Absolute Win8 install nightmare

[mikeymikec]

Old-ish machine, but it works fine for my parents. My mum wanted LibreOffice to cold-start quicker, as on XP it takes about 15 seconds, and I know that on the same hardware, even on Vista it takes less than half that time to cold-start. There was also the April 2014 deadline to consider.

I'm not thinking that my experience of the Win8 install routine is in any way average / definitive, but I can't think of any install routines that have gone anywhere near as bad as this (apart from ones involving subtlety dodgy hardware).

I started at 10AM today, and decided to excessively not take any chances, and backed up the whole file system before starting rather than just my parents' files. About an hour went by and that was done, during which I also downloaded a few drivers (WLAN USB for example).

The hardware (desktop, probably needless to say):

Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2GB DDR2-800
GeForce 7300LE PCI-E 64MB
80GB HDD SATA
DVDRW
Netgear WG111v3

I lost about an hour because the first install failed during setup due to a slightly faulty memory module (I was a bit surprised at this because the system had been rock solid stable, my parents don't remember it ever giving any trouble and neither do I). I replaced the module and got the install going again.

The first phase of setup went fine (I started from scratch each time, deleting all partitions), then it rebooted at an expected point, during boot-up it showed the Windows 8 loading screen, then the monitor put 'NO SIGNAL' up on the screen. The computer evidently still was booting, and responded to pressing the power button once. I tried again, still nothing.

I then found out that Microsoft, in their infinite *$*&^"£H"£& "wisdom", have removed the F8 early startup menu option, so no VGA mode. After a few attempts it inexplicably continued setup without issue, and after I got the Nvidia driver on it didn't give any further problems (it was previously using an MS WDDM driver and recognised the card correctly), until I did the first cold start, then the same problem again. In the end I tried having a VGA cable also connected, which worked fine. The nvidia driver reckoned the DVI connection was some bizarro 'television composite' connector, and no amount of convincing would get it to work properly on pure DVI. WTF.

It also BSOD'd once during the WinSAT check (citing the graphics card, the 116 error).

Apart from my grievances with the new Win8 Start system, which I won't go into here because the topic has been done to death (which certainly weighed significantly on the end result of today's excursion into computer fuckwittery), the thing that got on my nerves almost as much as the DVI issue was Windows Update. 12 updates came in, 4 wouldn't install. Each time it failed to install updates it took about 15 minutes to right itself and start Windows properly again (which it did all by itself, it didn't need assistance, to its credit), however Windows Update seemed to suffer significantly from amnesia - it had no record of any installed updates even immediately after a load had failed to install. The event log was also strangely clear of update/servicing info. It wasn't BSOD'ing during updating either. Googling didn't yield any definitive results, and my usual tactics to sort Windows Update problems didn't help either:

Windows Update troubleshooter (found problems and fixed them, it said)
Nuke softwaredistribution and try again
SFC /SCANNOW

I considered searching for the 'windows update readiness tool', but quite frankly it was already 8pm or so by this point and for a clean Windows install this simply should not have happened. I had a spare Vista licence, and Vista works fine on my wife's machine if she puts it into sleep mode every night rather than shutting down, so that's what I did here.

Within 2 hours of starting to install Vista SP1 from DVD (clean install, all partitions nuked obviously), and with only the DVI cable used throughout, no problems, and right now the computer will spend its time installing post SP2 updates (I did a standalone install of SP2 to hurry things along). Not a single thing went wrong. Admittedly this computer was built in the era of Vista, but I would put a hefty bet down that Win7 would go on it without a hitch either. I'll go back and finish off the install tomorrow (if everything goes to plan, the defrag will trigger at 1AM, 75% of the post SP2 updates will have been installed, and apart from a few more updates I'll feed it between reboots I just need to do the app install work.

 

[postmortemIA]

I have 7300 Go on my laptop, Windows 8 did not even recognize the card. All I could do is install Windows 7 driver old few years. And it didn't work too well, even DVDs would skip. Looks like nvidia released new driver, might work better.
either way, no big loss .. it is not worth it if everything does not work right.

 

[HeXen]

not sure I would have the highest expectations for an OS released in 2012 to function perfectly on hardware from like 2006 or whenever to begin with, however i'm sure its difficult for MS to guarantee much when there are so many hardware combo's out there.
Regardless, not much excuse, you should have gone here first thing: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8

Before upgrading to Windows 8, we recommend that you run the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant......You can run Upgrade Assistant without purchasing or installing Windows 8

But if it's any consolation, I haven't had any trouble whatsoever with W8

 

[postmortemIA]

not sure I would have the highest expectations for an OS released in 2012 to function perfectly on hardware from like 2006 or whenever to begin with, however i'm sure its difficult for MS to guarantee much when there are so many hardware combo's out there.
Regardless, not much excuse, you should have gone here first thing: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8


But if it's any consolation, I haven't had any trouble whatsoever with W8

For me, it said everything (including graphics card) is compatible.

 

[Mem]

It happens,infact you can go back to XP,Vista,Win7 etc... and even further back and read of bad upgrades OS wise etc..same will happen for Win9,10,11 etc..however saying that you are in the minority since most users get fine upgrades,I'm three for three on Win7 to Win8 upgrades.


Does not help you but you not alone .

 

[mikeymikec]

If say the graphics card isn't compatible, then surely a VGA driver should have kicked in?

I bet my parents wouldn't have had an issue forking out about £25 for a graphics card if that would do the trick, but this situation has made me a lot more nervous about trying Win8 on my 2010 PC as I use DVI, I don't have a HDMI monitor and I'm sure as hell not going to use VGA on my 1080p monitor.

I would take some convincing about how the Windows Update issue could be the fault of 'old hardware'. The amnesia thing was just bizarre, and I can't remember ever having Windows Update problems on a clean, brand-new install of Windows.

@ Mem

I pointed out at the start of my post that I don't consider my experience to be average or definitive, I was just relating my experience to this forum.

I'm definitely not the only one with nvidia issues on Win8 though, except most people ended up with a black screen with a flashing cursor.

I could potentially understand the nvidia issue being due to an RTM driver which isn't ideally suited to my particular card, but with the official, up-to-date nvidia driver for my card did pretty much the same thing it is just bizarre.

TBH I'm a bit surprised at say a GeForce 7 or 8 driver shipping with Win8 considering how old the graphics cards are, I am perfectly capable of installing drivers myself, I won't go crying about having a VGA driver on the first boot

 

[Mem]

If say the graphics card isn't compatible, then surely a VGA driver should have kicked in?

I bet my parents wouldn't have had an issue forking out about £25 for a graphics card if that would do the trick, but this situation has made me a lot more nervous about trying Win8 on my 2010 PC as I use DVI, I don't have a HDMI monitor and I'm sure as hell not going to use VGA on my 1080p monitor.

I would take some convincing about how the Windows Update issue could be the fault of 'old hardware'. The amnesia thing was just bizarre, and I can't remember ever having Windows Update problems on a clean, brand-new install of Windows.

@ Mem

I pointed out at the start of my post that I don't consider my experience to be average or definitive, I was just relating my experience to this forum.

I'm definitely not the only one with nvidia issues on Win8 though, except most people ended up with a black screen with a flashing cursor.

I could potentially understand the nvidia issue being due to an RTM driver which isn't ideally suited to my particular card, but with the official, up-to-date nvidia driver for my card did pretty much the same thing it is just bizarre.

TBH I'm a bit surprised at say a GeForce 7 or 8 driver shipping with Win8 considering how old the graphics cards are, I am perfectly capable of installing drivers myself, I won't go crying about having a VGA driver on the first boot

I forgot to meantion I've a MSI 560Ti card with latest Nvidia drivers installed on my main Win8 PC and even Nvidia 650m on my laptop as well,both upgraded fine from 7 to 8( my third PC is AMD based video card,upgraded fine too) ,end of the day there could be millions of reasons why it failed the upgrade from software to anti-virus etc....

I acknowledge the fact you have had problems and as I stated there could be many reasons why,think about how many different hardware and software combo's users have out there?..only takes one that can screw up the entire system or one bit of malware on the PC already.

I know one user that upgraded from 7 to 8 with Norton's AV installed and bang system crashed,again this is not you, but what I'm saying only takes one bad software etc.. to mess up the system regardless of the user.

HeXen quoted this,

Before upgrading to Windows 8, we recommend that you run the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant......You can run Upgrade Assistant without purchasing or installing Windows 8

I did that for all my three upgrades and removed everything I was told from MSE to my print software(I purchased newer version off ebay at bargain price that was compatible with 8).


Microsoft can try to make it painless as possible but there is always a small risk,if it helps I had an OS crash on Linux OS few years ago on upgrade , so it shows even Linux is not bullet proof.

 

[mikeymikec]

I acknowledge the fact you have had problems and as I stated there could be many reasons why,think about how many different hardware and software combo's users have out there?..only takes one that can screw up the entire system or one bit of malware on the PC already.

Clean install of Win8 Pro, nuked partitions etc.

I also said in the OP that I don't consider my experience to be average or definitive, I just wanted to relate my experience.

I had an interesting turn of events on Vista - in the first slew of important updates post SP2, I hadn't noticed an Nvidia WDDM 1.2 driver which was marked as important. It caused very similar symptoms on Vista as I saw on Win8, and it was exactly the same driver version that resulted from that update as I tried on Win8. Once I removed the driver and used the standard Windows driver for the card, then hid that update from the list, the system didn't have any further problems. So my guess is that the Win8 default Nvidia driver is the same or very similar to the most current nvidia driver (306.97), and has a bug in that affects one or more graphics card models.

I do hope that Microsoft isn't testing their newer version WDDM drivers out on older versions of Windows via automatic updates, that could potentially suck.

 

[Mem]

I had at one time a Nvidia factory overclocked video card that would cause havoc on ONLY a few of my programs ,took me ages to fine the cause.


Hardware and software can be very weird sometimes.

Ironically I installed Win8 on overclocked CPU (overclocked via BIOS) and video card (factory overclocked)with no issues.

 

[cboath]

I have 7300 Go on my laptop, Windows 8 did not even recognize the card. All I could do is install Windows 7 driver old few years. And it didn't work too well, even DVDs would skip. Looks like nvidia released new driver, might work better.
either way, no big loss .. it is not worth it if everything does not work right.

I put 7 on an older laptop that had an 8400 in it. 7 didn't recognize the card. Worse still, I thought the card was an intel card (I was given the laptop and THOUGHT i'd looked at the device manager before wiping) so I spent two hours trying to figure out why the damned intel drivers wouldn't work Then I went to the nvidia site and grabbed a driver and figured it can't hurt anything and it worked.

I guess I got out of the upgrade habbit long ago. I started doing only clean installs back during the 95 betas and haven't really done upgrades since.

On my desktop, I was stunned at my 8 setup. Onto a new SSD, start to final login and to desktop was 15 minutes. Of course I still had to update the video driver, reinstall av, malwarbytes, ff, etc. But the OS install just flew. I swore something went wrong because it shouldn't go that fast

 

[HumblePie]

Did the windows 8 install this weekend with zero problems. First I installed windows 7 fully and when I was done I thought, what the hell, I'll grab windows 8 through the download promo offer they have going. Since I was doing a fresh install anyhow, why not try out the new for a cheap deal?

Had zero problems with the install that way since I got windows 7 full installed with all the latest drivers first. Wonder if that would help make a difference or not for the OP to try.

As to my impressions to the OS, I both like and hate it. I think it feels faster and smoother and I'm not having any problems with stability. However, I hate the look/feel of it all. I hate having to create my own shortcut tiles just to get a 1 click option for a shutdown and restart buttons for my PC for example. No glass look to aero. Everything is all blocky and pastel colors for the default themes. It's all so ugly, and non-intuitive on layout. So as a user you are forced to go looking for themes to put the look and feel in a somewhat tolerable layout. Even then, it's not perfect as some things for the look/feel are just locked down.

 

[Pardus]

Windows 8 won't run office 2003. This OS reminds me of Windows ME. If i buy a new pc and it comes with Windows 8, first thing is to wipe it out and use Ubuntu.

 

[Mem]

Windows 8 won't run office 2003. This OS reminds me of Windows ME. If i buy a new pc and it comes with Windows 8, first thing is to wipe it out and use Ubuntu.

Lol...so 9 years old software which was released back in XP days does not run on Win8,I think most users would be using something a bit more modern ,you do know Microsoft have newer versions out.

 

[mikeymikec]

Lol...so 9 years old software which was released back in XP days does not run on Win8,I think most users would be using something a bit more modern ,you do know Microsoft have newer versions out.

What has age of software got to do with anything? I've seen much newer software which was badly designed and had more problems with say DEP than much older software.

I don't mind a piece of software being deemed as "not working" on a new version of an OS because of a decent technical reason involving an improvement in the OS. For example, Office 97 on XP with standard user privs is a bit of a no-go because Office 97's security model isn't very good and requires the user to have write access to files in the "Program Files" folder. Outlook 2002/XP has a problem on Vista and later saving passwords because it uses the older method of storing passwords, but I'm not sure what the shortcomings of the "Protected Storage" system were or whether its replacement is any better.

I'm not aware of any improvements in Win8 that might stop Office 2003 from working properly. If there's a good reason, I'm fine with it, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to want to generate a bit of extra revenue by forcing people to upgrade Office at the same time as well.

 

[Mem]

What has age of software got to do with anything? I've seen much newer software which was badly designed and had more problems with say DEP than much older software.

I don't mind a piece of software being deemed as "not working" on a new version of an OS because of a decent technical reason involving an improvement in the OS. For example, Office 97 on XP with standard user privs is a bit of a no-go because Office 97's security model isn't very good and requires the user to have write access to files in the "Program Files" folder. Outlook 2002/XP has a problem on Vista and later saving passwords because it uses the older method of storing passwords, but I'm not sure what the shortcomings of the "Protected Storage" system were or whether its replacement is any better.

I'm not aware of any improvements in Win8 that might stop Office 2003 from working properly. If there's a good reason, I'm fine with it, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to want to generate a bit of extra revenue by forcing people to upgrade Office at the same time as well.

Age has everything to do with it especially when there are newer versions available,I remember when some of my old software would not work on XP,Vista etc....so nothing new here with Win8,just that some people have very short memories.

You can bet Win9,10 etc will have similar issues,end of the day some software works and some does not.

Supporting older software sometimes is just not worth the cost or time with new operating systems,especially when there are newer versions of that software available..


I still have my DOS and Win95 software etc...around somewhere ,should I complain it does not work with operating systems like XP etc?... no I purchased newer versions of my software.