Windows 8 upgrade key... immediate install?

[kiddingguy]

When upgrading to Win 8 an Upgrade Assistant has to be run and an 'offer' will be made.

However, can the purchased key be stored and used for a later moment... or must Windows 8 immediately be installed - or in a given timeframe?

[PNWDweller]

AFAIK - it should be okay to keep the key since you purchased it to upgrade. Let's assume the scenario, you buy the key, power outage happens, you are in a blackout for a day or two. (It happens!). Or, say that you buy the key, and an emergency happens, you can't get back to installing later.

I would figure that Microsoft would allow for something like that. If in doubt, a quick call to them might also do the trick to be absolutely sure. :)

[Michael Lacey]

You can use it whenever you like.

[Intelligen]

When you run the assistant it just checks the hardware. Once it comes back with its findings you can then purchase windows 8. You can choose an upgrade where you save your files or an don't save anything which is a clean install. After payment, it simply downloads the iso and you can install whenever then. Done two of them so far and each one i just downloaded the upgrade iso with the assistant then burned to disk and did the upgrade at my leisure.

[Motoko.]

I actually encountered a clean install situation tonight where the activation wizard told me that this was an upgrade key and I couldn't use it for clean installs so what I did was I modified the registry

• Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
  
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
  
• Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to
  
• Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
  
• Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
  
• Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
  
• Reboot Windows now.
  
• Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows.