No Need to Hate Windows 8

No Need to Hate Windows 8

By Leo Notenboom

During my recent two-month sabbatical, I took the opportunity to do a few things that I’d been putting off.

One of those things was to upgrade my main machine – a nearly five-year-old, quad-core desktop with eight gigabytes of RAM – to Windows 8. Not a dual boot. Not a “try it in a virtual machine.” No, this was a commitment. I did this with the intent to completely commit to Windows 8 moving forward and suffer through whatever it is that I’d been hearing of from people for the previous few months.

I was deeply disappointed.

Not by Windows 8. With only a couple of exceptions, it’s been great.

Instead, I’m disappointed by all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that I’ve been hearing from readers and in the tech press.

If you’re good with Windows 7, then you can be just fine with Windows 8. Mostly because, Windows 8 essentially is Windows 7.

I can hear heads exploding already. Let me explain.

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Disregarding my own advice

I started my process by completely disregarding what I’ve long held as a standard piece1 of advice when moving from one version of Windows to another: do a clean install.

I didn’t.

I did an actual in-place upgrade of the Windows 7 Pro. Yep, I totally understand that reformatting and starting from scratch is a royal pain. I’m probably worse than most in having lots and lots of different applications and utilities and other what-nots installed and customized on my machine – especially the one that I use every day. I didn’t relish the thought of having to reinstall and reconfigure everything again.

I also wanted to tempt fate. In a sense, I wanted to experience the worse-case scenario so that I could see just how bad it might be and hopefully gain a better understanding of why people were complaining.

It was not to be.

It. Just. Worked.

In fact, it was one of the smoothest upgrades that I’d ever done. After the upgrade, my machine rebooted and I was looking at a Windows 8 that looked amazingly like the Windows 7 that preceded it

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This post is excerpted with permission from Leo Notenboom.