Microsoft appears to be really ramming Win 8 hard down the throat of consumers.
I just tried to download Windows 8 onto my desktop PC and take advantage of the $39.99 pricing. But it failed... twice... even after I went ahead and flashed my motherboard BIOS to the latest version, just in case there were some Windows 8 based updates that were needed - but to no avail.
And it's not as if I have all that niche of a rig. I do have an SSD as a main drive and HDD as a secondary drive - but who doesn't these days? It's not like I have a RAID array, or any kind of special 3rd party devices installed. It's actually an Intel motherboard, and pretty standard fare.
This just goes to show that even after all that the effort that Microsoft has put into compatibility, they are still light years away from Apple and Google at having an Operating System that "just works". I'll see if there's anything I can do to work with Microsoft Support, but the error message was a complete non-descript fail message, before it returned my system config to Windows 7.
And if this is the result from a fairly expert user trying to install their OS, you'd have to wonder how much of the broad market will fail at upgrading - or won't even try. Hence, you end up with only 1% OS penetration several weeks after launch, even though every system in the stores has it pre-loaded.
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