Terrible experience Upgrading from Vista to Windows 8

Thought I'd share what I experienced when I tried upgrading from Vista to Windows 8 today.

First a little bit background, the computer had a Vista OEM, a Packard Bell with Intel Celeron e1200 cpu, so it isn't the newest kid on the block but still, W8 should be snappier than Vista (everything is). And I had tried W8 Developer and Customer preview in VMWare Player and they installed quickly.

I downloaded the upgrade advisor it did the checks and nothing went wrong, I then paid up, and got the download, I didn't have a dvd burner nor a dvd disc nor a USB-drive to use so I started an in place upgrade. And I chose the option to keep the personal files.

Oh well, first it had a long process of preparing something inside Vista, not sure what that was all about, but one thing I Hated about the installation compared to older Windows versions was the total lack of feedback about what was going on.

Anyways A good 30-40 minutes (did i say slooow) later the computer rebooted and I Got that metro logo and then the logo showed and eventually a spinner started but then the screen went black for a very long time, and nothing happened.

So I did a hard reset and the boot menu had three options, Windows 8, Vista and Windows installation. I tried the first one but that was just ended in a reboot every time, Instead i chose Vista again and the Upgrade assistant said that the installation had failed and it had rolled back the changes.

I then tried another install, this time "keep nothing", and this time in addition to the 30-40 minute "preparation stage" it also had a stage where it tried downloading updates to the installer first. So, reboot Windows logo + spinner, and then black screen again, for a fairly long time, then a Smiley except it wasn't smiling, it said something about a stop code which reminded me more of a BSOD. And then a reboot. When I now tried starting Windows 8 from the boot menu, I got a message box saying that the hardware or something wasn't working with Windows 8 and i had to continue installation to fix this.

So I chose the Install option in the boot menu again. I had to leave the computer for quite a while and I'm not sure what happened but when i got back and i pressed the "any" ( ) key a reboot happened, and then the spinner and logo and a long wait again, and this time it started a fairly long rollback process which said that the upgrade had failed.

So now I'm stuck with a Windows 8 which refuses to install - because technically it should be a clean (w/o formatting l) install. And I dare not try a clean install because if there's a serious hardware issue I really do not want to install Vista again.

I'll contact MS Support on Monday and post an update on how it goes.

In conclusion: the lack of visual feedback of what is going on has been the most frustrating part of this experience, and the fact that the installation is extremely slow for some odd reason considering it's more or less a "clean install"