And so it begins.

Moving the business computer across from XP to W8.1.

The business machine has already decided it's time, giving repeated 'recovered from a fatal error' messages.

Matters of observation:
The new Seagate SSHD is about 3/4 the thickness and 1/2 the weight of the Samsung 750Gb drive it will replace. I hope it's genuinely faster too, especially after a few uses.
Windows OEM packaging is 'basic' to say the least, the stickers with the product key now have tiny, fine writing that I now struggle to read.
The heatsink below the fan for the CPU was literally solid with dust. I can't remember how old this machine is now, but I'm sure I never cleaned it out. Not that it seemed hot when I shut it down, so I don't think that was the reason for the fatal errors.

Right, 8.1 installed, Start menu tidied up, graphics driver updated, now we start loading software and data files.

*edit*
Microsoft have certainly done something right with this, performance-wise. The hardware this is running on is around 3-4 years old, AMD 245 processor, dual cores at 2.9GHz, but stuff opens really quickly and the whole lot has a 'new windows install' snappiness to it in a way that I've never seen with W7(and I've installed it a few times). Once the SSHD starts making a difference then I expect it will be quite a nimble little beastie. Hopefully good for Chris to use.

*edit 2*
I'd not realised quite how tired I was yesterday evening when I posted that - at least, that is my excuse for the lousy writing.

Seems I build that computer in Nov 2009, at very low cost (about £90 for the mobo and processor, tenner for the case, £20ish for the memory, hard drive was already laying around and it uses the onboard graphics and audio). On that basis it's darned amazing how well it all works: and to think I had pretty much written off AMD as producing sluggish chipsets. Makes me also wonder whether it IS time to update the livingroom computer for something less pedestrian, since that came free (broken) 2 years ago, and was hardly state of the art then, even though it was a lot snappier than my older machine (which is STILL hiding upstairs).

Money: who wants to keep it?