Windows 8 Developer Preview

Anyone brave enough to install it yet?

Windows Dev Center

 

I'm posting from IE10 in the Win8 Dev program. So far I can't get the Verde driver to install properly...

 

Im downloading it now. I'm gonna put it on an older drive of mine, Ill let you guys know how it goes

 

Posting off of windows 8 still trying to get used to the new start menu and the other new features

 

which one do you download?

 

I used the Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) version, not the one with the dev tools. Makes for a smaller download cause I don't need the dev tools don't use it in place of windows 7 lol to many bugs

Windows 8 dev Preview Downloads

 

I've got both 64bit versions DL. I had sent BatBoy a message today asking him about this. Have you just installed Windows 8 or have you attempted to also get AlienFX command center working? It seems to be a smooth install from other posts I've read.

 

works pretty well. I tried to get the audio drivers installed but the installer said there was a registry error. The touch bottoms on the top of the keyboard work fine with out the driver so im gonna leave it for now just waiting on my graphics drivers and command center. Ill put mass effect on after I get that done and see how that runs.

 

Got all the drivers and such installed including latest nvidia beta drivers with modded inf. Only real bugs I have encountered so far are not waking from sleep. (I can live with that ).firefox crashes every once in a while but it doesn't happen that often, and windows media player crashes from time to time but i bet that will be fixed shortly

 

Hmm, I might just creat an image backup of my drive and install Win 8 just to check it out. How is it compared to Win 7?

 

For all you people that want to try Windows 8 but don't want to image your HDD or erase it to create partitions (or load on some flavor of Linux to partition without erasing your HDD), I found a great program that will partition your HDD without erasing it. We use it at my work on servers quite often and have never had any issues with it. It's called Easeus Partition Manager and will make installing windows 8 painless. Once you are finished messing around with Windows 8, you can then delete the partition safely and without losing data.

FYI- I dislike Windows 8! It's made for tablets. It seems that once you take away the tiles, it's just a skinned version of windows 7 but with a lot of watermarks.

 

Windows 8 is supposed to be (eventually) less of a resource hog then windows 7 (not that 7 is much of one). But anything that improves efficiency is good to me.

 

There's an even simpler way - Just create a VHD and install Win8 to it. Then boot from the VHD file.

Windows 7 ? VHD Boot ? Setup Guideline - knom's developer corner - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

Rather then worrying about your HD partitions, why not use VmWare Workstation? Usually there is a 30 day evaluation on it. I've been running Windows 8 on VmWare Workstation just fine. Heck, even have Mac OSX Lion 10.7 running on it as well.

As for Windows 8 itself, the first release that got leaked stated "Windows 7" when booting up, you need to remember this is not even in beta yet. But Microsoft is positioning itself to be able to use Windows 8 on tablets (which they have already previewed and I must say they look promising), laptops / workstations, and Windows Mobile Phones. They clearly are looking towards going to a more cloud based solution. I'm really interested if MS can manage to pull off such a tablet all while running a full Windows 8 OS on it.

Some of the features I find promising are the changes they are making to the file copying system which promises to be much faster and easier when it comes to copying over an existing directory (I still prefer robocopy especially when using SMB 2.0). I think Windows 8 will have some great improvements, but they certainly do not want to stray too far away from their major success with Windows 7.

 

Have you seen Windows 8 Server? The UI is the same as the client.

 

Yes I have, Windows 8 Server (I'm on the fence of whether they will actually release it under that name) will of course still offer some of the advanced multimedia features found on workstations; but it simply is not practical to use the Aero features or multimedia experience on the majority of Windows 2008 / R2 servers. Unless your setting up a thin client on a workstation to connect to a virtual desktop, there is no reason to enable such functionality.

 

yep - Metro is totally confusing on the Server.

 

I had problems installing it to vmware workstation. I am running version 7.1.4 so it's not the newest version, but when installing the 64 bit Windows 8 client it would freeze and not run. I got it working on virtualbox but it wouldn't allow me to install the direct3d support because it's 64bit so I decided to do a 40GB partition and it works fine. I'm still just not a fan of Windows 8 on a laptop (my friend put it on his tablet and it's actually really cool).

 

I think windows 8 will be a lot better once they refine it. Remember this is only the dev version and there will doubtless be more changes and features added in the future