Upgrade to Windows 8
Welcome to the Windows Upgrade Offer.
http://www.windowsupgradeoffer.com/
When you buy Windows 8 online you will get a level by level download and installation document and complete with the Windows 8 Upgrade assistant to warn you about program and hardware compatibility and its issues, or you can buy a DVD.
The RTM and evaluation downloads are ISO files that you have to burn to an optical disk or build a bootable USB flash drive for, but that's not something consumers will have to deal with now.
As with the Windows 8 Consumer and Release Previews, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.
Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs which installed alread, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.
Unlike Windows 7, you cannot do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you have to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.
This option appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro only; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install.
A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep applications, settings & files does show up when you run the installer from Preview Release, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over. And you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.
If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise version, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user). With the Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade, it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation
Scanning the fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact. If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any apps, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.
On a variety of Desktops it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the license key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.
One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10 version. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.
It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organizations remain unhappy.
After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronizes settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.
While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.
If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitizer just shows the mouse tutorial.
If you have picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC. Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working. Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).
If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.
In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.
A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).
On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars.
Fore more details: Click here
Welcome to the Windows Upgrade Offer.
http://www.windowsupgradeoffer.com/
When you buy Windows 8 online you will get a level by level download and installation document and complete with the Windows 8 Upgrade assistant to warn you about program and hardware compatibility and its issues, or you can buy a DVD.
The RTM and evaluation downloads are ISO files that you have to burn to an optical disk or build a bootable USB flash drive for, but that's not something consumers will have to deal with now.
As with the Windows 8 Consumer and Release Previews, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.
Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs which installed alread, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.
Unlike Windows 7, you cannot do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you have to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.
This option appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro only; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install.
A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep applications, settings & files does show up when you run the installer from Preview Release, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over. And you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.
If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise version, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user). With the Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade, it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation
Scanning the fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact. If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any apps, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.
On a variety of Desktops it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the license key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.
One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10 version. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.
It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organizations remain unhappy.
After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronizes settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.
While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.
If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitizer just shows the mouse tutorial.
If you have picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC. Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working. Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).
If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.
In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.
A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).
On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars.
Fore more details: Click here
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