Just another reason why you need a good set of backups.

OK, yes you do need to make the partition active. But you can do that from the built in diskpart tool.

diskpart > create partition primary > active

Both tools are completely unnecessary. Just open or mount the ISO file and copy all the files to the USB drive. That's it. It's just a straight file copy, there's really nothing special that needs to be done.

If the machine is offline, it's probably not going to be getting infected.

I'll install every patch automatically until it messes up my system. Which has happened to me exactly once in about the last 10 years. And that was a bad patch. Uninstalled it, waited for a new fix, reinstalled, everything was fine.

MS does a MUCH better job of testing patches than they have in the past. People who are afraid of patches messing up their systems are the same people who wait for Service Pack 1 to install a new OS. That's a Win NT mindset. It's just not like that any more.

Same here. I did an in-place upgrade from Vista and have been very happy with it. I might wipe and reinstall later depending on how it runs, but my Vista install was only a year old so it wasn't too mucked up.

The product keys are based on the version you purchased. Like it warns you if you don't input the product key during the install, if you don't install the version that matches your product key, you are looking at a wipe and reinstall.

In theory you could "upgrade" in-place. Suppose you installed Home and had a key for Professional, you could do an in-place upgrade to Pro and use that key. You can't downgrade in-place.

Nice work. You reposted the instructions for rebooting your device that have been available from Apple for years. That's some good reporting.

I can't think of a single movie worth buying. Who wants to watch the same thing over and over again?
I get all my Blu-Ray discs from Netflix.

It's about time. Virtually every other piece of software allows you to try it out. Apple even allows you to "try" a $0.99 song before you buy it, but they wont allow you to test out a $10 app? I know lots of the apps are cheap but if you buy ten $2 apps and only 1 turns out to be worth keeping, that makes it pretty expensive.

The side benefit of this is that it will make the apps better in the long run because developers won't be able to release seemingly good, but crappy apps, since people can try them first and will know the crappy apps aren't worth paying for.