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Common Users folders have a ‘Location’ tab in Properties. It is safe to change the location there of folders like Documents, Music, Movies, Downloads, etc.
I always change them to a larger non-SSD drive.
they will survive backups and upgrades with no problems, since that is a supported method.

After running the preview in several VMs, I decided to try the released version on real machines.
Clean install on HP ProBook (from dvd). No problems. All major devices work. Fingerprint reader has driver, but no software to access it yet.
Upgrade on old Asus netbook (from 8.1). Worked fine, every thing functional. Took an extra reboot to self-repair something, but fine after that.

Upgrade on a HP Pavilion g6 (from Win 7). Everything works except Wi-Fi (WLAN). The adapter shows functional and happy in device manager, but the status is ‘off’ in properties, and won’t toggle to ‘on’. LAN works fine, though. No help from MS or HP forums yet.

Next is my dev and gaming box. I’ll try an upgrade, but I am fully prepared to wipe and do a clean install.

Then my wife’s laptop, which needs a clean install since I got too fancy on moving system folders and it’s stuck on Win8.

Typical phones rely on the built-in charging tech in the battery to get to the minimum charge necessary to boot the OS.
With Windows Phones, the phone only stays off until there is enough charge for the OS to boot, which then takes over the charging logic.
You can leave it plugged in forever, basically, as the charging is turned off once a certain range is met. I expect all modern phones and devices of sufficient quality work this way.

Yes, cheap power supplies are bad. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t very good non-OEM generics out there as good or better that the OEM ones. Monoprice.com usually has good ones.

Also, your charging cable matters. There are two main specs, Apple and Android/Windows Phone. Both will work interchangeably, but the Apple spec limits the amount of power draw on WP and Android devices to 500ma, no matter what. (If I remember correctly, the Android/WP spec has the data lines shorted in the USB cable). Several of us bought ammeters to test and verify this.

GPS and navigation software on all phones and OS’s uses a ton of power. If you must also play music from your phone, use a cable; much less power use and much better audio quality. For car navigation use, make sure that you are using the correct one. You’ll only get 500ma from 2watt car charger if you are using a data cable with an Android or Windows Phone. That’s not enough for the GPS and other sensors.

I use a wireless charger for my Nokia 1020. Once the battery is charged, the charger stops charging — it checks occasionally, but mostly its off. Yes, it’s less efficient, but if you plug and unplug the micro-usb socket in the phone frequently, it wears out/breaks.

RickH

I took an older computer–it was dual booting XP and Server 2008.
It had a decent nVidia card–512mb of ram, and 6GB ram on the ASUS motherboard, running a dual core AMD cpu.
I created a CD from the Win8 iso file.
I did a clean install. It detected my other OS’s, and created a multi-boot environment. Less than 20 mins later, I was booted in Win 8.
All drivers were found.
I used an old XP64 driver for my Canon iP5000 and the network print server.
Everything just worked.
Reboots are now 10-15secs. from the multi-boot selection menu.
A bit of a learning curve for the new UI, but its really easy to learn in a few hours–make sure you read or watch a tutorial a few times.

Running Win8 in a virtual machine will give you a greatly reduced feel for the OS. It needs fast video and keyboard response, only available from real hardware.

Windows Phone 7 is rapidly growing in use. Why don’t you even mention it for apps?
With the Nokia deal, in two years, it might have the most marketshare, or at least be close…
And after using WM6.1/6.5, various flavors of Android, and played with an iPhone, WP7 has the easiest UI to use.
The number of apps for it is growing quickly.
So why ignore it?

Alternative Office suites are great for personal use or small companies, but, since most don’t enable Office automation, are worthless for larger companies.
Many companies use InfoPath, Word, Excel, along with SharePoint and SQL Server to automate business processes.
Microsoft dev tools make it fairly fast and easy to do, compared to any alternatives.

So when recommending Office suite alternatives, please specify your target audience
Using a cheap alternative can be an expensive dead end for companies trying to improve efficiency…
My price for automating business processes using non-Microsoft products is considerably higher, if I can do it at all with what the client wants to use….

Old, misleading article.
Over a year and a half ago, I moved my Vista 32bit to Vista 64 bit. Basic system performance was very noticeably better,., at least 25%
No problem finding 64bit drivers for any of my equipment, including sound card, printer, and video.
Frame rate in World of Warcraft (a 32bit app), went up 25%
I’m now running Win7 64bit, which runs even faster.

I have a matched pair of 2gb mem sticks giving me 4gb –about $65 for high quality memory.
Most systems, even in Costco, come with 4gb ram and 64bit OS pre-installed.

IE8 64bit is much, much more stable than the 32bit version. I use it for basic news sites that I keep open all the time. Without flash or silverlight, I’m much less bothered by ads….

I’m looking forward to 64bit Office–especially Outlook, which I hope will improve its stability.

Stupidest thing out there is the lack of Silverlight 64bit. It might be its only chance to gain significant market share as long as Flash is not 64bit.

Huge problem with home users having administrator accounts with no password. Most of them get turned into bots.
Having it disabled, at least usually ends up with a real user acct with admin privs…and no easy default to hack.