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.

backwoods


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. "

Yes, but Noel had very little else, other than audio,  on his machine. 

I had no trouble with any audio tools - these all worked fine with no changes: Sonar X1 & X2 Producer, NI Komplete 5 & 7, Alchemy, Omnisphere, Zebra, ubhiks, Bidule, Temper, Cooledit Pro, Audacity, Hyperscore, Live 8, Live 9 Beta, Granite, Iris, Kore,  Maschine... to name a few.

In fact, the Upgrade Assistant complained about Guitar Rig 4 (oddly not Guitar Rig 3) but I don't see any problems in it.
I have 351 programs now and that was after I uninstalled a huge number of MS tools.

Ironically, it was the backup tools - Acronis and Retrospect - that gave me the most grief.

Acronis stuff digs hooks deeply into the disk subsystem and starts up at boot-time. It is very hard to uninstall.

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)

paulo


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

Depends on your knowledge level on the geek'ery.
 
It is ok, if you know what the issues are, and got them covered before they happen ... but we do not know them until after the fact and that makes it tough.
 
Generally, I do not do Windows until the very first SERVICE PACK ... by which time they fix a lot of stuff.
 
If all you have is "software", I do not think that there is an issue as much, as if you have "hardware" ... and that is where most problems lie!

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

Another thing I want to try out:

http://win8tiles.com/Home/OblyTile

Make your own tiles.

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

Good resource:

http://www.eightforums.com/

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!

I've not had many problems these last few days, so I tried to turn on the Apps and set up an email account, this was a disaster, and I described it here:
http://www.eightforums.com/user-accounts-family-safety/17310-setting-up-live-email-account-destroyed-my-local-account.html#post171092