

Windows 8 upgrade - consumer confusion regarding installation options - progrock
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8

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progrock
Microsoft is offering a Windows 8 upgrade for £25 in the UK.

There's some confusion over installation options, and process. Especially when
one wants to do a clean install.

I have Debian and Vista sharing a partition on my laptop. I boot Vista rarely.
I am frustrated as is, that I have the 32bit version installed, which can't
take advantage of all of my memory.

I did think about upgrading Vista from 32bit to 64bit but Lenovo pulled their
Windows images from the support site. And I didn't get any
recovery/installation disks with my Thinkpad.

A while back I'd heard there would be an affordable upgrade option available
for Windows 8. So figured I'd just hang on.

Looking at this page though - it would seem that Microsoft are not encouraging
upgrading from 32bit to 64 bit OSs via this path. There must be a bunch of
people wanting to upgrade from say 32bit XP/Vista, to 64bit Windows 8.

There are work arounds / hacks for the install - but lots of confusion in the
forums about how people should attempt a clean installation.

It shouldn't be this hard (or this confusing.) Why can't it be as simple as
downloading an ISO and burning it to disk/usb? Activation could occur later by
submitting your new product key (that you just bought) - and if necessary your
old one.

