Windows 8 install experience

I just upgraded my desktop computer with a new Z77 motherboard and i7 core. Intel has decided not to support Vista x64 for the Z77 chipset. This makes a lot of things not work properly. So I went ahead and purchased the Windows 8 upgrade.

On Windows Vista x64, Windows 8 allowed me to create USB media. So I created a USB Windows 8 install key.

Windows 8 "Keep Nothing" option did not delete my files. Keep Nothing refers to what is upgraded and available as installed and usable programs. It also refers to not bringing over favorites, contacts, settings, documents, etc into the new Windows 8 installation. Files in the root of your hard drive will not be moved so long as they don't conflict with Windows' installation folders. Windows installation folders will be moved to Windows.old or Windows.old.0000 if Windows.old exists, and so on.

This is identical to what happens when you install Windows Vista, or Windows 7 on a hard drive without formatting it.

That was my first big worry, as I could find no information indicating what Keep Nothing did with other files and directories in the root of the hard drive. I ended up backing up hundreds of gigs of data to make sure it wasn't lost. After I installed Windows 8 and verified it's behavior, I then reran the install from the USB key while formatting my hard drive. Now I let Windows 8 re-partition the drive.

Windows 8 creates multiple partitions. I am not sure why. But the advantage for me was to finally convert over to GPT. I couldn't do that without re-partitioning.

So far, I am not as dissatisfied as I expected to be. I really thought this would be horrible. As I haven't yet done heavy development on this system, I can't say for sure how the Windows 8 behavior will affect me. We'll see that soon enough.

Windows 8 did freeze on me once. Right after cleanly installing Windows 8, I poked around, and I found the "PC Settings" menu, and chose to run Windows Update from within that menu. That just got stuck. 0% downloaded, and then no response to anything except mouse movement. Couldn't get out of it, couldn't ctrl-alt-del, couldn't do anything.
Even after reboot, I couldn't get the updates to install, but this time I went to the Control Panel, and clicked Windows Update. It just wouldn't download anything.
I got around that by installing all of the updates on this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35670
relating to KB2770917.
I picked this update to install manually as it appeared to be the most comprehensive of the updates that Windows was itching to install.

After all of these updates were installed, Windows Update started working.

My installations have so far been working. Hopefully I can continue PCI Express development on this system soon.