Just installed v. 8 over v. 7 via the GUI and it went very smoothly.
Impressions so far are very good! I'm not a fan of the new Windows 8 look with the big coloured squares, but the appearance of a programme is really not of concern to me, and I can see it will blend in with Win 8 really well. The new layout of the GUI will take some getting used to to know where to find everything automatically, but I think once I'm used to it it'll be fine. I really like the "current status" window under the "security" tab. It's better than the pie graph. Just one question about the "maintenance" tab - will there be an easy way to see if your programme version is out of date like on version 7? That used to show it in orange instead of green (or something like that - I've forgotten already!) when a new version was available.
It wasn't very obvious that the "safezone" and "firewall" are not available for the free version until I did some searching here on the forum, as I have the free version both show in the home tab of the GUI as one of those square things. I see is says "activate now" above both, but it isn't clear that this is only if you are wanting to upgrade your version to a paid version. If I were to press the firewall square, would this automatically download the paid version of avast? (Please note I'm NOT complaining that these features are paid only!! Just that it is confusing to have them there in my free version home page when they are not part of the free programme).
Also after reading the other thread on v. 8 here on the forum I'd just like to feed back that I am running a laptop with an AMD processor and have had no issue at all playing videos or running any flash content that I can tell so far, so the issue in the threads can't affect every AMD machine.