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Thread: 'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

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    Now with added sobriety Rave's Avatar
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    'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

    Long story short, my friend has an old PC that I built him a few years ago- and thanks to the Windows Genuine Advantage Tool he has a legitimate copy of Windows XP on it. It's now getting a bit slow and outdated so he asked me to build him a more powerful PC for £650, which I have- Core i5 3570K, Z77 board, 16GB DDR3, 240GD Agility3 SSD and a few other nice bits. The plan for the old PC is to pull its HDs and then chuck it in a cupboard as a spare- it's not going to carry on being used, so IMO* we've a legitimate right to use its legal XP install on the new PC. And then we'd like to take advantage of Microsoft's generous £25 upgrade offer for Windows 8. Obviously we want to be using the new SSD as the boot drive for maximum boot speed and responsiveness.

    So- is this going to be possible? As I understand it, trying to boot the new PC from the old boot disk (or a clone of it put onto the SSD) will cause Windows XP to have a conniption, as it notices that every single piece of hardware has changed since it was last booted. We may still be able to phone MS to get it re-activated though? We could then upgrade to W8 from there?

    Of course a simpler way of going about it would be to extract the legitimate XP Key from the old comp, intall a fresh copy of XP SP3 onto the SSD, activate it with the legitimate key, and then upgrade from there. Will that work?

    Any advice appreciated. Planning on trying to get it all setup tomorrow. I've better download some drivers for all the hardware later I suppose!

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    Re: 'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

    Have you read this thread? There's been some debate about how the £25 deal works.

    http://forums.hexus.net/windows/2634...only-25-a.html

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    Re: 'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

    There's no problem. I did it a couple of weeks ago, from my 2006 XP machine. Tried a upgrade install and quickly found out that it can be prone to errors. Did a fresh install and no problems.

    MS didn't ask any questions during the upgrade about authenticity etc.



    oh, and it was for £25 without any hiccups. Simple as.
    One can never stop saying Thank You

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    Re: 'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

    Thanks chaps. The problem it seems is persuading MS to give me a 64-bit version of W8 while I'm coming from a 32-bit copy of XP. I'm still slightly in the dark about how licences work on W8- if I persuade MS to let me pay them £25 for a .iso of W8 64bit then it'll Just Work as a fresh install will it?

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    Re: 'Upgrading' to W8 from XP- on a basically all new PC?

    Quote Originally Posted by Rave View Post
    Thanks chaps. The problem it seems is persuading MS to give me a 64-bit version of W8 while I'm coming from a 32-bit copy of XP. I'm still slightly in the dark about how licences work on W8- if I persuade MS to let me pay them £25 for a .iso of W8 64bit then it'll Just Work as a fresh install will it?
    Upgrade media requires an existing eligible OS be detected on the computer. You can erase this partition & start from scratch later, but the initial install requires something else already be present.

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