Mark Oates(Reviewer) posted this on Saturday, 19th October 2013, 01:00
The Windows 8.1 update via the Windows Store has gone live and I've updated both my laptop and my tablet. Fifty minutes from start to finish on a 120Mb/s broadband connection. Initial impressions are good.
RJS(undefined) posted this on Sunday, 20th October 2013, 09:53
So here's my upgrade tale...
About 50 mins or so to download from the Windows Store, that was easy enough, then it started installing, again easy enough, after maybe 10 mins or so of that it started moaning that I needed to uninstall the Sentinel driver before it would continue.
No idea what that was, but it turned out to be some copy protection license manager thing which got installed with Lightworks. So uninstalled Lightworks, still wouldn't carry on, still said it was installed. Grrr!
Extract it from the zip file, and run haspdinst.exe -purge to remove it. Then I could click the icon in the system tray and let the upgrade carry on. Still I quite like the fact it would just pause like that and not demand I started again.
After that it took maybe 15 minutes more installing, did a restart, then did a load of Getting Ready stuff, then Updating App Settings or something with a % counter that took forever to get to 100% and like all progress bars on computers these days would just jump quickly to one part and then spend ages on another.
Then after that it said just doing some more things, then it said just doing even more things, then more getting ready, then more annoying things it said it was doing with a progress %, then even more nearly there honest text that turned out to just be a precursor to yet another nearly there piece of text.
Then finally, I'm in Windows 8.1, minus my AV, so have to download and reinstall Avast. And I can now set my background to the start menu to be the same as my desktop, it loads the desktop at the same time, but other than that I can't see what has really changed.
Windows 8.1 feels very much like Windows 8 SP1, and begs the question what on earth have the dev team being doing this last year?
RJS(undefined) posted this on Sunday, 20th October 2013, 09:54
Oh on the bright side, one Windows Update that I had to uncheck every single time I did updates otherwise they'd all fail, at least I don't have to deal with that anymore!
RJS(undefined) posted this on Thursday, 23rd January 2014, 14:04
Quote: Windows 8 will run virtually any software that you’re already running on your older Windows systems. Except various old games, the list of which put me off upgrading my games machine from Win 7. (Before actually having Win 8 on my laptop put me off upgrading anything else. :/)
Quote: Windows 8 is less demanding than its predecessor. Because they turned off the beautiful Win 7 Aero interface UI. The flat ugly window frames look... flat and ugly. :/
Quote: Windows 8 does not suffer the same fate as Windows Vista when it comes to peripherals. Only in as far as any hardware built for Vista onwards will work with it. Anything before that like old printers and scanners, STILL don't work on Win 8.
Quote: Windows 8 is more secure. Period This one is hard to argue with. But quite whether it is so significantly more secure than Win 7 that it's worth upgrading for, I'm less convinced.
Quote: However, if that is the case and you just want to use Windows 8 as if it’s Windows 7, that is exceptionally easy to achieve. Except large parts of configuring Win 8 is confusing, the way to shutdown is confusing and doesn't even make a lot of sense for a touch screen device. Some parts of Win 8 are just completely pointless, like one of the corner menus! Closing Metro apps is horrible with a mouse.
It's like the Metro side of Windows 8 was made by a new team, and the rest by an old team, and the result is from years of infighting and battles about who owns what and gets to do what.
I don't even think Win 8.1 looks like a finished product, it certainly can't make it's mind up what it wants to be. If Microsoft had made Win 8 as a separate OS release like Win XP Media Centre Edition, I'm pretty sure it would be dead by now.
Quote: Microsoft TechNet blog makes clear that Windows 8.1 will not be patched; users must get Windows 8.1 Update if they want security patcheshowever:
Quote: For those users who are still using Windows 8 and Windows 2012 (and not Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 R2) you are unaffected and will continue to receive updates as normal. The new baseline only exists for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
This item was edited on Tuesday, 15th April 2014, 12:26
RE: Anyone For Windows 8.1?
admars(Elite) posted this on Tuesday, 22nd April 2014, 11:23
admars(Elite) posted this on Saturday, 25th October 2014, 18:26
I broke my win 7 machine the other day, so installed 8, then 8.1 on it ( I bought 8 when you could pre-order it for £25, but had never got round to installing it)
unfortunately couldn't use that link to dl 8.1, so had to install 8, thenm "upgrade" to 8.1.
most quick and painless, apart from virtual box, the bridged adapter wouldn't work after the 8.1 upgrage, and a quick google, this was a known issue, with an easy fix :)
not used it enough yet to see how it goes, it's the PC under the TV, used to use Win 7 with VLC, using a bluetooth adapter with ps3 remote, so hopefuly that will set up ok.
