And for anyone claiming that Windows 7 does, Win 7 is out of the question because M$ pulled all copies of it over here.

It reportedly works fine on Windows 8 (I don't have this game myself). Windows 8's compatibility is mostly the same as Windows 7. I don't know of any recent releases that work on 7 but not 8.

If you really can't stand the new Start Screen interface there are alternatives like Classic Shell (free). New interface aside, Windows 8 is essentially a faster, smoother Windows 7 in every aspect, so there's no reason to want to go backwards.

Depending on your graphics card, for a while, OpenGL games wouldn't work because the drivers for OpenGL on Win8 didn't exist for those cards. But it seems it's been remedied for at least some of the affected cards.

Thanks for the info. Classic Shell has finished downloading and I'm still currently pulling 8. $50 for Zealand until jan 31st.

Now I wish I would've put KRATER + DLC aside while it was on sale last week. From the compatibility preview that Win 8 does before install, it is absolutely confirmed that Sim City 4 Deluxe is NOT compatible.

I wouldn't have done this upgrade but I spoke to a very trust worthy independent tech who completely understood the issues with MS removing manual control so that it's difficult to impossible to remove cooperating vendors ad and marketing ware.

He claims 8 has the same amount of control that XP does once you've learned the entire OS.

Apparently it has only been Vista that did everyone dirty.

Still frustrating, this should have been the only upgrade since XP.

If you're referring to the issue with OpenGL on AMD's bundled drivers that can be resolved through a simple registry tweak (the files were present but had a minor error that broke OpenGL). AMD has subsequently released a legacy driver for their earlier HD models. The registry tweak will still work for models not supported by this package.The pre-install assessment isn't entirely definite and will depend on what specific edition/patch they tested; according to various threads SimCity 4 does work on Windows 8. :)

There has been a lot of talk lately about Windows 8 locking things down but a lot of this is based on concerns for the future (Windows 9 or 10 or whatever) rather than how Windows 8 actually is here and now. If you've previously been using XP there are a great many changes to get used to, but if you've been using Vista/7 a lot of it is familiar.

Well my desktop is dead at a black screen right now from the service install.

Using me girl's laptop and have downloaded and burnt the ISO from 8 from MS.

Hoping it's a simple issue like having to reinstall my Radeon drivers and I can use this ISO to boot into recovery.

Good chance my old crappy IDE drive finally crapped (using SATA coverter cable) or I had less space available on the drive than I realized before starting install.

My PC has been updated recently and should handle most of 8's features (8 told me that secure boot was incompatible with my m/b....I 'secure boot' isn't the 'safe mode' I'm attempting to load into), but I've kept the two hard drives from the old one.