Windows 8.1 - verdict?

[Sysman]

Well I decided to be at the cutting edge, more fool me, and installed the free 8.1 upgrade.

1. Navigate to Windows Store and find that it is offering me the upgrade. Am surprised that it doesn't want me to log on (more on that later).
2. Download starts so leave it to churn.
3. After doing the installation and a reboot, the EULA pops up. If you decline this it will wipe out all changes and leave you at 8.0. This appears to work fine.
4. If you agree to the EULA it eventually lands you at the login screen.
5. Problem. Immediately after logging in it insists that you either enter an existing Microsoft account username and password or create a new one. I couldn't find any keyboard or mouse driven means to skip this bit. Doing the hotmail/live/outlook account sign in brings a whole new set of terms and conditions, many of which I certainly do not agree to.
6. You get to switch on or off various stuff like IE options. Skydrive for all documents is enabled by default.
7. The pièce de resistance - the first time you log into an existing account in 8.1 you get a message about updating Apps from the store, and the background rotates through all the colours of the rainbow in a disturbing fashion that had me thinking of the Ipcress File. I seriously wonder if this screen has a bad effect on epileptics.
8. That little lot done, you find that you are logged in using the credentials of the MS online account, not the one you originally logged in under. It hasn't changed the home directory name though.

Apparently you don't get this MS account sign-on lark if you already belong to a Windows domain, but that ain't going to help those of us who find that the price of Server 2012 is too steep. Cheeky twats want to turn you into an advertising target.

There are way too many non-clickable URLs in both the EULA and the individual setup crap. Unlike Apple's various EULA's there's no option to save or print the buggers either.

Conclusions:

• If you are intending to upgrade to 8.1, wait. Someone will probably come up with a workaround for the MS account sign up. I did manage to delete the knobbled hijacked account from my system, but have no idea at this stage whether that will come back to bite me. Since MS is involved, it probably will.
• It is obvious that MS want to turn non-enterprise users into an advertising revenue stream. That's a fine business model for software which is free, but this software ain't free.

Ah well, just another excuse to look a little harder at alternatives to MS products.

[cojak]

Barstewards.

Thanks for the post SM. (Mr C uses Win 8 so I'll keep him away from the upgrade for as long as possible).

Along with the fecking Office 360 they're just converting all home users into cash cows.

[stek]

I managed to do it with the 8.1 preview, can't remember how though but it still works and I use my Mac account on it.

[TykeMerc]

Hmm, that's a concern, one of my sons is getting a new laptop in the next week (Dell replacement since they failed horribly to fix his old one under the warranty) and it comes with Windows 8.
I'm likely to be on site when it arrives so I won't be able to intercept the junk if it tries to make him jump through hoops.

I may well have to downgrade the damn thing to Win 7 when I'm back home if it appears to take the mickey too much.

[stek]

Seems the trick is to disable the internet during setup...

[cojak]

Seems the trick is to disable the internet during setup...

Ooh, good to know - ta stek.

[Cliphead]

I tried hard to like 8 and eventually binned it so 8.1 won't get an airing here. Most of the machines here are Linux with a couple of boxes with XP and 7. The XP box will shortly become a FreeNAS server leaving just the 7 machine to do the music stuff I need it for.

[Sysman]

Seems the trick is to disable the internet during setup...

Ayup. Confirmed by yanking the (virtual) cable.

Virtual machines with the ability to revert to snapshots are nifty things...



Edit: Found an easier way than yanking the cable.

The first login appears to default to the last user you logged in as under 8.0 (i.e. the one you invoked the 8.1 update from).

Beneath that is a prompt "I am not <username>". Click on that and it chugs away without asking you for a Microsoft account.

Further digging around reveals that they appear to have "forgotten" about the EU mandated browser choice. There's a patch up the spout to fix that, dated 1st October, but it wasn't there yesterday when I looked.

[BillHicksRIP]

Have done a fresh 8.0 install, an XP to 8.0 upgrade and an 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade and confirm the bit about pulling the cable out during the setup of the options. You can use the back buttons if you hit the screen and it will still work. It thinks about it for 60 secs then logs in with your previously setup local account.

Search is better as you dont have to pick which category you're searching on, and you can boot straight to desktop and skip Start by using the properties box launched from the toolbar. The return of the Start Button was a bit of a fudge. You can shut down and set options but if you need apps, it's off to the Start screen again.

[woohoo]

I installed 8.1 on my Lenovo Helix running win 8. So far...

1. Had to install old graphics driver from Lenovo website. I had issues with one of my dual monitors and a matrox box showing out of range message. Spent a morning attempting various things before reverting to an old driver.
2. Old Cisco VPN software didn't work, ended up editing the registry to get it working. To be fair this is a really old bit of software not supported by Cisco.
3. Sleep mode no longer works and all my power saving settings had been reset. I have to hold the power button down to reset the machine, really annoying.

On reflection I should have waited a while. Still like window 8 though.