Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Well, I've finally relented and installed Windows 8.1 on one machine in the house. Frankly, I'm not in a big hurry to do it on the other two PC's I use, including my main development machine. First of all, if you are planning on upgrading to Windows 8.1, be aware of a couple of things:  1) You cannot upgrade directly from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. Microsoft has, in their infinite wisdom (at least for now) made that impossible. No, you have to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 first. Only then can you do ANOTHER upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.  2) On my bedroom laptop, which is a very fast HP quad core with 8 gigs of RAM, the total time involved ran into the 3+ hour range. Not fun at all!  3) On Windows 8.1 you will get back your "Start" button and menu, but it won't be what you think you were told. In order to get something that looks like the classic Windows 7 Start Menu and features, you'll need to download something like Classic Shell ....

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”    - Jack London After doing quite a bit of reading to check up on various potential issues regarding the installation of the Windows 7 public Beta (build 7000),  and after having run it for a bit inside a VM,I decided it would be OK to do an upgrade over my notebook’s Windows Vista Ultimate installation. I use this machine often, but it is not my primary development box, so if things went south, it wouldn’t hurt me too much. The upgrade process was interrupted the first and second times by “incompatible software”. The first was Windows Powershell – which is installed by SQL Server 2008. There is no obvious way to uninstall this, so what I did was to rename the powershell folder under the Windows\System32 folder, and then search for the registry entries and set the installed key from “1” to “0”. That took care of the first offender. The next interruption came when Windows 7 told me Raxco Perf...