Sunday, October 27, 2013


So its time to upgrade to Windows 8.1. point release with many under the hood changes that I'm not gonna observe as all are in the tablet mode of the UI.

I go straight to the desktop and have classic shell installed so things are just like windows 7 for me. I like it that way and dont want any full screen apps starting on my 19" monitor. I am unable to understand that; as we move forward the screen space wasted is also going up . All the glossy effects, Aero style and now this single app on screen are wasting my precious screen real estate. Come on guys make better utilisation of pixels don't take it all up for a app. That remind me I have to find a way to disable the music app to run on double click.

So the system details screen above shows windows 8.1 another way to confirm is the command line version which wshould show something like the following screen. Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]


At this point id add the Windows Experience Index for the new OS but that has been done away by MS in 8.1. Now there's no standardised method to compare performance

Things I noticed after upgrade
1) the "My computer" is not called "This PC", change in semantics that i dont care about. I have only this windows machine at the moment and i dont foresee a windows device (tablet or mobile) with me in near future. Unless MS graciously gives it to me for free in which case i'll gladly accept it.
2) the tablet interface has colourful stuff as background which I immediately changed to desktop background to make the switch less jarring.
3) No change for the worse which is a great thing.

Be careful:
BEWARE: If you have multiple hdds in the machine and have copies of windows 8 on them then upgrade process might get confused and half upgrade main one and half another leading to unbootable both. I have 3 copied of same windows installation. Original installation on 1st HDD, migrate to 2nd as it was newer with less badness. then another migration to ssd.

lessons learnt:
1) Always have a backup installer disk/media ready.
 i didn't have and wasted 2 days finding one. You know its not possible to download the windows 8 install disk image without already  having some version of windows. MS does not provide a web link to download the image. Only its executable can. My other machine is linux and it was useless in making teh recovery media. shame on you MS.  
2) Remove all other harddisks before installation:
another waste of time to screw up installations. disabling in bios is not enough. windows find the other installation and corrupts it. Physically cable has to be removed from the machine.
3) Ensure you have nothing important dependent on that machine.
Things might go wrong as they sometimes do and especially if you have something important to do.
4) Take periodic backups of the system image.
This is not a refined platform like android where the backup method is already available by default after rooting. Its not like windows had a head start over android and is yet to figure out that ... oh wait a minute it pre-dates android. So why is its not easy to make backups, why is the third party app like easeus method easier to find and perform  that the inbuilt one. is there a inbuilt one which makes portable versions of system backup ??

So its definitely worth the upgrade and a definite 'go for it' to windows 8 users.



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