System Requirements

Microsoft seems to have pretty reasonable system requirements for their new OS, so the task to "round up a system to run Windows 8 for technical support to have access to from one of the unused systems" didn't sound very difficult.

• Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2
• RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
• Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver

Four computers later, when I found one that worked, I realized that the NX bit was more elusive than I had expected, at least in the systems I had available to test. All three systems with Intel CPUs failed the test and would give a scary stop error when attempting to install from the DVD-ROM. The AMD based system of the same era worked. I'm not sure if this was due to supporting the feature or just not failing the test.

Run the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant found on their support page for upgrading to Microsoft Windows 8 and pay special attention to the hardware restrictions listed in the report that are one of the system requirements listed above. The NX bit was a "maybe" option in the report but turned out to be a "no dice" road block when I was unable to update the old BIOS to have the option to enable the feature. A lot of searching found that the CPUs didn't even support the feature even if I had found a BIOS update.