Windows 8 Pro

[hrosvit]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Talk about the bleedingly obvious. The larger the company, the longer it takes to move to the next operating system. There are plenty of large multi-national companies that are still running on XP.
Most tech reviewers in the media seem to consist of media-studies graduates who believe that the ability to switch on an iPad is sufficient qualification to write about IT issues.

MS simply had to move forward to accommodate touch surfaces. However, unlike Apple they don't force you to upgrade or perish. They are still providing security updates for XP, after all, while you will be hard pressed to find someone who will even recall the name of the OS that was used by Apple at the time of XP's release.

+1. My agency just updated our desktops this past summer (about 5,000 machines), switching from XP/Office '03 to 7/Office '10. It was only necessitated because the hardware was hopelessly out of date, not because the OS and Office suite actually needed updating. Had that not been the case, we would have chugged along with XP for the foreseeable future.

And, just to show you where our priorities are, the new machines are all 32-bit. What old-stock warehouse did they dig those things out of? The finest machines the lowest bidder could provide...

[DarkScribe]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Businesses and institutions have never upgraded to a new version immediately. And they never will. That is because technical personnel don't want all that trouble. So this really doesn't mean anything.

It means a lot. It is being prominently displayed in the regular (not technical) sections of several newspapers and magazines. It will slow down purchases from private customers. It is a scare tactic. Microsoft has not got media support here.

Here (Australia) Microsoft is not intending to sell full packages, only upgrades, so no clean installs. That alone will create massive headaches for those who lack IT experience.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DarkScribe

Here (Australia) Microsoft is not intending to sell full packages, only upgrades, so no clean installs. That alone will create massive headaches for those who lack IT experience.

Upgrade licenses still allow for clean installs.
First thing the upgrade installer asks is whether to do an in-situ or side-by-side dual-boot upgrade.

And yes, "upgrading" by doing a separate side-by-side clean install is always best. You can then boot to either version or downgrade back if all the needed apps and drivers aren't available.

[WillysJeepMan]

Installed my $15 Win8 Pro upgrade. The developer preview had support for 16-bit apps, the gold code does not.

Win8 suffers from the same split personality disorder as OSX Mountain Lion.

[Kumabjorn]

I had my first epic fail today. Watching a video and when it was finished the mouse was no longer recognized, first I thought it might be a BT problem, but the trackpad wasn't recognized either. The corners weren't activated and clicking on something yielded zilch. For some reason the "Power button" was recognized so I could turn it off and then on again. But when I couldn't even click anything inside Task Manager I was worried.

PS.
I believe I may have found the culprit. Google Music Manager. After using that application applications on the desktop won't recognize the mouse.