Hi all, well I took the upgrade offer up and made a usb install stick, the thing is I really do like to play with my o/s so I have had to reinstall a couple of times which all went fine, the problem is now when I go to reinstall my win8 wont activate even though the keys legit I get a message for upgrade only so I have to install win7 first and then install win8 over the top, how ever I did not use to have to do this I could just wipe my partition, create a new one install win8 and job was a good one, has anybody else had this issue and is there any work around for this because I really want to make the most of my uefi mobo and run my rig in gpt instead of using the old mbr partition, and its a real pain installing 2 o/s just to get win8 activated, all this crap and I've paid for it life use to be so much easier
Your best option is to use a drive imaging program such as Acronis true Image or an equivalent software. As long as there has been no hardware chages, then when you restore the image it will still be activated. There are many more benefits to using drive images as well. Configuring and tweaking you OS at setup can take an hour or more. Restoring a drive image can be as fast as 10-15 minutes depending on you system and all configurations are saved. The only downside is that the image will usually be at least 5gb so you will need storage media with a little more capacity than just the Windows 8 setup files require.
Next time you have trouble with Windows 8 just try and follow below link. "redmondpie.com/how-to-restore-and-reset-windows-8-to-factory-settings"
And flexibility is all well and good if you know how to use 'em,but they become a liability for a normal user out of his/her depth - a better choice imho is to start with the less efficient,but simple applications and then build upon their usage with stuff like acronis/etc ^^^The single thing I'm growing most to love more and more in Win8 when it comes to 'Family IT' XD
It's all sorted guys, the problem was I secure erased my ssd removing the partition, had same issue on my sons pc after he had a new ssd. I was worried that m$ had changed there activation in some way but it seems as long as you have a partition there with some kind of windows on it all is good. Thanks a lot all.