My Windows 8 Upgrade Experience

I've been absent for about week due to the "Upgrade" to Windows 8...

Needless to say, it was NOT painless...

I ran the Upgrade Assistant...did what it said...and then did the upgrade...

about 90 % of the way through the upgrade it crashed and burned...
I had to do a "Refresh" which cost me all of my programs...so I had
to go back and reinstall EVERYTHING....which is very time consuming...
I had to get my Fxpansion Authorizatiions reset...as I ran out...
I had to "recover" my Waves licenses, which I forgot to send to the cloud...thank God for "recovery"

NOW...with all that said and done....

Windows 8 for the past 4 days has been ROCK SOLID...it's a new way of working...
but it seems to be a lot more stable...

I had to go back and reinstall ALL of my plugins...even the 32 bit ones..
so here's a tip...when you run a 32 bit installer...it will say "Windows prevented this program for installing" or something like 
that, BUT there is a "More Info" link under the text...select that and an option to "Install Anyways" will appear...and they
WILL install....and WORK.

Only issue I've had...I can't run IK Multimedia Stand alones....they don't recognize my Windows 8 Quad Capture driver.
If I use them in X2 they work fine...

Haven't had any crashes (yet) so seems to be very stable.

The MAJOR thing I've noticed.....In X2 the Core usage is EVEN....which is a MAJOR benefit....making X2
a whole lot more stable....

Looking forward to the X2 Win 8 Patch...if it improves on what's already a solid performance (for me)
then GREAT!!

Hoping IK gets the Win 8 Compatible programs out quickly...IK Obi?  When?  LOL

Cheers!

One thing I did notice about using the 32 bit Ik plugs (instruments) in X2...

They seemed to cause a MIDI hiccup....notes just randomly drop out
from ALL midi tracks...

All my other plugs have been solid...64 or 32 bit....they've been solid.

Do you have an option to 'upgrade' win 8 to a new hard disk without touching the current windows installation ?

Cheers!

djjhart@aol.com


So if you we're able to get it to upgrade , you wouldn't have to reinstall all your programs? 
No way do I wanna do a clean install of all my programs, I would be searching for installs and serial numbers for days ..
That whole crash and burn thing after 90% done would piss me off, thank you so much for sharing your experience, it tells me leave well enough alone. Unless there was a painless way to upgrade .. Plus my tascam fw 1884 won't work .. 

Dj,

I'm sure experiences with the upgrade vary....but that's how mine went...
but it may be due to the fact that I left everything plugged in...which, if I had to
do it over...I wouldn't do...


Tomixornot..


I chose the "Upgrade and leave my programs in tact" option - 
there are 3 options "upgrade and with programs and personal files", "Personal Files only" and "New Install"
and I read that you CAN install to separate partition or hard drive...

Honesty...the benefits to X2 are substantial, in my opinion.  I'm not happy about all the time lost...
but that may be my own fault.

Thanks for that write-up Larry. I'm going to do the same myself soon, but I may install to a new hard drive instead of upgrading, just in case...

Thatsastrat

John


Thanks Larry. Nice report.  No two ways about it Win 8 is a very good OS for DAWs. 

John,
I knew you were going to get the Win 8 disk from Microsoft. How long did it take to get the disk?
I have ordered mine, but I have not received the e-mail yet to confirm shipment. Plus it looks like I will have to get a new wireless adapter, even though the installer for 8 claimed I just needed to reinstal in 8. The non windows 8 drivers keep puting me into a crash and re-boot. I plan to get a windows 7 compatable adapter and that should fix things.

Hi Thatsastrat.

I ordered it on Oct 26th and received on the Nov 1. 

It came with both DVDs the 32 bit and the 64 bit versions.  

for me, sonar has performed noticeably better in windows 8.

Hi EB,
How is your UAD2 working under Windows 8?

Dean

Hey e.B. 
Re: problems after v.6.3.0, yep. I just posted a thread about them. Good to know that they work at least to that point though. Thanks.

Dean

cclarry

320 TB Drive   - Instruments and Audio

@cclarry

Not to go off subject but, do you really have a 320 TB drive? If so, who's? 

I have a 3 TB external but...

Wow, I would hate to have to back that up with floppies. 

I created a "Windows 8 Warning" thread after my lovely experience.  However, I was able to fix everything (with a few compliance updates from 3-rd party plugins).  Basically, every problem I was having boiled down to a permissions issue.  During the Win 7 x64 to Win 8 x64 upgrade, permissions were changed all over the place.  Plugins/apps that had read/write access to certain folders suddenly had read-only access.  I had to AGAIN set many apps to "run as administrator".  These flags were also reset curtesy of the upgrade.

1st step is to image the drive.

And then clone the disk to the new disk. Remove the "old" disk from the machine during the upgrade.

This will not create a dual boot.

To do that you will need to clone the disk and then use easyBCE to modify the boot stuff with both w7 disks in the machine.

Then run the disk and choose which install to update.