Review by A. H.

I installed this Windows 8 64-bit Upgrade on a machine I built several years ago around an Asus AMD 790X chipset motherboard and Phenom II 965BE processor. The machine had been running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

First, the upgrade was relatively straightforward. After inserting the disc and selecting the relevant menu options, it was off to the races. Although it is an upgrade package that will upgrade the existing operating system, it was not able to preserve the programs I had installed on Windows 7. It did save several settings; however, I had to reinstall Office, Photoshop, etc.

It found drivers on the installation disc for most devices I had attached, with the exception of a TP-Link wireless adapter. That device requires a hard-wire connection to the ethernet to allow Windows 8 to pull the driver from the Microsoft Windows Update site.

Overall, the installation process was quick – less than ¹⁄₂ an hour – and relatively painless.

The Windows 8 Metro interface has taken some flak, especially when run on a desktop system. Although it takes a little getting used to, it is actually quite flexible. If you hunt around for information about keyboard shortcuts, you’ll find that pressing the WINDOWS key and the X key will pull up a power user menu that will get you right into the control panel, disk management, etc. These keyboard based shortcuts are great. Microsoft screwed up here by failing to include any direction about their existence.

The biggest adjustment is the absence of the start button menu. However, its functions are all still there. You just have to learn how to access them. For example, from the start page in Metro, you can just start typing to run a search for a file or app. You don’t need the search box in the old start menu to do that.

For those who complain about booting to Metro instead of desktop, I wonder whether they’re just looking for things to gripe about. When you boot into Metro, you just need one mouse click to proceed to the desktop. Have we become so flaccid and spoiled that a single mouse click is too much labor and too much delay in our lives? Really?nnThe system boots and shuts down in no time flat – I have a Sandisk SSD in the computer, and it boots into Windows after POST (the power on self test diagnostic) in under ten seconds.

Overall, this package works decently to upgrade your OS to Microsoft’s latest offering. You probably don’t need to make the upgrade if Windows 7 is still working well for you. You’ll get faster boot times and some small system improvements, but it isn’t an earthshattering performance boost.

When Windows 8.1 rolls out later this year and permits users to boot directly to a desktop with some kind of start menu, more users may find occasion to upgrade.