The early official public test builds of Windows 8.1 is a tale of two versions. Once it hit the first milestone of development, Microsoft released the Windows 8.1 Preview, which was soon joined by Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview.
And after a little saga of very its own, the company also unleashed the Windows 8.1 RTM on its developer channels, MSDN and TechNet.
In between all these were the various leaked builds — including the unofficial leaks of final Windows 8.1 RTM. Hard to keep an official count of things, but Microsoft did announce that a rather large number of users installed the RTM version, somewhere in the 2 million range.
Windows 8.1 Preview also raked up similarly high numbers.
But now that we are only a few weeks away from the public launch of Windows 8.1, the software titan is finalizing things and applying finishing touches to the operating system, in order to ensure that all users are able to download and install it without encountering any issues.
Redmond has just released a new update aimed at workstations that are powered by Windows 8.1 Preview in order to prevent any errors when these users upgrade to the final version on October 18.
Microsoft talks about this in the Knowledge Base article 2880312, saying:
“This update will improve the user experience when you upgrade to the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 8.1 when it is released. After the update is applied, download failures and installation issues will be reduced when you upgrade through the Windows Store.”
You may recall that some users experienced installation issues and errors on the Windows Store back in June when upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 Preview.
The company, obviously, wants to avoid another situation like this.
Needless to say, if you have installed Windows 8.1 Preview and are still running it, this is just the thing for you if you are planning to make the jump to the final version of the operating system at launch. Check out the KB article above, and fire up Windows Update on your 8.1 Preview machines.
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I was going to just to a clean re-install of 8 then upgrade to 8.1, but I’ll check it out.