Upgraded Windows 7 Pro 64-bit to Window 8 Pro 64-bit (long)

[arachnaut]

I spent my holidays upgrading Windows 7 Pro with an 'in-place' install or Windows 8 Pro.
In case others want to try this I will relate what happened to me. My system is rather
elaborate and customize and I have a lot of system tools because I do beta testing
of audio software. I need to be very careful of my system setup at all time.

Here are my notes so far:

12/25/2012
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Backup System
Make DVD catalog of Windows 8 DVD using Locate32 (in case I need to find files on the DVD later)
Start install at 7:00 AM
Installer requires uninstall of Acronis 2011, Bluetooth Suite, Intel Network Connections
and PerfectDisk 12.5.
Uninstall Perfect Disk, and so on..

The uninstall of Acronis tools required the use of the ATI Cleanup utility
which also required the uninstall of Acronis Disk Directory Suite. This was a
very labor-intensive process, and it required devcon.exe. Then it required a
fairly elaborate search and destroy of registry fields.
I also uninstalled Virtual Clone Drive.

After this I restarted and got a BlueScreen Stop 0x0000...007b crash.

Restored system with Acronis rescue DVD and tried again.

I find Acronis fltsrv.sys was still around after the various uninstalls and
cleanups so I searched carefully for the registry fields and cleaned them
up. Acronis software people should be ashamed of this barbaric, sadistic
uninstall process.

Ran CHKDSK on all drives after reboot.

Backed up System with Acronis 2013 bootable rescue DVD in case I needed to get back to this point again.

Now it is 12:33 PM on Christmas Day and I got the Win8 DVD in-place installer
to proceed. The installation went on without incident and completed at 1:45. I
see the new personalization stuff and so on... I am asked for the Wireless key
(apparently it got lost in the migration).

I see that one of my audio tools didn't migrate - LoopBe30 Internal MIDI ports, so I re-install it.
Run Windows Update
Set up account picture
Tweaked some stuff
Turned off content indexing on C: drive (Windows Search not needed on that drive).
Ran Chkdsk on all drives
Backed up system

Installed upgrades: Retrospect 8 and UltraEdit 18.20

12/26/2012
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Check out my account and Administrator account and decided things were OK to proceed
Ran Disk Cleanup to remove C:\Windows.old
CHKDSK /F /R C: (full disk check and bad block locator)

Intel IAStorDataMgr terminated with unhandled exception - disable it in Services
Went to Black Viper site to see what Win8 services I could disable - disabled several
Turned off some Windows Features: Telnet Client, Simple TCP Services, MSMQ server, WCF services, .NET 3.5
Fixed up some bad font issues

Run boot-time defrag of C: with PerfectDisk
Defrag Registry with PerfectRegistry
Update Perfect Registry
Run Driver Detective to look for new Windows 8 drivers
Driver Detective needs .Net 3.5 Framework so I add it back to Windows 8
Update Driver Detective
Update LatencyMonitor for audio checks
Run Driver Detective - it recommends NVIDIA 310.70 drivers so I install them

Restart

Uninstall old Windows 7 MS tools (freeing a ton of space):
MS Network Monitor
MS Visual Studio 2010
Debugging Tools for Windows 7
MS Silverlight SDK
MS SQL Server
MS Debugging Symbols
MS Win7 SDK Driver Kit
MS Performance Toolkit
MS Windows SDK 7.1

Restart

Run Perfect Registry
Clean up old Revo Uninstaller backups (they were for Windows 7)

Restart

Run Perfect Disk to defragment the system drive

Remove Windows Media Player - I don't use it and it is indexing all my sample libraries which are enormous
Set up Winamp as my media player

I can't run .bat files in my user login, but I can as Administrator.
I do a Google search for solutions and try some to no avail. But I find if
I rename the .bat files to .cmd they run OK, so I do that. I spent a lot of
time on this and finally gave up.

12/27/2012
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Install new JMB36X 1.17.65 driver based on Driver Detective advice
Updated KeePass
Logged in as Administrator and checked things out, tweak screen, etc.
Logged in as my user
Defragged disk
Backed up system with Acronis 2013.

12/28/2012
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Tested Retrospect 8. Things were not good. To make a long story short, I ended
up uninstalling it and re-installing. Had some problems with Intel IAStor driver
(RAID), probably due to new JMB driver. I don't use RAID so I uninstalled the
Intel RAID stuff. Re-install Retrospect 8.

Retrospect 8 InstaScan claims it needs interactive services and this system
does not allow it, so I disable InstaScan service. Clear out old Retrospect
backup sets and test the backup stuff. It complains about the new
swapfile.sys so I disable backing that up.

Update Logitech SetPoint for Keyboard and Mouse.

The SetPoint Tray Icon is supposed to show things like Caps Lock ON, but it
doesn't, so I disable the Tray Icon.

At this point, Windows 8 meets my approval. There is only one major issue left -
the Network drivers for WIFI are not available. I set up Driver Detective to
monitor for this, until then I will make do with whatever kludge is installed to
keep networking working. My Home network is set up as a public network and I
can't change any Network stuff until I get that fixed.

So now it is time to make a full system backup. I start with Retrospect backing
up on one 2TB drive, then I will do an image backup with Acronis to another 2TB
drive. The last time I did this the image backup was about 1.5TB, I hope it
still fits on a 2TB drive...

Start back up all my drives with new Retrospect 8 - this will take a while...

12/29/2012
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Retrospect backup still running... Event Viewer shows no errors or warnings so far.
While it is backup up, I write this log from my notes in case others may find it helpful.
To be continued...

[Eventful]

This was actually bloody informative. Thank you.