Q&A: Moving On From the Windows 8 Preview

Q.I had the Windows 8 preview software running on an old computer that I don’t use all that much, but lately it has been nagging me to upgrade to the full version and rebooting all the time. What can I do to make these messages go away?

A.Microsoft’s free previews of Windows 8 were never meant to last forever, and these work-in-progress editions expired a few months ago — well after the official version of Windows 8 went on sale on Oct. 26, 2012. To provide motivation to upgrade, the expired preview version will not work properly, reboots every hour or two and strongly suggests that you buy the finished version of the system.

If you liked what you saw with Windows 8 and want to keep it, you can buy the official release and install it on the computer. The standard Windows 8 upgrade costs about $120 and the upgrade to the more full-featured Windows 8 Pro is about $200. (Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows has an article on upgrading to Windows 8 from the preview version that may be helpful.)

If you did not particularly care for Windows 8 or do not want to buy it, going back to the computer’s previous operating system is another option. Unless you installed the Windows 8 preview software on a separate hard-drive partition (and kept your old system in place on another partition) or have a full backup of the old system on hand, be prepared to dig up the system recovery discs that came with the computer and do a clean installation of the older system. As Microsoft states on the Windows 8 Release Preview page, “To go back to your previous version of Windows, you’ll need to reinstall it from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC; typically DVD media.”

If you have your original system installation discs or a copy of Windows from a previous upgrade, you can install the software over the Windows 8 preview; once it is installed, you will also need to download and install all the Windows Update patches for that system as well, since you are basically starting over from scratch. If you do not have any earlier versions of Windows, you can still buy a new copy of Windows 7 from various places around the Web. Once you have the system software you want to use, install the older operating system on the computer to replace the Windows 8 preview software. You should save backup copies of important files before you do, and plan to reinstall the other programs you use with Windows.

If you do not want to spend any money, do not have any Windows discs and still want to get some use out of the computer, you can install a copy of the Linux operating system on the old PC. Although Windows programs will not run on Linux without additional software like Wine, distributions like Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint are proving to be popular alternative operating systems.