2012 — 18 November: Sunday

In the light1 now dawning, I can see that Jeff Bezos must be monitoring either my ¬blog or (more likely) my Amazonian purchases (of the last decade or more) very closely. In the wake of a tiny order for DVDs and a very cheap Blu-ray last night he instantly responded with a £10 gift certificate cunningly designed to fail to attract me by first getting me to buy at least £40 worth of eligible clothing, shoes, jewellery and/or watches at some point in the next three weeks. I had to smile at that plural "watches".

"So not going to happen."

It must (surely) be time for my next cuppa? It is, after all, nearly 07:44 and starting to brighten up out there. [Pause] And I'm (almost) sure that -2C hardly feels cold at all, once you get used to it. Brrr.

In a triumph...

... of experience over hope, I'm now nudging my laptop PC a rung up the ladder from Win7 Pro to Win8 Pro. The download took about 35 minutes and (at 09:30) I'm confidently informed:

We're getting a few things ready

Nice to see an informal style of computer documentation that I helped pioneer has finally (nearly 40 years later!) actually caught on :-)

Aspects of the...

... behaviour and practices condoned in some human cultures so revolt me that I do wonder, sometimes, what makes us think we're fellow-members of a highly-evolved, sentient species:

FGM

"Comment" as they say "would be superfluous".

Oops!

After an unconscionably long wait, an impatient pressing of the power button long enough to trigger an error window, the gist of which was "Some of your data was not migrated" and then some casual dialogue with Mrs Google on another machine, I powered off the obviously-frozen laptop, powered it back on, saw the Win8 splash screen for a little while, and then faced:

Windows installation was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored.
Do not restart your computer during this time.

I wouldn't dream of it. Honest. Now I know why my previous successful upgrade on BlackBeast kept a huge folder called "Windows.old" knocking around!

And, within five minutes or so, the following "Blue Window of Failure" popped up, which I captured for posterity (trimmed a bit) and transferred by sneakernet — my network route to BlackBeast not then being alive and well, it seems:

BWOF

After which I successfully rebooted the laptop back into Win7. It's not actually telling quite the whole truth as, during my Win8 installation attempt I had to uninstall my Microsoft Win7 anti-virus product, and I've now successfully 'updated' the follow-on Windows Defender Win8 product with which the partial Win8 managed to equip me before plunging itself voluntarily into the great blue Yonder.

I think what I shall try next — given that there's now that enticing little "Install Windows" shortcut sitting on the screen — is simply uninstall the minimal set of applications on the laptop (I don't keep any data on it) to restore it to a fully-patched but "empty" Win7 SP1 state, and then simply try again. This time, without any attempt to save / migrate programs, data, or settings. But obviously not without a precautionary cuppa. It's now 11:48 and gloriously sunny out there. What am I doing in here?

When I next thought...

... to look at the laptop, well after lunch — having first taken a minute or so to dismiss (by unpinning from the 'Start' screen) each of the silliest2 of the various default App tiles — it was already time to offer it the chance to go off and feed itself on the first 545MB or so of "important updates". When it's finished stuffing itself I shall then add in the freebie Media Centre 'pack' (largely because it's still free for a while) and finally re-install a couple of bits'n'pieces.

I repeated the Win8 upgrade without actually getting rid of all my applications; just the ones I half-expected to put up resistance (Flash, the XAMPP stack, and the vital VLC media player). My calculated gamble paid off, it seems.

Oops! (2)

Having waited 20 minutes or so, with no sign of a Product Key for the freebie Media Centre 'pack' (which arrived within a minute or so the last time I did this), I studied the small print of the offer a bit more carefully. Turns out it's limited to one Key per valid email address. No matter; I didn't previously have this gorp on the laptop in its Win7 incarnation, so I expect I shall survive.

Ever onward. [Pause] And, just because I can, this next bit is straight from my laptop. Which is once again running Apache, too, to restore 'local' web-serving. (After I'd first downloaded a missing Visual C++ redistributable... and its security patch...)

  

Footnotes

1  Of yesterday's final footnote!
2  Trust me: when I want a live Sports feed in an interactive tile on my desktop I shall officially declare myself brain dead.