life.  Decisions, decisions. And the winner is... I decided to purchase a new SSD hard drive for my HP Elitebook 8530w and install Windows 8 from scratch. This option allows me to move to Windows 8 in a clean environment with a nice SSD performance upgrade and still switch back to my old Windows 7 machine in the interim as I get all my applications and settings configured on the new hard drive.  This move also theoretically extends the life of my 3 year-old notebook as the new hard drive and install will be like getting a new version of my existing machine, as the hardware is somewhat dated, but will have quite acceptable performance in this configuration, albeit not the same as brand new hardware.  A snapshot of MSINFO32 is as follows: The one downside of this hardware is that it is not capable of running Hyper-V as it has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor which doesn't have the SLAT capabilities necessary to run Hyper-V.  I think new hardware with this capability is in my future. Once I installed the new hard drive, I installed the 64-bit MSIT Windows 8 image off the network and the install ran as I attended a users group.  I chose to install the optional Office Preview at the same time to make the move to the new version of Office as well.  The install went without a hitch and when I popped back in the office after the users group meeting, Windows