Keep Calm And Discuss Retro Generally!

Deleted User wrote: »

Totally up to you. I'm not sure what the minimum hardware specs are for win8, but my media PC is running twice as fast on XP as it was on Vista. Hope it works out for you. Let us know.

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oh yeah meant to drop an update ,

On the minus side.
The lack of start menu is annoying , but a quick classic shell install and you have a workable one.I reckon its MS trying to ease people into only using their interface (which integrates into their app store), but at the moment its not an issue.The Metro/start screen isnt great to navigate via anything other than touchscreen ,and its a bit dumbed down.
The Dual boot menu looks lovely , but using BCD etc to change anything reverts you to the old text based one.At present my dual boot machine lists 2 Windows 8 installs (previously had an eval 64 and 32 , now have 32 and 64 , going to remove 32 later today as its not needed), and nothing to differentiate them other than the hard disk they're on.
It was BSODing (with a new BSOD! has a sad face and everything),turns out it didnt like my AV software , infact it doesnt seem to play nice with most AV's at present , so you're stuck with windows defender
Some of the odder stuff I run specifically for recording video for reviews, like MSI Afterburner and cam studio aren't working with it yet .
Going from 32 to 64 bit is do-able but they've made it awkward.(basically if you have a 32 bit OS and run the upgrader you 'll only get an option to download 32 bit version , you're licensed for 32 or 64 but to get the 64 bit version you'll need to get hold of the 64 bit media which isn't available for manual download yet)

On the plus side.
Its really fast , boot time feels halved, its worked with any of my older games I've tried so far.
The dual screen support is great.
Once I'd switched to 64 bit (I've 4 gbs of ram so I'd be crazy not to) it handled everything I threw at it with ease .I run skyrim in ultra with a ton of mods installed as well as high res textures ,in the 32 bit OS it was a bit ropey as it was only addressing 3.25gbs of ram , and the PAE kernal patching workaround I used to get around that in Vista wont work , but once I had it using of all the memory (after I'd reinstalled it in 64 bit ) it was rock solid.
One thing , and maybe someone can confirm this , in theory your MS licence entitles you to previous versions instead (VLK's have access to all , REtail have I think access to the previous OS)so ..in theory..you could take an XP machine , buy the €30 upgrade , then ring MS and downgrade it to Windows 7..not 100% on this though.