Friday 12 April 2013

I officially love the new Windows 8 installer

OK..  I've just tried to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.

Now I know that the machine I am trying to install it on is not totally compatible...  To the point where the Sony have told me the drivers are available, but they do not support Windows 8 on the machine.

Fine, I'm a techie, a tinkerer and I want Windows 8 (even without the touch screen!).  So I thought I'd give it a go today.

Back up the SSD (I'm not that insane!) to my server and hit the go button.

OK, there are three drivers that have to be unistalled before starting the process.   Fine.  They, the install process gets rid of them for you.

Hit the go button and inside 10 minutes it's done and Windows 8 is loading.

Unfortunately 40 minutes later it's still loading :)  I have a good idea what the problem was, so I have to have a go again on Sunday.

But that's not why I love it.

No.  I turned off the machine and thought, "right, let's see if the backup worked!" Restarted the machine and:

It looks like to windows installation was not successful, as your machine was OK before the installation this has been restored.

Brilliant!  A non destructive OS installer!

So typing this on my main computer, 5 minutes after a failed OS upgrade.

I never thought I would  be so happy after a failed upgrade :)

(And no, I don't count the Apple service pack installer as the same thing at all - I would not expect a windows service pack to kill a machine any more than an new "version" of OSX would kill my MacBook Pro ;p )

4 comments:

  1. Yay for backups. :-)

    I think it's a shame that Windows 8 hasn't taken off more than it has. It is faster, sleeker and more responsive than Windows 7. Perhaps if M$ hadn't insisted on removing the Start button and putting _that_ panel screen as must haves, more folk would be running it.

    Still, there's always Start8 ;-)

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    1. I was unsure until I used it. After that point I wanted it! I have it as a virtual machine on my laptop, but would love to have it running natively...

      Oh well, I'm going to have another go at the weekend... (And now I know that it will auto restore if it dies I am not even worried about it!)

      Stace

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  2. Where I work they are rolling out Windows 7 as people's machines get upgraded so that's what I'm using and although it has some bits I'm not keen on I do like the way it shrinks multiple copies of the same application down into a single icon on the taskbar.

    Have also been tinkering with setting up a network domain from scratch and that was easier than I thought, nothing complicated just the basics. Even demoting every back to a workgroup was fairly painless.

    Doubt I'll get to tinker with Windows 8 though for a good few years.

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    1. I think that the only Windows version that I have not played with was ME. By that time I was using Windows 2000 and needed the extra that the Pro version offered.

      I liked Windows Vista - but then I had a machine capable of running it, something most people didn't!

      Windows 7 improved upon the best bits of Vista and removed the performance drain from the core of the OS so that it ran on lesser hardware as well. I remember upgrading a net-book from Windows XP to Windows 7. You had to go through Vista as the upgrade path, and wow - at that point the machine was unusable! Going to 7 on that machine just showed what the difference is.

      8... What I have seen on the VMWare machine I like, even with only 4 cores and 6GB memory it performs amazingly. I am going to keep running it that way on this machine I think, but the fact it runs so well that way is the reason why I wanted to upgrade.

      Oh well!

      Stace

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