I am now fully upgraded to Windows 8 on both of my laptops. My Acer was actually upgraded a couple of weeks ago. That experience was pretty trivial, since that laptop is set up for the OS to be “disposable” (i.e. I do not keep anything important on it), so I was able to download the Windows 8 Release Preview, in ISO format, burn it out to a USB drive, and do a fresh install. While the touch screen on the Acer does not meet the Windows 8 specs, everything installed, and all seems to be working properly. This machine was also simpler because I have no need to attach it to the domain at work.
This week’s adventure was upgrading my work laptop (my HP2740P). This laptop is pretty messy, from a software perspective. Given my role, I have a lot of different development tools installed. I also have many third-party libraries, including demoware, open source, beta, pre-beta, etc. I have also never flattened this machine and installed Windows 7 clean to get rid of all the bloatware (just never got around to it). So the opportunities for various things not to upgrade well were many.
Given all that, I made the most logical choice – upgrade and retain all of my files, software, and settings! I started this at about 6 PM Tuesday night. I did not use the ISO download for this, just the basic installer. All of this worked pretty well (or seemed to), but was painfully, painfully slow. The upgrade finished just before midnight. I did not have much time to play with it at that point, but a cursory look seemed fine.
The next morning, things did not look quit so fine. Start up was really slow. There also seemed to be some issues with various things that normally run on start up (like all of the HP tools), but that was not all that surprising. Of greater concern was the fact that some of the metro stuff did not seem to be working quite right – specifically Internet Explorer. I could not seem to find the Metro version anywhere. I did some web searches but found no answer to this. I then started screwing around – uninstalling all sorts of things I did not really want anymore (such as the bloatware, old dev tools, etc.). This only got me into trouble! Many things would not uninstall cleanly. I did not really spend too much time looking for solutions to this, as my real intention all along was to flatten the machine and install cleanly.
So, Wednesday morning was spent making sure that all of my important files were moved of the machine, and getting read for the install. I still did not do a completely clean install, because I did not format the hard drive and install from an ISO. Instead, I still used the installer, and selected the option not to keep anything. This turned out to be a minor mistake, which cost me some time later.
The install again went cleanly, and was faster, but still took 2 or 3 hours. When it was done, everything was as it should be, except that I was, of course, no longer on the work domain. I also had the “windows.old” folder on my hard drive, containing about 35 gb of stuff the installer had kept either from this install or the original upgrade I tried. Deleting this took me quite a bit of time because of some interesting ownership and permissions on the files in this folded, but I eventually got it figured out.
The computer starts up significantly faster now, and runs well (in a couple of days of usage, I don’t think I have gone above 2.5 gb of memory usage, even with a lot of things running).
The next step was adding my laptop back onto the domain. This works exactly the same as in previous versions of windows, and worked smoothly. I then added my domain user identity, and linked my Microsoft ID (formerly Live ID), and everything was hunky dory (I can post details of any of these steps, if anyone is interested – feel free to ask in the comments).
Next, I had to put some virus protection in place. Our corporate antivirus is Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection, which installed without incident and is running fine.
Finally, I installed Lync 2010 and Office 2010, all without issue.
All in all, the only real issues I ran into had to do with choosing to upgrade instead of installing cleanly. Starting again, I would definitely lean towards re-formatting the hard drive and installing from an ISO. This is not to say that upgrade is not an option, but my machine was so messy that this was just asking for trouble!
Next time, I will write about my first impressions and experience running Windows 8 on the desktop for my daily work (hint, it is not as bad as you might think!)
The Windows 8 Experience 