my days with Windows 8

[Douglas McDonald]

It all started when I wanted to check out the UEFI BIOS on a new Biostar TA970XE mother board. I intended to just stay with win 7 but on the same day MSDN released Win 8 OEM final to developers.

Since I had to do a clean install anyway (UEFI uses a different HHD format) I thought why not just make the jump to Win 8. To say there is not good info on how to get all this to work is an understatement. MS and many other sites have documents but none are 100% correct. MS said no problem just enable UEFI and if using a clean drive just install windows. In the end this was mostly true but they left out a major step. After a full day of trying to get it to install using UEFI I was about to give up. I even used windows PE to create the proper partitions and it wouldn't install properly. It always reverted back to the old BIOS and a Master boot Record.

I was about to go home and I saw a web site that solved the problem (next day I got a email from Biostar confirming this). Turns out all you have to do is enable UEFI and install windows 7 or 8 but the step I was missing was entering the BIOS boot menu on POST. With the install DVD in the drive boot up and hit F9 (or whatever key for your mother board) then you see your list of drives. Well my install DVD was in an HP DVD drive and there were two choices for that drive. 1- HP DVD and 2- UEFI: HP DVD. Selecting the UEFI every magically worked perfectly. If I'd have done that (known that) I wouldn't have wasted a day. I feel pretty stupid now.

So how do I like Win 8 ? Other than there is no Start button it seems much cleaner, smoother and faster at some things. All my programs seem to work fine. If you have an AMD mother board or video there is no need to install Catalyst drivers any more. In fact it doesn't play well. I run 3 monitors with two video cards and win 8 set it all up from the start.

In about half an hour I really didn't miss the Start button. There is still a lot to learn but all in all I don't plan on going back to win 7. Yet.

I hope this help some one.
Doug