2012 — 4 November: Sunday

I've finally heard from my friend Carol in New York who avoided getting Sandy between her toes and dodged the hurricane by the simple expedient of being in Turkey, it seems.1 So that's one worry bead removed from my little list. Not that I have a little list, you understand. The list is not little...

The first cuppa is traversing my gastro-intestinal tract, and although there was a hint of a glimpse of sunshine a few minutes ago, a full-on grey rain cloud cover has now (09:27) put paid to that. I shall put on a light, rustle up some breakfast, and then try to remember to switch away from BBC Radio 3 in time for Cerys over on 6Music. Creature of unworrying habits, that's me.

Good grief, now what?

Can't trust anyone these days, it seems:

Oops

I shall browse elsewhere...

I was feeling...

... a little adventurous, so I decided to take myself (and my rarely-used 64-bit Internet Explorer) over to Seattle to let the Win8 Upgrade Assistant snoop around BlackBeast and assess any 'upgrade' issues and what it might cost to move over to Win8 Pro. It took less than five minutes to discover that there seems very little to hold me back (as it were):

Win8

So, on the face of it, I just need to examine my current anti-virus product, think (not very hard) about a set of audio tools I never use that came with my sound card, and get an upgrade for my rarely-used (but incredibly useful on occasion) OCR software. Not too onerous.

My Canon 5600F scanner and HP LaserJet 1320 printer are fine. As is the USB hub, my two screens, the MS mouse and Logik keyboard. Before I knew it, I was being offered a 2GB download for £24-99 and a snail-mailed DVD for an additional £12-99 and (frankly) at that price I'm left wondering what the catch is. Apart from the fact that it's Win8, of course. And that I'd have to re-install Win7 if I decided to back out afterwards.

Fortified...

... by my prawn salad lunch, and after downloading the installation material, and having made reasonably sure I've got backups of a few files, and having been emailed my product key, and (vitally) just made a fresh cuppa, my only remaining question is "Do you feel lucky enough to click this shortcut, punk?"

Here we go again

What's the worst2 that could happen? Erm, well, I may be gone a while :-)

Several hours later :-)

Well, actually, that all went quite smoothly. It took longer (just over an hour) to install the 2GB lump than it did to download it. Then there was another 220MB or so of patches and updates (already!) and a free download of the Media Centre Pack. I'm left with an nVidia graphics driver that has stopped working (and for which I refuse to install Java just to use the automated nVidia driver-finding tool [mostly because I no longer have any nVidia hardware in BlackBeast]), and some sort of problem with Adobe Flash Player that can wait until I actually need it...

As I expected, the local service that was running an Apache webserver for me has gone AWOL — since I also have hard-wired access to the Raspberry Pi webserver (which is faster) that's no great loss.

I was particularly pleased to see my installed applications and settings make the 'leap' without any intervention on my part. I was left with almost no tinkering to get things back to looking and feeling like the Win7 system of this morning. The new desktop (all those ugly tiles) can be dismissed in an instant after each reboot, and brought back simply by hovering the mouse in the bottom left hand corner where a little "Start" button hides itself. So, in truth, what we have is a refreshed Win7 system not buried very deeply under a thin veneer of Tablet 'modernity'.

Naturally, there are (free) ways and means to make Win8 more closely resemble its various ancestors by putting back the "Classic Shell". (Link.)

A teensy-weensy...

... almost infinitesimal quibble: surely it shouldn't be necessary to ask Mrs Google to tell you how to restart or shutdown the system? I've created a pair of shortcuts that I shall leave pinned to my desktop...

Power!

  

Footnotes

1  Smart manoeuvre, if you ask me.
2  I fully expect it to blow away the Apache web server I run as a local service, for starters. And I'm kissing the lovely Aero Glass theme goodbye, too. And I shall be very cross if my Sudoku stops working.