Note: this thread is not meant for discussion about how and why you hate Win8 and will never use it.

I've seen quite a few people also here using Win8 preview versions, and apparently some are eagerly waiting to get the final version on their PCs. So I am genuinely interested, what is your personal push to adopt it as early as possible?

Does Win7 have some issues that you see fixed in Win8, or do you simply like to always use the latest Windows revision as soon as possible, or does your work or studies push you to learn about the next Windows revision, etc. etc.?

I bought a new PC (laptop) recently specifically so that I have at least one potent Win7 machine, before Win8 becomes common as the preloaded OS with new PCs. Just in case Win8 isn't all it is cracked to be.

Yet, at the same time I keep in my pocket the option to upgrade this to Win8 for a bit of extra money (was it around 10-15€ or so?), if Win8 really turns out to be great and making Win7 pretty much obsolete overnight. But I let others be the guinea pigs first.

But most probably I will not "move" to Win8 until I purchase my next PC (preloaded with Win8), whenever that will be. Years from now, I guess. One reason is that whenever I move to the next Windows release, I have to study again how to perform certain things, especially related to retro-gaming (e.g. getting Munt emulator to work in Win7/Vista is quite a bit more complicated than it was in WinXP, etc.). And currently I have a pretty good idea how my (older) games run in Win7, or how to make them run. No idea about Win8, yet.

So I don't feel like actively moving to next Win8 unless it offers good perks for doing it. But if it comes preloaded on my next PC, fine, I guess. At least I still have my older PC with the earlier Windows release, for those cases I might want to use it instead.

I think that's pretty much my concern. There are people that have a certain OCDness about having the most recent version of software on their PCs, but my impression is that Windows 8 is going to break more than it fixes to begin with. It offers absolutely nothing that Windows 7 doesn't already in terms of the desktop experience (aside from the complete inability to disable Aero, which is likely to break a lot of older games), and Metro really does not interest me in the slightest.

I personally don't see much support for Metro coming from third parties - Microsoft had to work fucking hard by the looks of it to get the exclusives that they did - and most "unsponsored" (or unbribed, should I say) publishers will retain desktop compatibility to avoid isolating the XP/Vista/7 users. And that'll be the crux. Software will remain desktop-specific for a long time to come yet, and there's reason to believe that Metro will not take off at all, so there's little real reason to upgrade straight away.

I should mention that I do have a certain OCDness when it comes to my Ubuntu installation, but differences between Ubuntu releases are rarely as game-changing as differences between Windows versions, and upgrading between Ubuntu versions has less of a tendency to break legacy software compatibility.

I had the developer Edition on my Netbook for some months now and never used Metro. As I got the opportunity to already buy it from MSDN quite cheap, I got it last weekend and installed the final product...

I was quite amazed to what Metro developed. It is quite native, all the programs use up the whole screen (even non-Metro Programs like Google Chrome), and everything is really fast.

I can only say 1 bad thing at the moment:
Metro requires a minimum resolution of 1024x768. With a Netbook with an uncommon screen size and Intel Graphics Card, it is quite tricky to get it working at all (always got a message, that the App can not be run because of a too low resolution setting). Found a workaround later to increase the resolution by using some registry tweaks.

I don't quite can blame them, though. For example, I have the same urge e.g. always upgrading the latest firmwares to my PCs if available (even if I am unsure if I really need them, e.g. new BIOS just adds supports to some new CPU that doesn't concern me), or sometimes graphics drivers (albeit I haven't checked these for awhile, for some reason). A year ago I even went through my oldest PCs to see they have the latest BIOS versions for that particular motherboard or laptop, just in case it affects their ability to handle bigger hard drives etc.

Or heck, I like to try out new Linux distributions quite often, but it is a bit different because I usually don't use them as my main OS at that point. Just fooling around with them in a virtual machine etc. Not to mention, I did try out one Win8 preview in a virtual machine too, just to get some preliminary feel about it.

I guess my stance with Win8 is pretty much "wait and see". I am not actively opposing it, but neither do I feel any urge to get it ASAP. Hence, I will probably get it on my next PC preloaded, just because it was there already.

Several reasons, really.

1) It's reportedly better optimised and overall runs faster, which is always nice.

2) The upgrade offer is quite cheap. I'm not eligible for the cheapest update, but last time I checked, Microsoft said all current W7 users would have that option for a pretty low price. Like less than half of what W7 would cost you today.

3) I want to upgrade my Office suite to the latest version once that comes out, and from what I saw in the preview release, it looks like will integrate a lot better, visually and otherwise, with W8. Reason for getting the latest Office is that I'm still on 2007 and considering it's one of my primary work tools, I really feel I should use the latest version possible.

4) I'm a sucker for the aesthetic formerly known as Metro.

5) I actively and openly refuse to dismiss the work of Microsoft's UI experts based on a few screenshots. (I'm actually one of those people who think the Ribbon is brilliant.) In all areas of life, I'm trying to make a conscious effort to not reject changes just because they are changes, because I believe this attitude hinders development. So it's a way to make a personal stand to the negative hype, I guess.

6) I think the doom and gloom predictions regarding the Windows Store are utter bollocks.

Because:

1. It's cheap when getting it right away, not going to muck about with test versions though.
2. My HD is full and I'll pretty much need to reinstall anyway after getting a better one.
3. I dont wanna reinstall Vista, because it's not all awesome.
4. I didn't get win7 because I didn't want to pay MS to fix vista.

If I had Win7 I probably wouldn't be upgrading.

I used to be the same with graphics drivers. I used to check every couple of days to see if NVIDIA or ATI had released new drivers and I'd install them straight away in the odd belief that they would provide better performance. With age comes experience and wisdom, of course - the jolt being ATI's monumental fuck-up with the handling of the Quake engine extensions when they introduced OpenGL 3.0 - and you come to realise that both tend to break backwards compatibility in their drivers in the interest of getting newer stuff to run better.

As for BIOS updates, well, that's a whole different kettle of fish. Even the mainboard manufacturers themselves say that you should never flash your BIOS unless you have a damn good reason for doing so, because the risk of bricking your mainboard outweighs the benefits. In my 25 years of gaming, I've only been forced to upgrade my BIOS once, and that was because my mainboard in its supplied state didn't support my then Athlon XP 1800 processor (the original BIOS force-underclocked it to 1333 MHz instead of the 1533MHz it should have been, and a quick email to ASRock revealed that the support for the newer processors was introduced in a BIOS update.

What is the ETA on the new office? I never switched because I usually use a remote desktop for work, but nowadays I really like having the same Office at work as at home.

I don't think it was officially announced yet, but most estimates I've seen expect it to roughly coincide with the W8 release, which is sometime in late October, I believe.

Good think I held out on buying 2010 then ... ;-)

Yeah, so did I. It's not quite cheap enough to buy a soon-to-be-old version right now.

But now I've checked the web and latest estimates expect it to land in February or thereabouts. But there's no insider info yet, so who knows. If I were to take a guess, I'd say they'll do their best to show that new Surface Pro tablet of theirs in the best possible light, so they might want to push that a bit earlier. That was also supposed to make it before the Christmas season, I think.

EDIT: Found some better info now. The Surface is slated for release alongside W8 in October, but Surface Pro is supposed to appear only three months after that. Which makes the January/February prediction more likely.

Yeah, generally true, but I feel quite confident doing them due to my work. Heck, I even have access to a JTAG flash programmer if needed. :) Meaning, if the firmware really became fully corrupted (both the active and backup banks, due to some freak occurence; usually the working backup bank automatically becomes active if the other bank becomes corrupted for any reason), I could still have means to fix it (I've had to do that sometimes at work, never at home).

The reason I started looking after the firmware versions also at my home is some old occurence where my PCs old BIOS didn't support big hard drives, and apparently managed to corrupt a big HDD partition I connected to it, or something like that.

But as you said, usually new BIOS revisions just add support to new hardware components, or sometimes add some nice new options. Very rarely they are critical... but sometimes they can be, even if it is some thing that could happen only rarely. Common users should in general stay away from flashing the firmwares just for the fun of it.

I think the question is why not be ?

I have been part of the nix community for years, where early adoption is stanfard as it allows the developers to tighten up problems that the users find. I have not really noticed the same trend in Windows, as I have always believed that Microsoft stance is "you take what we give you".

No, I am not trying to start the linux / windows discussion, and I may be completley wrong about Microsoft. Personally, I think its brilliant that people adopt early, as long as the developers listen. Believe me, this doesn't always happen in the nix world lol

My personal reason mainly was retrogaming. At the moment I mostly know how to handle things in Win7 (and earlier), no idea about Win8 yet. Maybe someone else can tell me if e.g. the installation and usage of Munt is identical to how it goes in Win7, for example.

I presume with time we start to see more and more workarounds and 3rd party fixes to get possible Win8 specific quirks out of the way, same way like happened over time with earlier Windows revisions. But it takes some time.

But I also see some mention that they have apparently installed Win8 on e.g. their secondary PC, e.g. netbook. Sure, why not, at least if you get it cheaply? Maybe I was approaching the question more from the thinking of leaving Win7 (and older) pretty much completely behind, replacing current Win7 installation with Win8 and using Win8 as the main,or only, OS from then on.