Well I decided to be at the cutting edge, more fool me, and installed the free 8.1 upgrade.
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:
Ah well, just another excuse to look a little harder at alternatives to MS products.
- 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).
- Download starts so leave it to churn.
- 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.
- If you agree to the EULA it eventually lands you at the login screen.
- 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.
- You get to switch on or off various stuff like IE options. Skydrive for all documents is enabled by default.
- 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.
- 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
knobbledhijacked 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.
Comment