Windows 8 hands on.

Anyone who has read my other threads knows I'm not a big fan of the pre-release Windows 8. But a couple of events have moved me to a deployment. My wife had an issue on her email, where an apparent spambot was present (turned out not to be the case) AND she was intrigued by Windows 8. So I agreed to update her Vista 32 to Windows 8.

Her machine;

Asus P5 (120) Motherboard
Intel E8400 Core2
4 GB DDR2
SATA 2 1TB 7200RPM (WD)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 1.2GB DDR5

A little bit older, but a competent machine with a good graphics card.

The upgrade:

Windows 8 Pro, Retail 32bit

What should have happened is a straight upgrade, with all applications intact. But that isn't what went down. Instead, it did a migration. The old install was moved to Windows.Old - trashing all the program installs. Mostly this was Office 2010. Oddly enough, both the documents and picture folders were migrated. I'll put Office 2013 on tonight and pray that I can migrate the .OST from Outlook without issue.

Basic result, despite no Office, Windows 8 did surprisingly well at hardware. It loaded Detonator drivers for the GTX, found the Lexmark Genesis USB printer. Did not find the Brother printer on the LAN. Found the Steel Series mouse, but installed generic drivers. Installed SATA 2 and USB 2 drivers. Retained drive mappings to other machines on the network.

Performance.

It's a clean install, though it shouldn't have been. Performance is good. Very rapid boot for a mechanical drive. Still a LOT of drive activity after the initial boot, but the machine seems responsive enough - which Vista was not. I still hate Metro and find application launch to be a pain in the ***, but the applications I've tried run alright. Steam needed to be repaired, but did so without issue. Acrobat runs without issue. I lost Chrome in the update, and will have to reload it. IE 10 is responsive and clean. I easily dumped Bing and switched to Google. Some of the live tiles are actually kind of cool. After browsing photos, one tile became a slide show. After visiting Sharky Extreme, another tile started showing headlines from the site.

I'll post more as I live with supporting it more.

UPDATE:

So I put Office 2013 on the wife's machine. I did not need to migrate the .OST, as once installed, all mail and contacts appeared in Outlook.

WHAT this means, is that a Windows 8 migration is either not compatible with Microsoft's flagship Office 2010, or the upgrade process is so poorly designed that it can't even migrate an Office install.

My suspicion is that Microsoft is trying to sell office upgrades. I don't know, though. I suspect I could have reinstalled 2010 without issue, but as an MSDN member, I get the software for testing at no additional charge. So may as well give 2013 a run.

I tested performance on the most basic level using Torchlight II and Fraps. Under Vista 32, the machine held a steady FPS of 84 @ 1920 x 1200 with FSAA at 2X and default anisotropic filtering. After the upgrade, the settings remained the same, which was nice, and I got - wait for it - 84 FPS. This shows that the video card and NVidia drivers have a lot more impact than the operating system does - at least on Torchlight II. I'll run Vantage a little later, maybe on the weekend, for a more comprehensive test.

I will say that I never realized how much of a resource hog Vista was until I went to repair a friends machine that had 1GB of RAM and found it nearly unusable (technically it was his dad's, so we will let it slide about running vista on a 1GB system). I have an old Pentium M 1.6GHz with 1GB of RAM that ran Windows 7 very competently. (I won't call it fast, but it worked wonderfully as an on the road system for being on call at work.)

Win8 definitely boots quickly, and I would almost consider it slightly lighter on resource usage than Win7.

Keep the updates coming, it's interesting to see other people's take on the new OS.

Upgrades are often not smooth, especially skipping a version in between. This goes for any OS.

I just did an upgrade on my Win 7 main PC and it went very smoothly. Brought over all my programs and they work fine. I deactivated some before hand and reactivated them without issue.