptop. For example, there is a Skype tile. We ended up having to download Skype anyway. Clicking on the tile took you into a screen with a discussion of the app, but did not actually open Skype. That is another gripe I have – every time I clicked on a tile, I got into a menu-less screen with a few words on it about the app, and no obvious way to get out (no x in the corner, no menus, escape did not work, etc). It is not a “window” per say, but some other new construct they have added with this release. The only way I found to get out was to go to what they call the charms (cursor in corner of screen, and with some annoying wriggling, finally finding the way to get the icon-type choices on the right side to show up).</p>
<p>I told my dad to just go straight to the desktop we had set up every time, and not even look at the tiled start screen.</p>
<p>The hideous thing about all of this is that four years ago I went from a PC laptop to a MBPro. I’ve hated the darn thing since the day I got it but vowed to keep it until it died of natural causes (I know, I’m the only one on the planet that hates mac). By the time it’s dead and I get to buy a PC laptop the darn thing is going to look/operate just like a freaking mac!! :mad:</p>