Windows 8

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Melvin_sl said:

success/horror stories

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My first install attempt happened when I put the newly burned dvd into the drive and hadn't disabled auto-play yet. The installer was so friendly that even an Apple user would feel comfortable with it. One thing that I would have appreciated was a way to chose which HD the install is going to end up on. Or, at the very least, a screen that said "Hey dummy, you're about to install right on top of the only HD whose existence I'm currently aware of, and you're probably an idiot for telling me to do that," would have been a step in the right direction. I'm chalking this one up as a total failure.

Attempt #2 is looking much better so far. It took some fiddling with the bios, but I was able to boot from the dvd and that led to a much more normal installer. You know, an installer that lets you chose which of your hard drives gets used as a target.

Just make sure to chose "Custom Install" instead of Express or Upgrade or whatever the other option is. It allows you to chose which drive it installs to and you can format/partition that drive and any other you have. Also, who the fuck uses disks to install Windows these days? If you have IPTorrents, search for this same one but here is the PirateBay link for the download:Windows 8.1 AIO 20in1 x64 en-US Pre-Activated DaRT 8.1 Dec2013 (download torrent) - TPB. You will still need your own key and make sure you install whatever version you bought (Standard/Pro/Enterprise/whatever) but this download has all the applicable updates through December 2013 so you get to skip most of the updating as well.

From there, usethis program (Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool direct from Microsoft)to get a USB stick setup to install Windows. Don't let the name fool you, it works fine for Windows 8/8.1 as well.

Edit: To answer your question I've had zero issues with updated torrents that I've used off of IPTorrents.

dont think that chan likes you stealing their megahurtz

jeydax_sl said:

Just make sure to chose "Custom Install" instead of Express or Upgrade or whatever the other option is. It allows you to chose which drive it installs to and you can format/partition that drive and any other you have. Also, who the fuck uses disks to install Windows these days?

. . .

Edit: To answer your question I've had zero issues with updated torrents that I've used off of IPTorrents.

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It was really surprising how different the autorun version of the installer was. It was like a Playskool My First Windows Installer. I don't even think I was given a express/custom option, or if I was, I must've accidentally double-clicked right past it without even seeing it. I don't recommend that version at all. The main reason I burned it to disc is because of lazyness. I had a stack of blank dvds within arm's reach and I didn't feel like fucking around with finding and cleaning off a flash drive.

I used avanilla 8.1 OEMiso (perfect match for my product key), and everything seems to be on the up and up so far.

Just did a clean install of Win8.1 on a new SSD. Fuck that was easy as hell. I never had a clean install be that easy. That NInite site is gold.

You ain't kidding Draegan. I just upgraded my fiance's HTPC with an SSD last night and decided to do a fresh install and move her from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 - took me all of about 10-15 minutes to do the install through USB 3.0, get her drivers installed, do my weaks, install her programs through ninite and have it ready to roll.

Anyone have any thoughts on gaming on Windows 8, is it possible that some games just don't work well with it? I upgraded from Win 7 Ultimate to Windows 8.1 pro last night, and while most of the benchmarks I ran(Unigen Valley/Heaven, Bioshock Infinite) performed the same, if not slightly better in Windows 8.1, the new Tomb Raider took a MASSIVE performance hit. On ultimate settings under Win 7 I was getting about 85 FPS, and under win 8.1 I've dropped to 66. This is with SLI'd 660Ti GPUs. I even tried 3 different versions of drivers including the latest beta drivers, all with pretty much the same results.

In fact, when I first installed win 8.1 and tried to run benchmarks, I was getting BSODs like CRAZY, nothing would run for more than 2-3 minutes without getting the dreaded BSOD. After doing some research as to my error message, it looks like it was my overclocked CPU. So I dialed my 3570K back from 4.6ghz to 4ghz and never had another BSOD at all. Why in the world would Windows 8 have anything to do with being less stable under an overclocked processor than Win7? That's so weird.

So first impressions of Win 8...not good, and it has nothing to do with the interface, which is totally fine in my opinion, but it seems like it's causing me some serious hardware issues.

edit - Nevermind about Tomb Raider, it is just purely an issue with that game. It wouldn't even run when I first installed it, had to make some registry changes to even get it running, and apparently it's running in a full-screen borderless window, not truly fullscreen, so theres the performance hit. Game won't even load fullscreen under Win8, just crashes instantly, blah.

Did you do an upgrade installation or a fresh installation? If you did an upgrade, just do a fresh installation. I would never, ever recommend anyone do an upgrade.

I'm just happy with 7 and I see no need whatsoever to move to 8.1

I also find it shady as fuck that Microsoft is force feeding 8 down consumers' throats by stopping Retail sales of Win7 (Oct 30th, 2013) despite Windows 7 out-selling Win 8 / 8.1 month for month. If Win 8.1 was hugely successful, I could understand them dropping the Win7 sales. It simply comes off as "you dont like 8? Tough shit, we are cuttting off the popular version of our product!!"
Windows lifecycle fact sheet - Microsoft Windows Help




*Note: Copies of 7 are available at retailers by their own stock. Once that runs out, that's it for Win 7.

jeydax_sl said:

Did you do an upgrade installation or a fresh installation? If you did an upgrade, just do a fresh installation. I would never, ever recommend anyone do an upgrade.

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Fresh install. I don't think I've done an OS upgrade over another OS since Windows 3.1(and that was a mistake, I learned my lesson)

They probably just don't want to have to split their resources between so many different versions when they're releasing them faster than they used to. And they have been very cool with updating security issues in ancient versions.

The bigger issue with 7-> 8 was ostracizing users comfortable with the layout we've had since 95 wasn't it? Hopefully they avoid that going forward.

Yeah I benchmarked everything across the 1200p monitor to keep comparisons even(the drop from 85 to 66). Maybe it is possible I didn't have the hair tressFX on the first time around, but I'm pretty sure I did. I'm going to just chalk it up to my weird issue of having to run it in a fullscreen window. TR won't even launch fullscreen, and it was always fine before on Win 7. Honestly though, other than that everything is fine(well, other than having to down-clock my processor, I still cant get Win 8.1 to accept as high of an overclock, 4.6ghz as Windows 7 did. I've been running at 4.6 for over a year now on Win7, it makes no sense that Win 8 BSODs all over the place at that speed.)

Is your motherboard's BIOS fully up-to-date? You seem like the type of guy who'd make sure it is but thought I'd ask anyways. That seems really strange that it won't OC as well.

Yeah, I have the most recent bios update, from April '13 I think it is, but there hasn't been a bios update released by ASRock since Windows 8.1 upgrade came out, I wonder if that could maybe be an issue that might be fixed down the road. I didn't do any benchmarks under just plain Win 8, I upgraded to 8.1 immediately before installing any software on my fresh install

I had the same issue with my overclocked i5 when I moved to 8.1. At least for me, the solution wasn't dialing back the overclock (though that would have probably worked) but instead upping the voltage to my memory.

Thanks, I'll give that a try

joeboo_sl said:

Thanks, I'll give that a try

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Just be really careful and up the voltage by .1 each try-- too much and you can damage your memory. I upped it in .1v intervals and then ran memtest each time until it passed.

That's reason enough for me not to swap to 8.1. I have been running Win7 on a 4.5GHz overclock / 2000MHz ram for a year and a half now without any hiccups. I would be infuriated if I suddenly needed to tweak my OC just because I swapped OS. Software shouldnt have any effect whatsoever on a hardware OC. (Provided you can do the usual rounds of CPU / RAM stress testing error free)