PAE error during boot

Check for any BIOS updates to start, and flash if any exist. While PAE is not required when dealing with less than 4GB of ram, it is turned on in 64 bit versions of Windows and cannot be disabled.

For 32 bit versions, there is a switch you can specify in the boot manager to turn the feature on, but it is normally off by default (although in consumer versions of Windows, turning it on when using 32 bit actually does nothing anyway)

- PAE is Physical Address Extension provide by Intel to allow 32 bit access to areas beyond the 32bit address space.
- 64 bit windows does not need a 32bit address translation scheme and does not use PAE

- I would suspect that your old system had it turned on and the Windows 8 upgrade just tried to keep the settings for you. Look for a way to turn it off
- It can also be turned on automatically if you have Data Execution Prevention turned on with a 32 bit system( check control panel system, performance options, data execution prevention)

sorry, my memory is fuzzy on some of this old stuff.

My CPU only supports 32Bit...
I'm not sure whether my system had Data Execution Prevention turned on in Win 7...

It sounds like my system's PAE needs to get turned off somehow...
Will fresh install work..?
My system couldn't install fresh Win 7 install, so I had to upgrade from Vista.. which worked fine.
Do I need to change or modify the ISO I downloaded from windows upgrade assistant?

-I looked at the machine specs its a 2005 era machine(designed in 2003/2004), very custom. I would expect low success rate for this upgrade so be prepared to restore back to your starting OS.

- You may find one of the custom device drivers requires DEP to be on and caused PAE to be turned on also.

-Mainly, these early tablets did some funky designs to get around OS limits. The designs required custom drivers that have not been updated to the newer driver standards on the newer OS. The manufacture will not want to spend the resources to update and write new drivers for hardware that is long past its expected end of life.

- Also note: upgrade your BIOS to the most current version you can get before you attempt a upgrade. Big waste of time if your install gets messed up because of an old BIOS.

-If you still proceed with the update I would go into the BIOS and turn off everything I don't critically need before I attempted a update. Then after I got a install I would enable one device at a time.

- You will have to have a working OS to update anyway, be sure to have win 8 try to find and download any drivers and updates during the early portion of the install process.