Don't let Windows 8 upgrade offers lure you into buying a new PC

Vista has taught me to never buy hardware on the promise of future updates.

That being said, I will be getting a new laptop by September.

I never buy premade except for a few occasions like a 7 laptop as a gift for someone last year. Of course by then 7 had already been out for nearly 2yrs. almost back in May '11.

As a rule many companies will introduce their latest models of laptops and desktops with the newest version preinstalled. The pcs with the previous version have already been out for a bit where the Anytime Upgrade offer presents itself by way of OEM.

For the experienced user looking upgrading the OS it's a matter of planning a clean install over an upgrade of OS to start with due to knowing that type of upgrade can result in bad installs and hanging onto clutter the previous version's install collected over time. The novice user however who doesn't how to perform a clean install or plan to buy a separate upgrade or full version disk for the next version will usually jump on these offers.

One thing to say however is that with 7 and 8 to out soon there's no real concern about any new system requirements like needing more memory while that can never hurt any as far as overall performance. With the introduction of the MinWin kernel in 7 the shock of Vista's minimum requirements not being accurate but less then actual(a Biggie mistake by MS) the rush to upgrade hardwares on a present 7 system isn't there.

Can you imagine running 9, 10, 11 if those versions to come along later if called that run well on the exact same machine without a hiccup? You unexpectedly find your then 10yr. old 7 machine runs the latest version at the time without any problem would be something to see as well as some having tried the early builds of 7 on real old pcs only seeing 512mb of ram or less.

The one thing 8 will be bringing in that will require new hardwares would be the new Metro UI and touchscreen technology more involved then the HP Touch Pen already seen. For those that rushed into the Anytime offer they would then be saying: "Why couldn't I wait until some new machines were out?! ".

The concerns expressed are understandable, but not universal. My experience has been somewhat different.

I purchased a Dell E520 with XP Pro a few months before Vista was released, with a "free" upgrade to Vista Business when it became available. As soon as Vista was made available to me by Dell I installed it and it ran fairly well (considering it was Vista, pre-SP1). All my PC hardware was supported with drivers from Dell.

Over the next year or so I upgraded my CPU, video card and ram, but not because my PC was dogging with Vista, I wanted better gaming performance, etc. When Windows 7 came onto the scene I installed it and it was a very good experience for me. Windows 7 supported all my existing PC hardware (printers were another story, but eventually Canon got with the program). And, as we all know, Win 7 is a bit easier on the hardware than Vista was.

Now I'm dual-booting the E520 with Win 7 & 8, and again, Windows 8 is supporting all my existing PC hardware, and Win 8 runs at least as fast as 7 does. I haven't tried any gaming under Win 8 yet, but I think it will be ok by the time the RTM rolls around.

Aside from the touch technology, I think it would be a safe bet to take advantage of an upgrade offer if a new PC is on the horizon for anyone.

Just my opinion, of course...

If the games you have require Direct X 9 elements be present they won't run on 8. One of the first things looked at when going to the CP was how would it be and what games are likely to run into problems as far as compatibility(very old Legacy obviously not, DosBox to be next).

Sure enough when going to see if DX 9 would go on it wasn't going to happen. "not compatible with this version of Windows" was the immediate error message seen when running the set up for the full DX 9 package. Without that one old title simply saw an OpenGL issue while another 2001 game not requiring any DX version seems to run well.

As far as the AnyTime Upgrade it depends if you saw an actual upgrade over XP or a replacement install where the install removed the former XP install first in order to see a clean install of Vista at the time. Iften this will be the case while going to use an upgrade disk to upgrade over not replace is what sees a good deal of the now useless temp folders and any other leftovers.

A clean install of any newer version or any version for that matter is always the best move unless you are trying to save what is already on an existing install by Upgrade to Repair. That's a different situation however.

The writer there however seems to have based things on differences in hardware requirements for older XP machines with only 512mb or 1gb of memory, an AGP video card, slower 4,200rpm or 5,400rpm main drive, etc. and then moving upto Vista which obviously saw the 2gb(x86), 2.5gb(x64) recommendations for memory and other newer hardwares when the new machines were out in late 2007.

As for 7 and 8 both seeing the new MinWin modular type kernel over the getting too big in services previous version the minimum requirements are just about equal if not slightly less since neither will pounce on resources as much as the older larger Windows. This is also one of the main reasons for 7 becoming a success story over the bad rep Vista got.