OK, so I spent a very wet, foggy, Queens Birthday Monday upgrading to the Windows 8 Release Preview. I had been on the Win8 Consumer Preview for some months, and was generally happy, but one must always “move forward”.
My prep was fairly easy, only needing to note the apps I’d installed and confirming all my data was in a safe place. As I was already on Win8, the baked in Settings Sync was already backing up all my system/apps/browser settings to the cloud.
I ran the new Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, it downloaded the new Win8 build, copied it to a USB stick, and made it bootable. On reboot the process started without incident. In fact the whole install was absolutely seamless and easy, albeit much much slower than with the Consumer Preview. I can only put this slowness down to the Win8 cloud sync of the settings – the new build needing to download all my settings during install. But once it finally started up, it was straight into a fully working system – favourites and all.
After installing my apps, everything is back to normal. In fact, so far the Metro interface seems more stable than with the Consumer Preview. I still had to add a pseudo Start button for the desktop, but that’s the only non-standard customisation so far.
If you want to take the leap, then visit http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview.
