The LAN driver is the one i'm most concerned about and it was included in the WIN 8 install.

It's an upgrade version so 7 needs to be on the drive. The upgrade went perfectly, but I hate upgrades. I saw something about a clean install on Microsoft's website so I tried it. Since I now had 8 on the drive, I just had to reboot from the DVD and do the install and it offered a custom install which let me wipe and format.

I added in my media center serial number and that went fine as well. A little slow, but no issues.

I just finished that and grabbed all the Asus drivers and installed them. It's doing a reboot and update now. All has been flawless so far.

I always unplug the power connectors of my hard drives when doing this so nothing gets accidently formatted, so now it's time to start plugging them back in. I do them one by one and be sure they connect.

I kinda like the tiles so far. They look good on my 60 inch screen!

 

Hey Scott, did you ever finish installing mountain loin OS using Workstation?

 

No, i never got it all downloaded.

 

So everything went smooth then? I had all kinds of issues after I installed it on my laptop from '07. I don't recall exactly which driver it was (perhaps the video driver), but it was so slow that it was completely unusable. Just clicking a tile would take over 5 minutes to change.

I don't use the tiles often, but they come in handy sometimes. I use the weather all the time, so that all I have to do is hit the Windows key and my weather tile is right there.

 

Oh yeah, I remember you saying someone messed with something and you couldn't finish downloading it. I just remembered about that and was wondering if you ever did it.

 

The install went smooth with no issues, but when it came time to start plugging in the hard drives they all weren't showing up. The boot drive was obviously fine and the second one was too. The 3rd and 4th drives would not show up in Windows (but they did show in the bios), nor did my two external 3 terabyte usb drives. I double checked the drivers and they were installed. I did notice that the bios was old so I did an upgrade on that and after I rebooted the drives were now visible.

I installed the drivers for my cable card, got media center installed and that is going fine. My Zune software went smooth too. Been running 24 hours now without a reboot or hiccup.

I like the tiles and like that you can go to desktop mode as well. The start menu on the side and full screen list will take some getting used to. Shutting down takes too many clicks and is a pain, so hopefully there is an app that will put a tile up for that. Still need to explore.

My regular PC is the same motherboard (Asus P8Z68-V PRO) so I may take the plunge and do that one this weekend.

 

Since you already fixed it, just for future reference: How big were all the drives that you had issues with? Any partitions over 2TB may give you problems. Google converting MBR to GPT and UEFI.

That's what I thought at first too about restarting and shutting down. But it's really the same amount of clicks. Just move the mouse to the bottom right, click settings, then power, and you're there. As I was getting used to it though, I did create a shortcut to shutdown and I put it on the bottom left corner of the taskbar. It's basically just a shortcut to "shutdown.exe" in a command prompt. "shutdown /s /t 0". I've gotten used to shutting it down as Microsoft intended now though.

 

Thought this was cool

 

The largest internal drives are 1.5TB, and the two USB externals are 3.0TB. The ran fine under Win7 so I would have assumed they would have run under Win8.

No need to do any drive converting right now, but some day... maybe?

 

Just a thought, in case you ever have anymore problems. I'm about to add a few large drives to my home server. It's pretty old (still running a P4) and I fully expect to have issues with the drives. lol.

 

I just ran into my first compatibility issue with software. My DRM removal program just plays the song instead of silently converting it.

 

I'm ready to go homicidal. I started the sp install an hour ago. Thankfully it's gotten much farther since that pic

 

Be glad it's not Win8

 

I wouldn't touch win 8 on this hardware. I'd flat tell them to replace

 

 

Client? Are they running a network?

 

Not a domain one.

 

Booo! Was thinking you might be able to go with WSUS or something and automate that stuff. What about auto updates or are they running a third-party software you might worry about breaking when an update is applied?

 

Service packs don't auto update, at least in vista they don't.

 

Hmmm, I know you could push them with WSUS, been a little while since I have had to run a service pack at home.