My windows 8 upgrade experience .

I am in the middle of the windows 8 x64 upgrade now. After a few false starts I was able to get the upgrade to run as an upgrade.
 
I'm not sure that saved me much hassle. I had to remove all the extra hardware from the computer including the RME card before it would run. Then after all the hardware is back and working several of the programs still needed to be reloaded before they would work properly. TruePianos x64, Jamstix2 and 3 had to re-register TP had to be reinstalled.
 
X2 seems to take a lot longer to load projects and sometimes hangs when closing even without a save. Also projects with several midi tracks seem to behave badly on the bounderies of the midi clips the first time after boot. After that all the tracks playback normally.
 
Audio/Midi performance is not noticeably better. When a project loads and the audio engages for the first time there is a small pop sound that was not there previously.
 
So far not impressed performance wise but not bad enough yet to restore the windows 7 x64 image. Hopefully the X2 windows 8 patch thats coming will sort out the issues.
   

I may take the time to do that later. With all the stuff I'm having to reload anyway the upgrade path did not save any time.

Never mind.  It seems possible: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/clean-install-windows-8-upgrade.htm

I could write a book about moving on to Windows 8. But to keep you folks from passing this by I will keep it short.

First I was having nothing but issues with my hardware from Roland namely my audio interface and my MIDI interface. What I was doing was trying to use the win 7 drivers which were not installing.  My Vista drivers did install but I was getting driver issues with them. So what to do? I took a chance and went to the Roland site and checked for new drivers both devices had Windows 8 64 bit drivers ready and waiting to be installed. I was surprised to say the least.

Paint me a very happy camper! Both installed without issue and work perfectly. Than I thought its time to bite the bullet and see if my printer had drivers for Windows 8 and sure enough it did too. So did my Epson scanner. 

In other words look for Windows 8 drivers for all your devices and I'll bet they will be there. 

I fully recommend a clean install of Windows 8 if its at all possible, For me its a way to not keep unused software hanging around and also for the this simple reason you will have acquired over the years drivers and stuff that you may not get rid of because you don't know that their there so to start fresh a clean install will clean out all those cobwebs clogging up your system.

I think you will see better performance by ridding yourself of needless apps and junk that you have that the OS can no longer use or that you no longer use. 

Now Make sure that once Windows is installed cleanly update it. There are patches already for it.

As far as I can tell Sonar X2 is very happy on Windows 8. It seems more solid and responsive than it does on Vista. X1 runs very solid on Vista

Be sure to patch it with the hotfix though. 

One more thing I did modify Windows 8 by adding the Classic Shell start button to it.  

I find it very useful indeed.  

I am beginning to like Windows 8 a lot. I have a long way to go still with installing stuff but I will do so at my leisure.

I hope you all have as good a time with it as I am having. 

I second what Alex and John said about clean installs.

I don't think the dialogs or the borders are as nice as the ones in Windows 7 and for some reason, the File Explorer is a lot slower than Windows 7 (I'm wondering if its not indexing the folders.) Adding the start button made it a lot better for me because it put my applications where they were in Windows 7. Now I hardly even look at the Start screen with the tiles. 

Toolbar?

Do you mean the Taskbar? If so yes the way I set it up was the right is the default and has some customized stuff on and about it. The one on the left screen is set to a default configuration.

The file explorer works fast here but keep in mind that the Windows 8 dick here is darn near empty and its a 1TB disk. 

When I look at other disks I don't see a slow down. 

Update:

I just loaded the beta 64 bit version of jamstix3 and saved the export from the 32 bit version. Removed the 32 bit jamstix and loaded the 64 bit Jamstix35. Imported the saved song file into Jamstix and off and running. 

It seems the studdering vst problem was either JS or bitbridge since JS was the only 32 bit plug in the project. 

I only have NI B4ii that is 32 bit if memory serves. If it causes any grief I guess I will just bounce it to a track after recording the midi and unload it until it is needed again.
 
So hopefully things can settle in and go smoothly now.