Upgrading to Windows 8

I have this old ThinkPad laptop, recently restored to factory settings and running pre-installed Windows Vista. After receiving endless upgrades it now runs pretty ok. Amazingly, even the usual DPC Latency issues appear to be resolved and it handles my sound card without major clicks and dropouts. It's however enormously sluggish and overloaded with build-in Lenovo software I don't really need. Booting up this thing takes forever.

As we all know, Windows 7 is by far better than Vista and MicroSoft claims that the new Windows 8 is even faster and more efficient. 30 Euros seems to be a reasonable price for the upgrade, so I tried to get it.

Upgrade involves downloading and running the Upgrade Assistant from MicroSoft. It performed some compatibility checks, informed me about what software/hardware might need attention and happily crashed, when I pressed "Next" button. Ok, I'm an advanced Vista user and quickly discovered, that when Running as Administrator, crashing does not occur.

Still, a minute later it turned out that it's impossible to place an order, as the Billing Address form rejects  my Zip code. I tried couple of workarounds from forums, such as simply entering "700000", or applying all kinds of format variations. None of them worked.

From what I read on the Net, it appears that this problem is present in many countries and that MicroSoft's support lines have failed to help in all of them.

I tried to re-download the Upgrade Assistant ten days later, still no luck. So, judging from the quality of the Upgrade Assistant I'm beginning to wonder, whether this whole idea is good at all.

Maybe Windows 8 just isn't ready yet?