Laptop questions

[Buttkicker]

Go easy folks
never owned a Laptop and had minimal use of one
basically a beginner in Laptop World

just pulled the trigger on a new Laptop comes with Windows 8 pre installed

apparently is comes with no Windows back up media which presumably means no windows 8 disc

so I guess the first thing I do is make a back up of the boot drive and all its files

I used to use a program called 'ghost' to clone the drive years ago and although it was a bit shakey it backed any drive up to another drive

not having done this for years what is the best way to back up a new Laptop so if it goes belly up I can restore it to like the day it came

must add I have never used or even seen Windows 8 and I now believe there is a newer version windows 8.1 now out
does my version upgrade via windows update to this???
thanks

 

[nV_Jason]

Typically the machines come with an inbuilt recovery partition or the software within Windows allows you to burn off recovery disks.

If you can rip the product key out of the machine (built into the bios) you can download the .iso from Microsoft.

Was it Norton Ghost? One i use in my workplace is Acronis True Image Home, works really well for creating images and clones.

To update your system to 8.1 you must first complete all the current Windows updates, once they are complete go to the store App and click on the Windows 8.1 upgrade box.

Hope that helps

 

[Joshct]

I believe you can even download 8 on a trial basis? Could always use that trial and put a key in, in the future if required.

We had to start specifying at work we wanted some digital media with out win 8 machines, at first they weren't coming with it so i'd expect that's mostly across the board.

Win 8.1 is service pack 1, as jason said, do all your updates and then you can upgrade, it's not a replacement OS or anything.