Installing and upgrading
When you buy Windows 8 online you'll get a step by step download and installation, complete with the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant to warn you about program and hardware compatibility issues, or you can buy a DVD.
The RTM and RTM evaluation downloads are ISO files that you have to burn to an optical disk or build a bootable USB flash drive for, but that's not something consumers will have to deal with now.
As with the Windows 8 Consumer and Release Previews, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.
Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.
Unlike Windows 7, you can't do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you'll need to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.
This option only appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install.
A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep apps, settings and files does show up when you run the installer from Release Preview, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over.
Again, you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.
If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user).
With Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade - it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation.
Scanning a fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact.
If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any applications, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.
On a variety of PCs it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the licence key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.
One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.
It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organisations remain unhappy.
After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronises settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.
While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.
If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitiser just shows the mouse tutorial.
If you've picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC.
Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working.
Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).
If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.
In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.
A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).
On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars.
Once you activate Windows 8 you can personalise the Start and Lock screens. You can choose from what looks like the same 25 colour schemes as in the Release Preview. Some of these are extremely bright - the vivid pink background is quite the eye-opener - while others have grey or black backgrounds with an accent colour.
Once you activate Windows 8 you can personalise the Start and Lock screens. You can choose from what looks like the same 25 colour schemes as in the Release Preview. Some of these are extremely bright - the vivid pink background is quite the eye-opener - while others have grey or black backgrounds with an accent colour.
If you didn't like any of the six abstract backgrounds for the Start screen in the Windows 8 Release Preview, there's a much wider selection of 20 different designs, ranging from plain to detailed to some quite strange and quirky images with floating mountains and swimming birds.
Pick an animal, mechanical or musical theme or choose from the more abstract designs. Some of the designs have a mix of related shades, while others have a range of colours that change to match and contrast with the colour scheme you pick.
Some of the combinations of these are gorgeous artworks that wouldn't be out of place on clothes or furniture, and we're hoping to see tablet sleeves, notebook cases or Artist Edition mice to match. Spend a little time here and you get something far more stylish than the original primary school feel of the preview releases.
A nice touch is that as you scroll the Start screen, and the design you choose scrolls along - especially on a touchscreen tablet, we reckon you'd probably get a bit of motion sickness if it didn't.