Upgrade to Windows 8 - questions?
DeePeeBee Feb 1, 2013 7:57 AMI thought it might be a good idea to upgrade my media desktop from Windows 7 Pro to Window 8 Pro. I bought the specially priced download version (which should even upgrade a Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro). I have a couple of questions before I undertake the upgrade.
1. Windows 8 does not support DVD playing. Does that mean that my optical drive will stop working after the install program deletes the Windows 7 install and I will have to purchase separate DVD playing software? Will the optical drive continue to function to load the Windows 8 software?
2. I have a 4HDD RAID0 installed, if I do a "keep nothing, custom install," of Windows 8 upgrade, will that break the RAID?
3. Will I lose the drivers that I installed when I built the computer (Intel RAID, graphics card, etc.)?
4. Will I lose the overclocking setup that I have created?
5. If I wanted to do the "cleanest" install, would I need to purchase a full install DVD version of Windows 8 (and use the upgrade on another computer)? Would that involve wiping the C drive? Would this then break the raid?
6. Will a full Windows 8 install from a DVD automatically load the Intel RAID drivers? Would I still need to separately load the Intel drivers for the RAID during the Windows install?? If so, will my optical drive work to do that or will I need to put the Intel driver software onto a USB flash drive??
7. Has anyone successfully installed a Windows 8 upgrade and found that there are no problems in using Adobe CS6 software from the Adobe Cloud?
8. On my media computer, I have installed only the necessary Adobe programs and a handful of diagnostic packages. For a "clean install" upgrade should I reload each of them (hoping I can find all of the keys)? That's relatively easy. But on my business computer, I have a ton of software, some of which is NOT compatible with Windows 8 and some of which is annotated, "Paid upgrade available ", for instance Microsoft Office 2007!! I would cost hundreds of $$ to upgrade everything to work with Windows 8.
9. Is it worthwhile to upgrade the computer on which I use only Adobe CS6 software and diagnostic tools?
10. Is it worthwhile to upgrade a general purpose computer with significant "obsolete" but eminently usable software?
11. I also have a laptop (I use for the new Adobe Prelude + lots of other stuff, especially e-mail) that will require a BIOS upgrade because the current BIOS does not support something called "NX". Is it worthwhile to upgrade the BIOS and do a "keep nothing install". I admit to having a lot of junk that should be cleaned up anyway.
I thought this was going to be easy, and the software only cost $40 (the offer expired yesterday), but I am having second thoughts and would be interested in the experience others have had.
Thanks,
Dorothy



