As seen, Microsoft is pushing users with Windows 7, XP and Vista to download and install Windows 8 with an update . This means that you can buy online, on the Microsoft website, only the update and not the complete copy that would be available only by ordering the installation DVD or buying it in a store at a higher price.
What Microsoft is doing these days is a full-fledged promotion, to install Windows 8 Pro with just 30 Euros and not 200 Euros as it will be after January 2013.
What is unclear is whether a clean installation can be done using the ISO that can be created by the Upgrade Assistant program .
Microsoft's official position is that you can't, because customers must already have Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 to install Windows 8 Pro.
What you buy is an upgrade of the current version and if you want the real DVD, the one that can be installed on multiple computers, you need to buy an OEM version.
In theory, however, it seems that by creating the ISO in the update program and burning it to a DVD or USB stick, it is possible to install Windows 8 from scratch, reformatting the computer and cleaning everything up.
Clean installation means installing the system on an empty hard disk or on an already used one, however deleting all the data inside it.
However, it seems that some people, with this procedure, get an error while activating the product with code 0x8007007B or 0xC004F061
Practically this error indicates that the product key of the newly purchased copy of Windows 8 is valid only for an update and not for a clean installation.
The questions I have been asked are:
1) you can use a license to install Windows 8 cleanly on a PC, without updating the previous version of Windows "> install Windows 8 on a virtual machine following the guide for VirtualBox and see if it works.
The trick would be to make a change to the Windows 8 registry key after installation.
Launch a command prompt as an administrator (by pressing the Windows-X keys), write regedit and hit enter.
In the registry, go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Setup / OOBE
and change the value of the MediaBootInstall parameter by putting 0 instead of 1.
Go back to the command prompt and run the slmgr / rearm command; restart and enter the product key.
I understand that the news reported in this article may displease many, but it is clear that this is a promotion at a significantly lower price than normal.
I hope I have made some clarity, I promise to update the article in case of news and I hope that someone who has done some experiments can say with certainty that you can install Windows 8 cleanly, maybe even on a other computer.
In another article, see how to install from scratch and activate Windows 8.1 with the Windows 8 productkey
