My experiences so far upgrading from Windows 7 Pro (64-bit) to Windows 8 Pro 'in-place'

12/25/2012
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Backup System
Make DVD catalog of Windows 8 DVD using Locate32 (in case I need to find files on the DVD later)
Start install at 7:00 AM
Installer requires uninstall of Acronis 2011, Bluetooth Suite, Intel Network Connections
   and PerfectDisk 12.5.
Uninstall Perfect Disk, and so on..

   The uninstall of Acronis tools required the use of the ATI Cleanup utility
   which also required the uninstall of Acronis Disk Directory Suite. This was a
   very labor-intensive process, and it required devcon.exe. Then it required a
   fairly elaborate search and destroy of registry fields.
   I also uninstalled Virtual Clone Drive.

After this I restarted and got a BlueScreen Stop 0x0000...007b crash.

Restored system with Acronis rescue DVD and tried again.

    I find Acronis fltsrv.sys was still around after the various uninstalls and
    cleanups so I searched carefully for the registry fields and cleaned them
    up. Acronis software people should be ashamed of this barbaric, sadistic
    uninstall process.

Ran CHKDSK on all drives after reboot.

Backed up System with Acronis 2013 bootable rescue DVD in case I needed to get back to this point again.

Now it is 12:33 PM on Christmas Day and I got the Win8 DVD in-place installer
to proceed. The installation went on without incident and completed at 1:45. I
see the new personalization stuff and so on... I am asked for the Wireless key
(apparently it got lost in the migration).

I see that one of my audio tools didn't migrate - LoopBe30 Internal MIDI ports, so I re-install it.
Run Windows Update
Set up account picture
Tweaked some stuff
Turned off content indexing on C: drive (Windows Search not needed on that drive).
Ran Chkdsk on all drives
Backed up system

Installed upgrades: Retrospect 8 and UltraEdit 18.20

12/26/2012
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Check out my account and Administrator account and decided things were OK to proceed
Ran Disk Cleanup to remove C:\Windows.old
CHKDSK /F /R C:  (full disk check and bad block locator)

Intel IAStorDataMgr terminated with unhandled exception - disable it in Services
Went to Black Viper site to see what Win8 services I could disable - disabled several
Turned off some Windows Features: Telnet Client, Simple TCP Services, MSMQ server, WCF services, .NET 3.5
Fixed up some bad font issues

Run boot-time defrag of C: with PerfectDisk
Defrag Registry with PerfectRegistry
Update Perfect Registry
Run Driver Detective to look for new Windows 8 drivers
Driver Detective needs .Net 3.5 Framework so I add it back to Windows 8
Update Driver Detective
Update LatencyMonitor for audio checks
Run Driver Detective - it recommends NVIDIA 310.70 drivers so I install them

Restart

Uninstall old Windows 7 MS tools (freeing a ton of space):
    MS Network Monitor
    MS Visual Studio 2010
    Debugging Tools for Windows 7
    MS Silverlight SDK
    MS SQL Server
    MS Debugging Symbols
    MS Win7 SDK Driver Kit
    MS Performance Toolkit
    MS Windows SDK 7.1

Restart

Run Perfect Registry
Clean up old Revo Uninstaller backups (they were for Windows 7)

Restart

Run Perfect Disk to defragment the system drive

Remove Windows Media Player - I don't use it and it is indexing all my sample libraries which are enormous
Set up Winamp as my media player

I can't run .bat files in my user login, but I can as Administrator.
     I do a Google search for solutions and try some to no avail. But I find if
     I rename the .bat files to .cmd they run OK, so I do that. I spent a lot of
     time on this and finally gave up.

12/27/2012
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Install new JMB36X 1.17.65 driver based on Driver Detective advice
Updated KeePass
Logged in as Administrator and checked things out, tweak screen, etc.
Logged in as my user
Defragged disk
Backed up system with Acronis 2013.

12/28/2012
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Tested Retrospect 8. Things were not good. To make a long story short, I ended
up uninstalling it and re-installing. Had some problems with Intel IAStor driver
(RAID), probably due to new JMB driver. I don't use RAID so I uninstalled the
Intel RAID stuff. Re-install Retrospect 8.

   Retrospect 8 InstaScan claims it needs interactive services and this system
   does not allow it, so I disable InstaScan service. Clear out old Retrospect
   backup sets and test the backup stuff. It complains about the new
   swapfile.sys so I disable backing that up.

Update Logitech SetPoint for Keyboard and Mouse.

   The SetPoint Tray Icon is supposed to show things like Caps Lock ON, but it
   doesn't, so I disable the Tray Icon.

At this point, Windows 8 meets my approval. There is only one major issue left -
the Network drivers for WIFI are not available. I set up Driver Detective to
monitor for this, until then I will make do with whatever kludge is installed to
keep networking working. My Home network is set up as a public network and I
can't change any Network stuff until I get that fixed.

So now it is time to make a full system backup. I start with Retrospect backing
up on one 2TB drive, then I will do an image backup with Acronis to another 2TB
drive. The last time I did this the image backup was about 1.5TB, I hope it
still fits on a 2TB drive...

Start back up all my drives with new Retrospect 8 - this will take a while...

12/29/2012
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Retrospect backup still running... Event Viewer shows no errors or warnings so far.
While it is backup up, I write this log from my notes in case others may find it helpful.
To be continued...

I finished all my initial backups and consider the system stable.

I just need Win8 official drivers for my WiFi - none are available yet for any product as far as I can discover.

There are Beta releases, but I don't want that.

I'm really liking the many improvements in Win 8:
1) the copy progress graph with capacity to pause a big copy and resume later
2) built in ISO support - mount an ISO as a directory
3) all-in-one Task Manager
4) File History, Spaces, Library improvements,...

and I'm finding more as I go.

I still have not set up one of those APP accounts and I don't use the start screen for much. 

Thanks for the detailed info, though to me it sounds more like a reason not to do it as much as anything else ;)

Thanks for this, i will be doing the same after the new year. Fingers crossed.

One thing though, i would have run Ccleaner after any uninstalling to get rid of rogue registry strings.

Cheers,
Jerry

Here is Noel Borthwicks experience- notice he didn't even feel the need to create a backup...

"Well I just bit the bullet and upgraded my Win7 DAW at home to Win 8 in place. I've installed Win8 a few times on work machines but those have always been clean installs before so this is my first time doing an upgrade. 
The process went flawlessly and all my apps and data migrated fine. This is a 3 year old machine with a bunch of audio apps installed. X2A was intalled prior to the upgrade and it all works as before. All I did prior to the upgrade is uninstall MS security essentials and ran CCleaner to remove all cached files etc to avoid unnecessary junk being carried over to Win 8.   No backups :) I started the install, went to have dinner and when I came back about 45 mins later it was about 90% through. The data migration took another 15 mins or so and it was done. So far everything I have tested is ok.  Very impressive how easy and painless it was. "

joakes


Thanks for this, i will be doing the same after the new year. Fingers crossed.

One thing though, i would have run Ccleaner after any uninstalling to get rid of rogue registry strings.

Cheers,
Jerry

Revo Uninstaller is much better at this. It tracks the application installation and registration service during it's first startup. That covers much more than what CCleaner does.


I do use CCleaner regularly, and it is fine for routine, safe, cleanup.

If you miss the Start Menu, try this idea - use a Toolbar folder on the taskbar:




It is easy to do:
1) Make a folder somewhere with shortcuts and/or other folders
2) Use Character Map and the Arial Unicode Font to pick a nice Unicode character for the folder name (it fits nicely that way).
3) On the taskbar, right-click, Toolbars->New toolbar...
4) Select the folder

I have three little toolbars, one for music stuff, one for tools stuff, and one for 'pinned stuff' (stuff pinned on the taskbar): 

(Open in a new window/tab, or download,  for full-size image)

There is a special Control panel called 'All Tasks' that you can display with this string in the Windows Explorer Shell:

shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

It looks like this (These are full-sized images you can open them in a new tab or download):

http://www.arachnaut.net/...asks-Control-Panel.png



You can put it on the Win8 Start Screen by following these steps.

1) paste that string into explorer shell

http://www.arachnaut.net/...r-All-Tasks-string.png




2) In the new window, copy the address and paste to the desktop (right click on address)

http://www.arachnaut.net/...All-tasks-Shortcut.png




3) Rename the new shortcut and put it somewhere, then right click on it and select 'Pin to Start'

http://www.arachnaut.net/...All-Tasks-on-Start.png

Took the plunge and installed W8 on top of W7.

No real issues, had to re-install the Focusrite drivers for the Liquid 56 though.

Also installed Classic Shell, using its W7 patch and all is well. So far only one oldish programme  - VideoEdit 4.1 - refuses to work, but not a show stopper.

Cheers,
Jerry

Also installed Classic Shell, using its W7 patch and all is well. So far only one oldish programme - VideoEdit 4.1 - refuses to work, but not a show stopper.

 
Can you clarify this?
 
I have bad eye sight and that new Window is trouble for me, as I can not read things well/fast enough to know what they are ... I get ribbed on that by my old roomate because my W7 looks like the old XP ... but the Windows desktop setup in W7 is not for computers ... it's for someone else that doesn't use Windows named Guillermo Puertas!

R

joakes


Took the plunge and installed W8 on top of W7.

No real issues, had to re-install the Focusrite drivers for the Liquid 56 though.

Also installed Classic Shell, using its W7 patch and all is well. So far only one oldish programme  - VideoEdit 4.1 - refuses to work, but not a show stopper.

Cheers,
Jerry

I take back what I said.


Like the old 12 bar, i woke up one morning, turned the pc on and


- no mouse
- no keyboard
- no Ctl Alt Supp
- complete freeze


And that for several forced boot ups.


Tried a "Replace" restore which effectively wiped my HD.


Prolly user error, maybe not, but it took me 3 days to re-install. 


And yes i had an image (Acronis 2013) but sods law, corrupt .......


So here I am back to W7, happy as a pigvin the what-not, no latency as such. 


No more W8 for me, thanks MS.


Cheers,
Jerry

Now it is several weeks later and I've had lots of time to play with Windows 8. Here are some things I fixed or worked on:

I upgraded my keyboard and mouse because they did not have Windows 8 drivers! Go figure. That fixed the SetPoint problem.

The key for the Win8 Media Package arrived so I enabled that in Win8. That's makes my system display as 'Windows 8 Pro with Media Center'. I don't have a TV or any use for that so I will just let it be there for the future, I haven't even started Media Center yet.

I tried to enable the Microsoft email account, but I ran into problems outlined here:

http://www.eightforums.co...-my-local-account.html

I have not used any Windows 8 APPs yet and I unpinned them all from my start screen.

I added the Classic Shell to start up my system on the desktop and get me back the start button. I made a simple skin for it, described here:

http://www.classicshell.n...opic.php?f=17&t=17

I solved the Acronis 2013 problem, as outlined here:

http://forum.acronis.com/.rum/38423#comment-121954

I tried to remove 8dot3 shortnames. The process was not successful, as outlined here:

http://www.eightforums.co...shortname-removal.html

The only problem remaining is that I lack a proper Windows 8 driver for my WIFI USB adapter, but the Win 7 driver seems to work OK.

There are 2 errors I see in the Event list after a restart. One is a DHCP error probably due to the Win 7 WIFI driver.  'The driver \Driver\WudfRd failed to load' is due to the WUDF driver starting later manually. I'm going to ignore these for now.

A few boot drivers fail to load: 
"The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) did not load: 
dam
EhStorClass
JSWPSLWF"

dam is Desktop Activity Monitor - not needed for me
EhStorClass is for Extended IEEE 1667 Support - things like smart cards
JSWPSLWF id the Win 7 driver for my WIFI adapter.

I keep checking the Netgear site for Win 8 drivers. There is a Beta available, but reports I've read about it are not encouraging. I downloaded it, maybe some day I'll try it out.

I've encounter zero problems with any audio application.

It's been a while and I thought I'd post an update.

I have read several people mention that it might be better to do a clean install, while I did an in-place install because of the amount of software I had already installed.

I have not encountered any problems of any sort in the last few months.

I have had one or two crashes from a WiFi adapter driver, but I now have Windows 8 drivers for that.

Acronis software has been the worst offender, with each update breaking something new, but I have workarounds.

So my final recommendation to update to Windows 8 is an unqualified 'Yes'.

I installed W8 for a second time, and it went better than the first time.

But i hate the new interface, my latency is bigger, so i formated and re-installed W7. 

Feels more normal, natural etc. Twice bitten, and third time VERY shy.

Not convinced (and i have a W8 capable machine), but each to his own......

Cheers,
Jerry

kristoffer


Note: DPC latency checker does not work properly with Win8 yet, so it will show about 1000us latency. 
Latency Mon is much better to use to see which drivers and processes causing the latency.

Aha that I didn't know.

Third time lucky then ?

Cheers,
Jerry