By Mr Internet
Melbourne Australia
9 August 2012 (likely tomorrow where you are)
Beta Hells: Office 2013, Windows 8 Build 8400 Over Office 2010 = Install Suicide
- I Know I know, testing a beta is always dangerous. But 2 betas on top of each other, is silly, doing both as upgrades over previous versions, then it would be a miracle if something did not work right.
- But I can only take some of the responsibility: Many reviews said to install Windows 8 over Windows 7 was a good idea this time.
- The same reviews said Office 2013 over Office 2010 was also not an issue.
- Wrong answers for this puppy.
- To start 64bit windows 8 build 8400 would not install over windows 7 64 bit but after a few tries all was pretty good, with a slight performance increase (as installing any new OS will do even if over the top). My test machine a quad core home built PC with 8GB Ram and a Quad Core CPU, with a few TB of storage, is more than enough to handle this task. Then when office 2013 came out a few weeks later, Windows 8 seemed a great opportunity to see how they went together.
- Firstly office 2013 did not like an old FrontPage 2007 32-bit app, so it went, leaving my office 2010 64 bit intact, I chose to install Office 2013 to run in parallel, with 2010, so I could blow it out if I got into problems.
- Before you could say oh fire truck, none of the 2010 apps would run, none of the office extensions would open either on 2010 or 2013, I could not assign any extensions to work with 2013, but they would open with 2013 if opened.
- Worse of the lot was Outlook 2013 would not open period, and neither would 2010. Oh well I gave it a try. So I went about uninstalling 2013, crash, uninstall, 2010, crash. Manual, crash, Oh crap…. Time to wipe it…
- There lies the moral of the story, I always always test on my primary machine so I can get the full effect of the software, the secret is to ALWAYS, run your OS only form a drive, and install all software to another drive, and your data, to another, then 123 backup data to another drive, cloud, & external drive. So when I then ran Windows 8 again wiping my Windows 7 after trying to fix it for days, I did a clean install WOW what a performance difference. The system rocks.
Summary Tips
- Never install beta software on a primary machine UNLESS you are prepared for what happens if it dies, and requires a full re-install and wipe
- Install your OS ONLY in a drive or partition by itself (so if you wipe it you have less pain, and it keeps your system cleaner/ faster / leaner.
- Regardless of the recent news, good back-ups = piece of mind and make things work better.
- Forget the reviews and reviewers saying to upgrade software always consider doing a clean install, that has not changed since windows 3.1
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