problem with getting RDP accessing Win8 pc

What kind/model of router do you have? Do you have the ability to disable Windows Firewall on the Windows 8 machine?

Do you have a static IP address at your office?

Why would you not just use something like LogMeIn?

It is really risky to leave the RDP port to 3389 on your external IP because that is the one of the first things that hackers scan for when they are port scanning IPs. Best practice is to set the RDP port to something else and then translate it to 3389 on your internal network.

Trying to hack port 3389 isn't that severe anymore, if using Network Authentication, and W7 does that by default, so the risk is much lower than before. But using non-standard ports for public access is always a good idea.

You didn't tell whether you get any feedback, but I assume you are not. First troubleshooting step is always to look at the router logs, if available, and to disable the remote Windows Firewall.
I suspect it is the Firewall not having the corresponding rules active, which just happens. Check that - you should have special Firewall rules allowing RDP by default, and those should be activated.

I completely disabled the windows firewall on the target machine after the first time of not being able to connect just to make sure it didn't have anything to do with it. If I was able to connect after disabling WF, then I would have guessed it was a WF config issue - any other ideas/possibilities?

I'm seeing around that receiving an RDP connection to any version other than Windows 8 PRO wont work - is this correct? If so, I'm sure this is the problem.

No, that's not correct. You can RDP into all Windows OS starting with W2000 Server and XP. Only the security options are less, e.g. Network Level Authentication is not available before W7 / W2008R2, which means if you force the RDP connection to use that, it won't work.

Ok - I'm not sure where to go with this then. I'm still having the issue if not being able to login via RDP from a win 8 machine, to a win 8 machine. I'm just going from home to work. I started off using port 3389, forwarding to itself in the router to the target  machines IP - I couldn't connect, so I shut down windows FW to see if that was it, still didn't work - we also have a simple Cisco store bought router E1000 - prior to replacing it, we had a win 7 machine that we used to connect to perfectly fine, so I know it's not the port being blocked by ISP -  stumped. This is usually pretty straightforward that's why I thought it may have been because we gave the basic version of Win8

Ok - well at least we now know what the issue was. Now the next question is, can the upgrade from Win8 to Win8 Pro be perf

Ugh - hit the send button by accident - to continue : can the upgrade from 8 to 8 pro be performed remotely? Will it shut down and need someone in front of it for prompts etc?

Considering you can't remote in right now isn't this question rather mute?

You will probably  require an Unattend.xml to fill in the prompts

With 3rd party tools installed i.e. logmein remote you could do this remotely perhaps even with logmein free (http://www.logmein.com) though I'm not sure WHEN it starts (machine level or user level)