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...

 Thank you for this excellent post

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. 

Hi,
 
To be honest with you, I am scared to run W8 right now ... but if I do, it will be off an XP-PRO machine that does not have music, or anything important in it ... to prevent so many misfires.
 
For the eventual music machine, it will be a new install of the software on a new hard drive and computer, to prevent any more issues with drivers and what not.
 
What I don't know, YET, is if I should install as 32 bit or 64 bit ... knowing that there are issues with a lot of software in 64 bit ... and that is one call I have not made as yet, but I likely will set things up at 32 bit, since I am not doing the big time professional bruhaha that some folks here are doing.
 
But I already know that I will not touch the machine that has the M-Audio Sound Card, since M-Audio is just now starting to get drivers for Windows 7 ... !!!

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

I think I would recommend that anyone with a substantial amount of software invested in Windows 7 to skip Windows 8 for now, at least until drivers comes out. Or maybe wait for SP1.

I just found a free Kindle book on Amazon.

You can download Kindle for PC for free and read Kindle books on your desktop.

The book is:

Introducing Windows® 8: An Overview for IT Professionals

http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Windows%C2%AE-Professionals-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B009XBTVNY/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1356891650&sr=1-19

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

Sounds like a lot of monkey business to me, I'm skipping Windows 8 completely. Windows 7 works great for me so why should I change ??

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. "

There is a new feature (I think, at least I did not notice it earlier) which shows the Operating System Context of running processes - that is, what their compatibility settings are set for: XP, Vista, Win7 or Win8. Also a 32-bit or 64-bit flag.

In an ideal world these would all be Win 8 64-bit for me.

At least it can help you look for possible upgrades.

Here is a full-sized screen dump (open in new window if it is too small to see):