Some weeks ago I read somewhere that the new Windows 8 from Microsoft was one of their better upgrades. Then yesterday, on the way back from Epsom, I passed a large and tasteful advertising hoarding on the subject and suddenly thought that perhaps I ought to have some of that. Upgrade PC No. 1 before I get into forced upgrade land because something has broken. Blaze the trail and all that.
Get home to inspect PC No. 1 to find that it is running Window 7 Home Premium and Office 2010. Then off to the Microsoft site where, after a not too many minutes, I decide that maybe what I want is Windows 8 and Office Home & Student 2013. Then run something which checks out the PC and the report seems fairly relaxed. A few things which I don't use won't work in the new world, one or two things in the new world won't work on this PC.
So off we go. Flash the plastic at some place in Germany and down comes Windows 8. After a couple of hours or so all done. User files seem to be present and correct. After a bit of fiddling about I work out how to log in and to get around the system. Not too impressed with the rather loud start screen which seems to have taken its cue from the sort of telephones that young people use on trains. On the other hand, the search indexes which I broke a couple of months ago by renaming some folders might have been mended, so that is a plus. At which point I try to fire up the all important bread spreadsheet to find that Office has vanished. Along with various other bits and bobs which I do use - unlike a lot of HP flavoured junk (at least as far as I was concerned) which came with the PC which I don't.
Reload Dropbox, a product which has served me well, but which might be made redundant by new features in Windows 8 if I ever get around to learning how to use them. In the meantime, it looked as if the new Dropbox client just needed to do a bit of twiddling; no need to upload all the data that it knew about before because it still knew about it - thank goodness. All the little lights have gone from blue to green this morning, which is promising, and all that remains is a remote test.
Reload Chrome and get into my email OK. To find a nice letter from Microsoft containing, inter alia, the key to authenticate my purchase of Windows.
Now as it happens, I was planning to buy a new Office anyway, although it had not occurred to me (as it should have done) that new operating system is apt to require new application software, or at least a reload. Flash the plastic at Germany again and after a few false starts, down comes Office. The only problem being that I couldn't find it for a while. After which I work out that maybe I need to do something to the task bar, a something which the help (getting better all the time) helps me do. At this point, take another look in email, not finding another nice letter from Microsoft, so I don't have an authentication key to authenticate this second purchase. But will I ever need to use such a thing? Will it give me a bit of a free trial before it wants sight of the key? In the meantime, now able to update the bread spreadsheet with more details concerning the 166th batch of the brown stuff.
Try talking to the bank this morning and that seems OK - although, oddly, the German people have not hit my plastic account. I thought that such things were more or less instant.
With the only other niggle so far being that I can't put a password into the thing to control access on wake up. Maybe I shall have to talk to the nice people at BT. But so far so good: a reasonably painless upgrade, perhaps more by luck than judgement, and I expect that I will find enough that I like in the new versions to make me feel good about the £200 and the 200 quality time minutes expended.
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