Fujitsu P770 and Windows 8

Anyone know if there is a way to get Windows 8 running well on the P770? There are no P770 drivers for Windows 8 on the Fujitsu website, so I am not sure how well it will work.

Windows 8 includes HyperV, which may resolve some issues I have. I have one application that must run under XP. The application runs OK when a virtualized XP session is run under Windows 7, but not 100%. HyperV is supposed to be a better environment, so I would like to try it - if Win8 can run on the P770.

Thanks in advance!

 

Have you tried the Windows 7 drivers? They should work.

 

Spent one day this past weekend doing a full image backup of the boot drive in my P770, then installing Windows 8 and then all my applications.

So far, it has gone far better than I would have expected! I am using a product called Classic Shell to get around the Metro interface and provide a Start button and menu.

Did not have to download and install any drivers at all! There are two warnings in the Device Manager. I have not figure out what those are for - they may be the fingerprint reader and the webcam. I don't use either, so if that is the case, it is a nonissue.

Installed most of my applications, and that went fast and easy. Nothing like installing onto an SSD!

Win8 had no problems with the dual SSDs, or anything else. It just kind of installed and ran.

Very nice!

 

The more I work with the P770 running Windows 8 Pro 64bit, the more impressed I am.

Tried using Hyper-V to create an XP virtual machine, but Hyper-V has one limitation that is a showstopper for me. It won't pass through attached devices to the virtual PC. In my case, I am creating the virtual PC to run DJPower 2008, which requires a dongle in a USB port. There may be workarounds to let the virtual PC see the USB port, but they are more time and effort than I am prepared to invest. There were also issues with the networking on the P770 - which was weird, since those same issues did not occur on my main machine.

Switched over to VMWare, and it runs beautifully! No problem attaching any removable device. If anything, this virtual PC running XP is even more compatible and solid than booting into XP! DJPower 2008 can be very finicky and flakey, yet stuff that does NOT work when booted into XP work just fine in a virtual XP machine!

Plus, you can control how many CPUs the virtual PC sees. This is important to me since DJPower gets really upset if it sees more than 1 CPU.

Everything else for both the virtualization and standard applications have installed and run really, really well. Issues that had cropped up under Windows 7 are gone. Drivers do not seem to be an issue in any way, even though Fujitsu does not support Windows 8 on the P770.

This is from a clean install. However, the upgrade done on my main PC has also been very good. That was putting Win8 on top of a Win7 install. Again, fast, solid, and very nice to work with.

Once you get rid of the dumb tiles, of course..

There are two things I would change with the P770. The mushy keyboard, and the need to use two keys to get Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn. There is enough unused real estate that they could fix the missing keys, and a bit of design could fix the mushy keyboard - it is just not solidly supported in the centre.

What about the P772 for those as has one - does the keyboard still flex? Did they add any keys?

The one thing that I am not dissapointed with - much, much to my surprise! - is the horsepower. Running a 1.2Ghz ULV CPU should mean that it spends it's time crawling and the user waiting. That just is not what it happens! I even did a lot of video editing with Adobe Premier last summer, and that was very acceptable. Wow!

 

I bought my nephew a P770 recently. I did a clean of W8 64bit onto an ssd drive and I could not get the wifi to work with a clean install. I then installed W7 64bit and upgraded in place to W8 64bit and had no problems. Everything was recognised in the device manager and the wifi now works as it should.