Windows 8
 

What a good job it's a leap year, On Feb. 29, Microsoft will reportedly release a Consumer Preview of the beta version of Windows 8.

Rivetess' computer - and indeed mine - need W7, but would putting the W8 Beta on a fairly powerful laptop be worth it? The W7 RC ran well for some months, and I was offered a great deal on upgrading to a licensed copy at the end.

With a month to go, they ran out.:{

But are such offers common? I'd love to get rid of Vista on both laptops, but again, having an OS that's tailored for hand-held devices might be a PITA. Is it too early to tell?

Loose rivets,

Install Windows 7 and use it look up the definition of the word Beta in the context of IT before rushing out to install it on a laptop you actually do real work on. :cool:

It's here: Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO formats

I'm going to try it tomorrow, in a virtual machine first, then as an upgrade to my laptop if I like it.

Win 8 gone and got.
 

45 minutes to download the ISO, 10 mins to burn to a DVD, then 20 minutes to install to its own partition, with just 2 reboots, and 65 MB of updates.

Access to existing OS's for files etc.
Some good 'Apps', if that floats your boat.
Memory and CPU useage noticeably less than the Vista comp this is on.
No VM install as CPU is cheeeeep:O
IE10 is great.

Long live Powershell, cmd.exe is dead!

Initial impression? Instant useability with the tiles, and a reassuring Desktop if all else fails.

Next event; the 64bit version for the Win7 laptop.

PS. You don't need a touchscreen.

I had a really good experience with W7 RC. I suppose most of the angst had been filtered out of it by that late stage. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to go back to XP.



Good idea about dual boot. It'll buy an escape route.


I have C D & E logical drives, with no Recover intrusion on this Sony VIAO, and has been set up to have programs on drive D. Probably a bad mistake, as I'm assuming I'll need a clean and preferably formatted drive for a second OS.

Can't think of anything, but can anyone see a problem in using drive D for W8?

Oh, dear. :( Just looked at New Explorer Ribbon Layout in the link. Now I know my tired old brain just can not put up with that.

My 3 explorers, plural ( well, one really) are set up on the task bar with the aiming point set in properties. At one touch, I'm in Photos, or my WP working folder. The new system looks sexy, but the old one is under control. Mind you, that annoying habit of the tree jumping to a new position still drives me nuts.

Oh what fun it is took me ages to work out how to get back to the startup page :ugh: having sorted that out and now switched to 'desktop' things are slightly more manageable intuitively. that said it's very fast and after I manage to get my head around customizing it I'll be happy.......I think.

bnt, in Virtualbox make sure you enable PAE/NX:

Settings > System > Processor, select "Enable PAE/NX"

or you'll get:

Your PC needs to be repaired
An unexpected error has occured
Error 0xc0000260

Loose:

If you really want to try out Win 8 I would strongly suggest not installing it to any partition on any hard drive.

What I would suggest is download Oracle's Virtualbox (it's free), install it and then install the beta of Win 8. This way, the only thing it could fry is the VM instance.

Can it be downloaded to and run from a USB stick?

Ideally, I would like to put it on the seldom used Toshiba Satellite 4600 but I doubt that has the oomph necessary.

hahaha... you're joking right ?

Surely you've used Windows ? You know what it's like in terms of resource utilisation. That said, I wouldn't even try to run a non-cutdown version of Linux off a USB stick either.

Do you honestly think the throughput over USB will be sufficient to enable Windows to run ?

There's a reason why it has been an unsupported configuration in all historic versions of Windows and will no doubt continue to be so.

As rgbrock said, install virtualisation software and run it on there.

Unless you've upgraded it from what's on here:
Satellite Pro 4600
It wont have enough RAM to run so not worth trying. Chances are it would also be in some sort of reduced graphics mode too.

I'd say though - if something will run vista, it will probably run windows 7 / 8. I successfully installed win 7 on my 7 year old tablet PC which had win xp tablet edition on it (till the hard disk crashed with no rescue disk) and it works a treat - faster than what it was on XP. I did upgrade it to 1.5GB RAM but even so...

I stuck it in a VM today. Initial thoughts are that useability is high if you want to do the tasks on the squares, but I had to search and search for the shutdown command, and couldn't find how to enter the control panel without typing "control panel" in the search. The hidden corners thing is a bit rubbish too. Am going to be a bit sad if CMD is gone though.

There is the option to download it to disc then burn it to a memory stick or dvd as an ISO, you'll need a 3Gig memstick, but you will still need to install it to the hard drive, I haven't tried it (I installed it on a separate partition) but you can just update an existing windows installation and it will talk you through it.

Not bring a user of small mobile devices It took me awhile to get my head around the concept of just moving things out of the way when you're finished with them and it took a while to work out how to get past the splash screen at the start and into the log in screen.

It is very fast with screens opening instantly and so far it's only crashed once, this was after it had put itself to sleep and about half an hour later it suddenly said "I've encountered a problem and will have to reboot" which it did ok.

Don't think much of I.E.10 but I opinion may change after I've used it a bit more, FireFox 10 runs without any problems.

Edited to add: It appears to be using about 720 Meg of ram which seems very good.

I have it running in a VM too. The command prompt is still there and working fine. I have two major apps that I need to work, and they seem fine, so I may just go ahead and upgrade my laptop with it next week.

I'm not really after the "bling", but for a while I've been reading about the work that's been going on under the skin to make it more stable and efficient e.g. this. There are some people working on Windows 8 who are a bit tired of the "bloated" reputation Windows has had over the years.

One handy keyboard shortcut I've found so far: Win+X brings up a quick "power user" menu with essentials such as Control Panel, Explorer, command prompts (normal & Admin), Task Manager, & more. Other Win7 shortcuts work too e.g. Win+L to lock the console.

I had a bit of time today, so I upgraded my "big" W7 laptop using the in-place method: run the upgrade program, let it do all its checks and downloads, then wait a couple of hours while it grinds away. It went smoothly enough, no problems in the process. The only installed application that had to be removed was Microsoft's own Defender anti-virus, probably because the process installs its own version of that. Apart from that everything else works, it's pretty much the same under the skin.

The default is to link your user account to Microsoft's Windows Live service, and synchronize user settings between computers that way, but you can turn that off and log in as a "local user", under Control Panel / Users. I only have one Windows computer, so I have no need for "single sign-on" of that sort.

I'll report back if I find anything interesting. :8

All the basics here.
 

ZDnet have a good article by Ed Bott on how it all works; with pictures!

HERE.

Lots more pics HERE, at Tech Republic.

Thanks for the heads up on Oracle VM. Now running Win8.:8
First impressions...useable but the tiles to me appear a bit 'tacky'. Suppose i'll get used to it. Maybe I need to tinker with the display settings but I'll leave that until tomorrow.
pprune works ok in IE10.:ok:

Der! A right click was all it needed to find all the other 'bits' and make it more presentable!

Hmmmmmm, there's a post on the Windows 8 forum suggesting that, according to a 'leaked' road map, Windows 9 beta will be released at the beginning of 2014 and the RC in November of that year. This is giving rise to the thought that W 8 is the "Vista version" for Windows 9.