Windows Windows 8 Marmite thread... Because you either love it or hate it

well my laptop is a bit older than windows 7.. it ran windows vista for a while but it was so slow.. i was forced to use windows xp.. so I dunno if my hardware will run Windows 7 or 8 beta.. but who knows.. *shrug*

Right now it's currently running Ubuntu 10.10.. and Windows XP.. Dual booting.. but i'm thinking of getting a netbook for the Windows 8 to test this thing out.. will that work??

I went by my laptop's driver site and i noticed that there's no drivers available for Windows 7.. so probably won't run that..

 

Windows 7 specs are lower than Vista, due to large amount of optimization. Win7 ran on a Pentium 3 800Mhz 512MB of RAM OK (without Aero of course). Sooo I am sure your old laptop will have no problem.

Windows 8 is supposed to be even further optimized, but Microosft decided to keep the specs, because they didn't want OEM put bare minimum in system and sold that.

Vista and Win7 drivers should work fine under Win8 as no core architecture changes was made on the driver side of things. You might need to run the setup under compatibility mode, to by-pass the OS check system of the driver setup.

 

Believe it or not Windows 7 Ran 1000x better then vista, try it out what's the specs for your laptop?

 

ah okay, but when I got this computer a few years ago.. i couldn't install the wireless driver in Vista and XP.. so was forced to go wired until I installed Ubuntu about a year ago on this system.. the wireless work on that.. so Just a bit concerned about the issue on that.. for some reason I'm thinking this laptop doesn't like Vista/XP driver for WiFi card.. *shrug*

 

Specs:
Acer Extensa 5420
AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology TL-60 / 2 GHz ( Dual-Core ) • 15.4" • Notebook • 4 GB RAM • Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu 10.10 (used to run Vista) •

 

If your system came with XP or Vista, than the wireless card should work. You probably getting the wrong drivers. Or the one offered in Windows update break it. Stuff to test.

 

I tried everything.. i even went to the site.. downloaded the driver from there.. nothing.. I'm thinking that when I'm running Windows XP/Vista.. it just wont turn on the wireless.. maybe I got a bad WiFi card or something.. *shrug* I have an extra laptop same specs as my current one.. that wireless card just works....

 

Or your wireless switch is broken Anyway, joke aside... try and see.

 

now I have to find an extra hard drive to backup all of my stuff.. but where.. I don't want to lose my stuff on this computer on both Ubuntu and Windows XP.. Anyone got a spare laptop hard drive to get rid of? lol naw you don't have to anyway..

 

Anyone know how long we can use this for? or can we keep using it until the real version is released then enter our cd keys?

 

How would I install it as a virtual machine as I dont really want to change my os yet

 

Not sure if I should install this as I have a UEFI bios and I have seen on the net, that it could lock out the bios from allowing any other OS to be installed, including Linux and even Window's 7.

Anyone have any info about if that does happen or not, as I really don't want to install it and suddenly find I cannot go back to Win 7 if I don't like it.

 

I have a similar spec HP-nx6325 running win 7 no probs

 

Go grab VirtualBox and install the default package. Once you're finished, you'll open right into a fresh copy of the application. This is where you'll begin creating your system inside your system.

To start, click on the giant New button in the upper-left corner of the app. Give your virtual machine a clever name and select Windows 7 as the operating system. Make sure that your choice of OS (32-bit or 64-bit) matches whichever version of Windows 8 you downloaded.

Click Next, and you'll be taken to a screen that asks how much memory you'd like to devote to the virtual operating system. The 32-bit version of Windows 8 requires 1 gigabyte at minimum, and the 64-bit version requires 2GB, but the more RAM you can give the virtual OS, the better it will run. Click Next once you've made your choice.

Leave the "Virtual Hard Disk" options and subsequent "Create New Virtual Disk" options exactly as they are, unless you think you'll need to access your virtual hard drive in a separate virtual machine application. You can select either a "Dynamically allocated" or "Fixed size" virtual hard drive based on your personal preferences--we suggest you use the "Dynamically allocated" disk on our installation. On the next screen, make sure that your virtual disk has at least 16GB allocated to it for the 32-bit version of Windows 8. The 64-bit version needs a minimum of 20GB.

Once you're ready, click Next to create your virtual machine.

When your new virtual PC is ready, it will appear in VirtualBox's list of available machines (powered off at the moment, we note). Highlight it and click the big Settings button. If your system supports hardware virtualization, you can give your virtual machine access to additional CPU cores via the System submenu. If you don't know whether your CPU supports hardware virtualization, you can check for yourself on Intel and AMD's websites. For Intel processors, look up your own processor model and check for virtualization under "Advanced Features." For AMD processors, look up your processor model and look for a feature listing called "AMD Virtualization Technology."

Now click on the Storage submenu and then on the Empty line underneath "IDE Controller." Click on the little CD icon next to the CD/DVD drive listing, and select the option, Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file. Scroll for the Windows 8 .iso file you previously downloaded to your actual (not virtual) system and load that up. Now click on the big OK button at the bottom of the overall Settings window.

Cross your fingers and click on the big Start button to load your virtual machine for the first time. If all has gone well, the first thing you'll see is an annoying pop-up message that tells you about your keyboard and mouse capturing options. Ignore it. VirtualBox will boot and go right into the Windows 8 installation mechanism. Now take a breath: You've made it past the tricky part. And before you know it, you'll be fiddling around in Windows 8's funky new user interface faster than you can say, "Virtualwho?"

 

Thanks and +rep

 

I'm not going to say I'm a fan of the interface just yet, but damn it's fluid. I have it on a 10GB partition (about 21GB recommended) on a 5400rpm drive, and it is really smooth. This is definitely a major leap, not like the leap from XP to 7, this is much more dramatic. There are some nice new features, too much to list (GUI boot menu for example )

 

Does anyone know if it's going to ship with DirectX 12?

 

just spent a hour looking for paint finally worked it out, heres a few screen shots, hasn't crashed once yet, and did work straight out the box unlike windows 7 where i had to install drivers for everything

 

There is no known date at the moment. Usually it's several month AFTER the Release Candidate. and RC expires about 6month after the official release (based on Vista and Win7 experience). You cannot upgrade Win8 Beta to RC. Nor RC to release. It's always a clean install.

No you miss understood. You got it the other way around
UEFI has a security feature that locks to 1 OS, WHEN ENABLED in your UEFI options. The idea is that you don't have a malware that plays with Windows boot system, and pre-loads it self before Windows, and then Windows security goes at the bin. You see the way it works (this is since day 1 of PC computing, even before), is that the CPU has 2 modes. Supervisor and normal. Supervisor mode can do anything... ANYTHING with your system. It can access other processes memory space for example, it can alter them.. it can get information that normal applications can't. This is why, for example, software can't know how much RAM they consume, only estimate. While Windows can tell you exact amount. You can only have 1 supervisor.. usually that is the OS. What a malware can do, is hack the boot sequence so that it pre-loads a watcher program of sort (few KB's in size), which allows a normal program in Windows (or wtv OS), to get and send commands to it. Once that malware is loaded at boot, it then loads the OS.. it can do that.. because as supervisor mode.. yup, as mentioned.. you can do anything. As it's a few kilobytes, or even a few megabytes, you won't notice a slower boot time.

To prevent this, UEFI presented a new security feature (if enabled) that locks the first OS detected. Meaning if a malware does the above hack... well the UEFI will tell you "Hey you got malware, I am not booting you!". While Windows Vista supported EUFI, it just means that Vista will install and boot correctly on your system. Windows 8 is the first version of Windows that support UEFI more fully, and support that security feature.

So all you have to do, is go in the BIOS (well UEFI settings), and make sure that this security option is disabled. Now you can install any OS.

Technically speaking, Linux can support this security feature, and now you can install both OS, with the security option enabled. BUT, the problem is that everything in Linux is open source.... so that means that the security code would be public... meaning that the entire security system goes at the garbage. So it's not done.

 

What is the opinion on metro vs desktop apps? (video, music etc)

I'm using metro music atm, which has it's positives, but also lacks the oh so handy mini controls of desktop players. It's annoying metro music and WMP are totally different programs rather than being two interfaces for the same thing.