A bit of advice.. I've have set up a full Windows 8 installation on a non UEFI Dell 6400 laptop (with all updates and Office etc) It's not licensed but I'm using it as a master image (with Acronis True Image) to help with any new family Win 8 PC's My question is... I have successfully re-imaged a new Acer Windows 8 laptop with my "prepared" image which works fine and becomes fully licensed when I enter the embedded serial from the Acer motherboard... but because my pre prepared image was created on a non UEFI machine I have to disable UEFI on the target machine. It all runs OK but what are the drawbacks - if any, with this method?
Thanks for the info. If I leave the new (re-imaged from my non UEFI image) laptop in legacy boot mode it works fine and is fully licensed so is there anything that benefits greatly from UEFI for the average home user?
Benefits? not really. Not unless you are booting to a drive that is larger than 2TB or are using an OEM system that puts itself in sleep mode and has a fast-boot option. If your system does not match that criteria, you won't notice any benefit.
+1, I am using OEM system with secure boot enable on a GPT disk with UEFI, I can confirm that w8 and w8.1 are running faster and better than installing and running on a mbr legacy mode.