While I have been reading a lot on the forum about Win8 Pro, hyper V and running WHS2011 in a virtual machine under windows 8 pro, I am needing some advice.
The only reason I am considering this is because of the windows 8 pro upgrade price and being at less than 80 bucks. I have searched and read that if you use it to perform a clean install, it will fail to activate, saying the key is for upgrade, not full install. I have also read that if you are upgrading from XP 32 bit, you cannot run the win 8 64 bit upgrade from windows XP, it would in turn do a clean install, thus giving the above activation problem. I had also read that a person need not activate the previous OS, but simply install it, then use the upgrade pro 8 DVD and upgrade the system in which it would then activate. I have no knowledge of any of this.
But if the last part were true, could I use my windows 7 pro dvd, install a fresh OS, then upgrade to win 8 from there? All my windows 7 pro dvd's are spoken for as far as being activated on various PC's, so I would just be using it as a way to get the upgrade win 8 pro up, running and activated. I could use my windows XP pro, but it is only 32 bit, and from what I read, I couldn't do the upgrade to 64 bit.
I was also curious, if there is any advantage what-so-ever to running whs2011 under win 8? I'm wondering how lightsout would control the PC, what would win 8 think about that?
Has anyone been down this upgrade path? I see the upgrade says it would allow for me getting 8.1 for free. Would this be yet another upgrade? I assume one that would have to download
It seems odd that the upgrade is setup this way, in years past, if I had an upgrade, such as Win98SE2 or ME, I would do a clean install, and it would simply ask for my previous qualifying OS cd/dvd, confirm and continue.