Buyer Beware

With the upcoming release of Windows 8 (I guess tomorrow, actually) I wanted to post a few things I've discovered while trying to install it.

I had downloaded the Consumer Preview and tried to install it on one of my old PC's:  the hardware requirements being a meager 1 GHz Processor, 1 Gigabyte of Ram, a DX9 video card.  All of which this old PC of mine had.  So I thought I would install it and see how I like it before committing my desktop and netbook to the new OS.

However, I kept getting an error every time I tried to install it.

Hunting around the internet for the error code lead me to what should have been an asterisk on that 1 GHz Processor requirement:  it must support for PAE, NX, and SSE2.  My XP Athalon 3000+ doesn't meet this requirement.  So just beware.

Also, there's plenty of articles on the difference between Windows 8 RT and Windows 8/Pro:  RT being designed for ARM processors (and therefore geared more for tablets.)  It isn't the full version of windows 8 that the other two (Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro) are.  I would compare RT to Windows 7 Basic that was available on netbooks, while the others are more featured and capable (remote desktop for instance).  So, just beware and make sure you get what you really want, and don't waste money trying to upgrade if your processor is too old.