$39.95 Win8 Upgrade Deal Ends 1/31/13 when Prices Go Up

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jan 19, 2013 9:45 am

Prices for Win8 will jump up to normal after Jan 31st, so if you think you might need a copy, grab it now for $40 while you still can.

Remember if you have a Win7 COA for a PC purchased since (I think) around September last year, you can use that to discount the Win8 upgrade price to $15.

http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/blog ... icing.aspx

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sat Jan 19, 2013 11:28 pm

I think at the new price, Windows 8 will flop. People just aren't going to spend that kind of money to upgrade to it, and new computers will already have it.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 12:50 am

I bought a win7 upgrade for 3 pc's last year. Does that qualify?

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:46 am

No, the computers with the licenses on them have to be bought within the period they mentioned.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 11:58 am

Executioner wrote:I bought a win7 upgrade for 3 pc's last year. Does that qualify?

IMHO, Win7's a far better OS and I wouldn't bother upgrading from it. I see no advantages in Win8.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 2:27 pm

EvilHorace wrote:IMHO, Win7's a far better OS and I wouldn't bother upgrading from it. I see no advantages in Win8.

Now Vista, that's another story!

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:01 pm

I'm loving Win8 on my laptop. It's very snappy. I could see going to Win8 on my desktop in a year.

Needless to say I'm not using Metro. I'm using Classic Shell to get the start menu back.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:55 pm

FlyingPenguin wrote:I'm loving Win8 on my laptop. It's very snappy. I could see going to Win8 on my desktop in a year.

Needless to say I'm not using Metro. I'm using Classic Shell to get the start menu back.

That is the big difference between Vista and Win8. Performance wise Windows 8 is great, it is the annoying Metro that is the turn off. Vista even with all the service packs, is still crap in comparison to Windows 7 and 8.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 10:39 pm

When working on a client's PC I can FEEL it when it's running Vista. The damn hard drive light is on all the time and it runs like a pig.

I rarely think an OS upgrade is worth it for the average person, but when someone asks me if it's worth upgrading from Vista to Win7 I say HELL YES.

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Sun Jan 20, 2013 11:20 pm

EvilHorace wrote:IMHO, Win7's a far better OS and I wouldn't bother upgrading from it. I see no advantages in Win8.

Just to have a copy only. I'm staying with win7 and xp for now.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:17 am

Just to have a copy only

I wonder if those $40 copies expire if not activated by the 31rst?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:08 am

No they are full upgrade versions. I have three on the shelf I'm saving for a rainy day.

I'll tell you why I like Win8. NO FLUFF. When you're on the desktop you are back to a clean classic Win2K style desktop. No aero, no rounded corners, no candy colored buttons.

I recently have run into an issue with Win7 on my gaming system that is tempting me to upgrade to Win8. Aero is so intimately tied into the desktop in Win7 that if you disable it (change the theme to Windows Basic) you actually have a crippled desktop. Dragging a window lags the display (at least in dual monitor mode), and any 3D games that run in a window (Minecraft for instance runs in a window even in full screen) suffers a serious performance loss. I go from 120 fps to 40 fps in Minecraft, which is unacceptable.

The reason I would like to run in the Windows Basic theme is that Win7 has an annoying feature that when it THINKS you're in the desktop and the 3D video processor is being maxed out, a notification window pops up informing you of this and recommending you disable Aero to improve performance.

This message pops up randomly when I play Black Ops II. It shouldn't, and no other game does it. It usually happens when I'm in a heavy firefight and then it kicks me to the desktop to display the pop up, which of course gets me killed. Most annoying is that there is absolutely no way of turning this feature off. I've Googled it a lot. There are many people complaining about it. It's apparently tied to a service that can't be disabled, and there is no way to selectively disable that feature.

The only solution is to either switch to the Windows Basic theme all the time (not practical because of the performance hit in Minecraft I mentioned above) or configure the compatibility settings for the Steam launcher to "Disable desktop composition" which is a fancy way of saying "Switch to Windows Basic Theme" while this app is running.

This is also not acceptable because I like to play Minecraft with Steam open so people can chat with me, or often I'm waiting 8 minutes for an opening in a Black Ops II server my friends are playing on and want to kill some time in Minecraft while waiting.

Microsoft threw out all the fluff in Win8 and went back to a lean and clean desktop GUI because Win8 needs to be able to run on low power tablets, and it needs to conserve battery power (and all that eye candy in XP and Win7 drains the battery faster).

So yeah, in a year or less I may upgrade this desktop to Win8 when the OS matures. So far I'm seeing no major compatibility issues with games or apps I use. Win8 really is more like Win7.5 with all the eye candy and superflous services yanked out. Anything that runs in Win7 that's not something like a disk utility seems to run fine on Win8.

Ironically, I can see Win8 (with a Start Menu hack) actually becoming the favored OS for power users and gamers in the long run.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 4:56 am

FlyingPenguin wrote:When working on a client's PC I can FEEL it when it's running Vista. The damn hard drive light is on all the time and it runs like a pig.

I rarely think an OS upgrade is worth it for the average person, but when someone asks me if it's worth upgrading from Vista to Win7 I say HELL YES.

I know exactly what you mean. Recently upgraded someone's PC from Vista to Win8. it was unstable as hell with Vista, even with a fresh install, it ran like crap. With Windows 8 on there it runs like a dream. I mean that says a lot about how sad Vista is when it is slow on a system with a quad core processor.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 7:00 am

I can still say my old laptop that ran Vista ran OK for me. It might seem faster now that it runs Win8 but then it also now has a SSD instead of a relatively slow HDD.
I think about the $40 Win8 deal now as for getting one to save but I can't see any reason to use that over Win7 which is now running on 2 other PCs here.

One thing's for sure regarding Win8, there's a learning curve for many aspects of it that most who've never played with it before don't care for.

Pugsley · Post by **Pugsley** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:23 am

For me the reason not to upgrade is the whole metro thing. If there was a version of 8 that didn't have that or if there is a way to turn metro off COMPLETELY then I might think about it.

I too love a nice simple 2k interface.