Windows 8, part 3

Well, the night before last I'd left it downloading All The Updates, and yesterday morning I found that it had failed to do anything with them, so I gave up, shut the lid, and put it away for the day, out of sight of burglars.

Last night I bought a flash drive on the way home (a 32 GB SanDisk Cruzer for 15 quid, I feel really old now because I remember when 16MB in a desktop was something special). I still haven't used it, but at least there are now signs I might get to do so tonight. There were 105 updates for it last night, and it was still only part way through downloading them a couple of hours later, so I left it overnight to do its thing. This morning it was admitting that it had updates and wanted to be restarted in order to install them, which is what it's currently doing. Other Half speculates that it may have done the thing where one of the early updates wants to be restarted before it can do anything with later updates, and got its tiny little brain all confused.

Doubtless there will be updates for the updates tonight. And possibly updates for the updates for the updates. I think the last time I had to re-install XP from scratch it took about three days of this. :-)

Re-installing XP multiple times is why I am going to live-blog the process. I will doubtless have to do this all over again at some point, and it's useful to be able to look up anything I discovered the hard way the previous time.

Windows 8, part 4

It had finished installing and restarting itself by the time I left for work this morning, which gave me high hopes. And indeed, this evening it could find no further updates. It then popped up something asking me what browsers I wanted to install, and I selected "tell me more". It was being a bit slow pulling up the page, so I made the mistake of wandering away to start dinner. By the time I came back, it had loaded my Gmail account instead. Bafflement ensued. I couldn't get back to the "what browser" screen, but in the course of trying, it announced that it wanted to restart to finish installing some updates. So I told it to go ahead.

When it came back, the next thing it wanted me to do was register it on Asus's website. That was fun, not. At least in the course of this I got to see the desktop, which looks vaguely sensible.

It's now creating the recovery drive. Once it's done that, I will point it at the Win 8.1 upgrade site. Assuming it doesn't run off to do something else first while my back's turned... I'm a trifle distracted at the moment by the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony.

Ah. Recovery drive completed. :-) And I found the "eject hardware" icon first time!