Anyone building new for Windows 8.1?

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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My i7-930 board bit the dust, so not buying new, but repurposing. Bought a 480GB M500 and running the 8.1 preview on a E3-1245V2. First in depth use of Win8 since the Dev Preview came out 2 years ago? Boot to desktop and classic shell make it very usable and comfortable.
 

Patrick

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I started the upgrade this morning on the i7-3930K rig. It was chugging along fine but I ended up having to head to work. When I got home, I logged in. What greeted me was a black screen and white cursor. I sometimes can see the start menu but it flickers on and off.

After a bit of searching (I could go ctrl + shift + esc and get chrome to load manually) I saw video drivers are often to blame. I turned off every startup process including catalyst. Also tried switching to the Quadro K4000 reviewed recently. No luck (login screen still looks great though)

I then tried safe mode and the same thing, nothing would launch. So I tried downloading Windows 8.1 DVD media to use as a recovery disk, disk operations failed.

Fun process! Moral of the story: should have just deployed a newly built system.
 

sboesch

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Aug 3, 2012
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I ran the upgrade from the MS store 2 days ago on my EliteBook 9470m. It went smooth enough. I still run a Win7 VM in hyper-v because 8-8.1 is not quite enterprise ready yet.
 

Mike

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May 29, 2012
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I ran the upgrade from the MS store 2 days ago on my EliteBook 9470m. It went smooth enough. I still run a Win7 VM in hyper-v because 8-8.1 is not quite enterprise ready yet.
Doesn't your battery life suck with Hyper-v?
 

Aluminum

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Sep 7, 2012
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yeah, had nausea for a few minutes until I was saved by classic shell

I did a fresh install on my gaming box in pure UEFI mode, the way I have it set up most of them are portable.
(straight up copy program folder + whatever crap they put in user folders works with no glitches and settings preserved for most, also some self-manage everything with launchers and config files inside in main folder tree because windows sucks)

No problems with latest ati betas, but it was just using a generic driver before that unlike 8.0 which has whatever WHQL was out when it shipped. (I think)

Intel has RST/chipset/etc for 8.1, interesting seeing the E5v2 "northbridge" shares drivers with upcoming E7v2, kinda makes sense as they are all ivy.


The only thing that really counts as testing anything server-like:
Mellanox OFED installer for "2012 R2" (same core) barfed at the end, but the driver and tools work fine.


Oh yeah, ****ing secureboot watermark, no way in hell I am turning that on. Need to go read up on how people are getting rid of that.