I have always been, and will always be, an early adopter. It’s something I take pride in. Other people may call us(people like me) lab rats, or experimental mice, but that doesn’t stop us from buying/testing products once they get released.
Most of the time this way of thinking pays off in huge quantities: iPad, OSX Upgrades
Other times it’s just a plain nightmare. Case and point: my upgrade experience from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro. To describe it using a single word, I’d say the entire upgrade experience was horrendous.
Step 1: Buying the product(10/26 9PM)
Getting a hold of the product was easy enough. You go to Microsoft’s website, enter your payment details and then download the Windows Update Assistant.
Step 2: Updating Windows 7(10/26 11PM)
I ran the update assistant. It scanned my device for incompatibilities, after which it reported 10 software/drivers were incompatible with windows 8. I pressed the next button. The next screen asked how I wanted to proceed: carry over all my settings and files, just the files, or create a fresh install. After being spoiled by my Mac, wherein upgrades are done painlessly, I opted to carry over everything.
As it turns out, this decision will come back and haunt me in my sleep later that night. Literally. I’m going to get into the details of what happened a bit later.
The rest of the upgrade went along smoothly, albeit long. I remember how excited I was once the upgrade process entered in its final phases, even getting into a count down once the last circulating dots appeared. And then I was presented with Metro.
Excitement filled the air, expectations ran high and curiosity was at its peak. I marveled at MS’s new awesome UI like a kid opening a new box of gaming console. I grabbed the mouse and decided to point at the Mail App. Click.
The app flipped, showed me the giant map icon, then went back to the Metro UI screen. I clicked it again. Same behavior. I tried the People App, but I got the same opening-closing behavior. I tried all the other Metro Apps, none of them were working.
Excitement turned into frustration, and good expectations turned into an “as expected from MS” motto. I was bummed. Since it was a new OS, Googling/Binging about the problem online didn’t do much. I updated my drivers, all of them, but still nothing. Not only were the metro apps not functioning, the system was really sluggish. Boot-up and shutdown times were considerably slower than when they did on Windows 7. I tried to figure things out, and when I noticed the time, It was already 1:30 AM. I decided to sleep, and face this issue the next day.
1:45 AM, I couldn’t sleep. I had to do something. I retraced my steps, scanning for missteps, and the best place to backtrack to. And then it dawned at me, I decided to carry over ALL the Windows 7 settings, instead of doing a fresh install. How Naive!, I thought to myself. And it was. My Mac has indeed spoiled me. I couldn’t sleep anyway so I decided to get up, and perform a full reinstall of the system. Since I bought an upgrade, I have to start from installing Windows 7 on my machine, before updating it to a windows 8. I was bumming hard.
I installed Windows 7, and started to download Windows 8 before going to bed at 4AM-ish.
6:30 AM, I opened my eyes, still sleepy. But the sense of urgency, that my machine is NOT WORKING, drove my out of my bed, and back to the idea room, where my computer is located in. I continued with installing Windows 8. As it did the first time, the install went along smoothly, but relatively faster than the first, since this is a fresh install.
Step 3: Using your device(10/27 7AM)
7AM, I clicked the mail metro app, and finally, it opened. I was still happy to see the metro UI app, and my excitement was still there, satisfied. But I have to say that the whole thing, the entire experience was dampened by what happened. It was a major failure on Microsoft’s part, in my opinion.
I Googled/Binged the issue again, and somebody found a solution which was to disable/uninstall any anti-virus installed on the system. This fixes the metro-apps not opening issue. If this fixes the sluggishness of the system, I will never know.
So there, my system is up and running. I installed a bunch of apps from the store. Guild Wars 2 is playing smoothly on the new machine. And best of all, I had my Metro UI fix.
Windows 8 Upgrade from Phoebus Torralba on Vimeo.
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