Well, I went ahead and installed the $40 download version of the Windows 8 upgrade on my ThinkPad. I did an in-place upgrade, and hoped for the best. It turned out pretty well. I had to remove several Lenovo utilities, but almost everything else seems to be working. Visual Studio 2010 is working fine. (I haven’t tried much, other than a “hello world” program, but that worked OK.) My “WIMP” stack is fine — MySQL is running, and PHP under IIS is still working fine. I checked phpMyAdmin and my test Drupal site, and they both look OK.
Most of the utility programs I use seem to be fine. That includes DropBox, Evernote, KeePass, IrfanView, VLC, and Notepad++. I still need to re-install iTunes, so I’m not sure about that, but I think it will work. And of course Firefox is working fine — I’m using it right now to write this blog post.
The install process was pretty smooth. It took about an hour from the point where I started the purchase, to the point where all the files were downloaded, the pre-install stuff was done, and the actual install started. Then, the install itself took about an hour to complete.
My experience on the ThinkPad has been good enough that I think I can probably do an in-place upgrade of my desktop too, so I’ll probably do that when the box upgrade arrives.
I’ve got a bunch of other stuff to mess around with, so I’ll probably write at least one more blog post on this. But, so far, so good!