Windows 8 upgrade £25 till Jan 31st

If I recall correctly, it can take you from XP/Vista/7 Home to W8 Pro, so useful if you see yourself needing over 16GB RAM or any of the other Pro features such as BitLocker.
 
Is there a way of saving this to a disc?

The reason I ask is that I'm currently running windows 7 and wondered what would happen should i need to reformat/reinstall windows 8
 
Don't use hibernate so have no idea.

I Windows Server 2012-ified my HTPC at the weekend and got domain, network backups and all that jazz set up at the weekend. All works nice after I managed to track down a USB3 driver that worked!

On the download front, I gather you can download and run the web setup program as much as you like, once you have purchased a key.
 
mid_gen said:
Don't use hibernate so have no idea.

I Windows Server 2012-ified my HTPC at the weekend and got domain, network backups and all that jazz set up at the weekend. All works nice after I managed to track down a USB3 driver that worked!

On the download front, I gather you can download and run the web setup program as much as you like, once you have purchased a key.
Click to expand...

Thanks

With it being an upgrade, will I always need my win7 disc to perform a fresh install ?
 
Some googling seems to indicate you can download an ISO from Microsoft.....can't check details though.
 
mrgas said:
Thanks

With it being an upgrade, will I always need my win7 disc to perform a fresh install ?
Click to expand...

That's normally been the case in the past. I don't think I've ever been asked to enter the code for the previous version though so it's not a very "thorough" check that you are the registered owner of a previous version.
 
mrgas said:
Thanks for that

Can't see it for £9 though, would you be good enough to post the link please ?
Click to expand...

When you go to pay it gives you the option to add a disk. I did this when I bought office 2010 and it took a couple of weeks to come through but you can download and install too. This time I just bought the download :)
 
Ferj said:
When you go to pay it gives you the option to add a disk. I did this when I bought office 2010 and it took a couple of weeks to come through but you can download and install too. This time I just bought the download :)
Click to expand...

Thanks mate :)
 
No worries. Leave enough time to install it though, I started at 7am today and its just finishing off 2 hours later. Very simple to do though!
 
Whole office on server 2012 and Windows 8 here.

If you use only desktop (old style apps), the only thing that has changed is the start menu is now full screen.

New apps = cool

More apps coming each month

Windows Blue - coming July 2013.
 
neil_g said:
I'd rather spend £25 on someone punch me in the face :D

Serious question - have they sorted the hibernate issue with bit locker?
Click to expand...

No idea!

Not a fan of W8 (split personality O/S), but we needed to buy a very cheap spare laptop a few weeks back and the cheapest route was to buy a W7 Home one and use the upgrade to W8 (£14.99, which Acer refunded) so that it could be connected to our domain.

But W8? Truly horrible.

Despite this, I may still upgrade a few old XP machines to keep them supported and drain a bit more life from them.
 
got it when they put this offer on a couple of months back, lasted with it till a couple of weeks back and then went back to W7. Im sure it will be great for tablets and phones but on a laptop i just found it got in the way of trying to do things.
 
I was going to jump on it when it came out as I missed the Win7 upgrade offer when that came out. I'm going to pass on this - even if it costs me 2x as much in 2 or 3 years....
 
mrgas said:
Is there a way of saving this to a disc?

The reason I ask is that I'm currently running windows 7 and wondered what would happen should i need to reformat/reinstall windows 8
Click to expand...


Even the upgrade version can be burned to a disk. I upgraded from 7 to 8 with this offer, and once burned to disk, even did a clean install... no need to install 7 first.




neil_g said:
I'd rather spend £25 on someone punch me in the face :D

Serious question - have they sorted the hibernate issue with bit locker?
Click to expand...

Win 8 is good. I'm enjoying it. I did however, install Start8 to get my start menu back, and so it boots to desktop and not the stupid Modern IU interface... which I agree... is hopeless on a desktop PC. Just install Start 8 and it's great.

No idea about hibernate. Never used it, and it's not a good idea to use i if you have a SSD anyway, as you're performing a great deal of unnecessary write cycles.



mrgas said:
Thanks

With it being an upgrade, will I always need my win7 disc to perform a fresh install ?
Click to expand...

As above, no. You can burn the downloaded files to a disc and it can boot from it. You can order a disc if you want though, and as it will be a pressed aluminium disk rather than a dye based writable DVD it's worth it.




wegotitugetit said:
tried it and hated it wont be upgrading for a long while
Click to expand...

Try it again with Start8 installed.




Dale_tem said:
Whole office on server 2012 and Windows 8 here.

If you use only desktop (old style apps), the only thing that has changed is the start menu is now full screen.
Click to expand...


Again... Start8 :)
 
Why would I want to upgrade ... what would it offer me on my laptop that Win7 doesn't already give me?
 
Pookeyhead said:
Win 8 is good. I'm enjoying it. I did however, install Start8 to get my start menu back, and so it boots to desktop and not the stupid Modern IU interface... which I agree... is hopeless on a desktop PC. Just install Start 8 and it's great.

No idea about hibernate. Never used it, and it's not a good idea to use i if you have a SSD anyway, as you're performing a great deal of unnecessary write cycles.
Click to expand...

I want to try to use it, I want to see if there are any of the supposed performance benefits. But every time after about 10 mins I have to shut my VM down before I throw my laptop of the window :(

Yup I'm aware of ssd and hibernate. A lot of people won't be using ssd though, I'm interested to hear if the quite major security flaw has been addressed :)
 
gramps said:
Why would I want to upgrade ... what would it offer me on my laptop that Win7 doesn't already give me?
Click to expand...

Supposedly it's faster OS. Faster to boot and faster to load apps.

At least in benchmark land. A lot of people have said in the real world it's really not that much difference.
 
Huge speed difference on my laptop, partly due to the start up config in the new task manager.


It ain't going anywhere and you will end up using it. Come over to the dark side ;)

New UI has lots going for it, it is just waiting for the apps. I will hopefully be picking up either a windows 8 tablet in the next month or a touchscreen ultra book.
 
gramps said:
Why would I want to upgrade ... what would it offer me on my laptop that Win7 doesn't already give me?
Click to expand...


No great reason. Windows 7 is still perfectly fine, and will be for some time. I suppose you should because until Jan 31st, you can do for only £25, and seeing as the "Upgrade" version seems to allow you to do a clean install, you're effectively getting Win 8 Pro retail for £25.

I didn't NEED to upgrade, but for 25 quid I thought I would do it now, rather than pay a shed load more for a retail version in a year or so.
 
Win8 starts up and shuts down as fast as Win7 sleeps and wakes up. Night and day difference.

Hibernate is not worth using these days. Power management and sleep modes all work great now. Especially with so much physical memory in machines these days, you've got a hell of a lot of data to write to disk.
 
Will this upgrade run on a windows7 32bits platform ?
Thank you
 
Could I go from win 7 32 bit to win 8 64 bit with this??
 
paddyfrog said:
Will this upgrade run on a windows7 32bits platform ?
Thank you
Click to expand...

You can do a clean install from scratch, and if you order the DVD for an extra £9 you get both 32 and 64bit DVDs.
 
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