Playing with Windows 8...
 

I've got my main PC dual-booting into Win7 64bit and Win8 64bit. I have the Enterprise edition and it's running very well on my Dell Inspiron with Intel 6600, 4 GB of RAM, NVidia 430 video and 1TB hard drive. Everything seems to work, except printing to my 2 shared printers. Windows Home Server sees the Win8 PC and backs it up every night, no problems.

The OS is completely different from previous Windows versions and I think it's more like Ubuntu 11 than Windows. Most of the "eye candy" has been removed so response is instantaneous and everything seems to be extremely quick!

For my job, I need to become thoroughly familiar with the present (Win7) and upcoming operating systems (Win8) from M$ because that's what my company uses for the enterprise. We don't have Mac or Linux on the desktop, so I concentrate on the technology that's most likely to be implemented at work, which has served me well career-wise thus far...

Anyone else here playing with Win8 yet?

I have an educational license through IEEE. I was tempted to upgrade but my computer is already pretty fast with Windows 7 (13 inch Sony VPCSA390x, i7, 8GB RAM, SSD as primary and other conventional HD as storage, etc.)

If I knew offhand that it would work well with Logicworks 5, MATLAB, Visual Studio 2008 and Mathematica, I'd probably consider doing it soon.

I know I will definitely get to play around with it at my work over Christmas break with our test environment. What sect of the IT field do you work in? Do you think they will roll out Windows 8 soon? Will it be a flop or a decent OS?

I have it on my test tablet so i can play with touch. I really don't like it, too geared toward social crap, admin tools are not easy to find, my guess.... It will be skipped over in the corporate world like vista.


Epic fail Ballmer

I'm an IT Security and Controls Engineer, working on Enterprise Antivirus at Ford, but I've been in just about every part of IT since 1990. I think that dual-booting Win7 and Win8 is a good, safe way to test the new OS. Since Ford has just migrated to Windows 7, I don't see them moving 350k+ endpoints to Win8, but whatever the next OS (Win 9?) from M$ will incorporate enough of Win8, that I think it's a good career decision to learn as much about it as I can.

I'll kick the tires and then run a bunch of tests against the Win8 antivirus/antimalware (Windows Defender) to see how it does. I'll test extensively with Symantec and McAfee and learn as much as I can about how Win8 works.

I have it running on 3 user's PCs at the office, and my desktop and laptop at home.

Have a Server 2012 Server running in production as well.

I think the UI is a little awkward on a non-tablet, but it's also not remotely as bad as some reviewers/bloggers made it out to be.

Performance is good.

Had a few business applications that wouldn't install right away, but there were ways around that on all of them. One odd one was that Win8 ships with the proper version of .net, so Windows Update won't load it up, but it has to be enabled from the command line because the installer for the app didn't know what to do with that.

I have Office 2013 preview on the desktop at home, that's a little bumpier at this point.

I hate it. Its IS as bad as the bloggers say. The system is schizophrenic. It has two distinct personalities, neither of which is complete.

I predict it will flop worse than Vista and may cause MS considerable pain.

I am getting ready to start playing with 8 and Windows Server 2012. The safest way to do so would be in a virtual environment. I'm installing vCenter 5.1 on a server this weekend, and then a couple of servers with ESXi 5; you can't run 8 or 2012 on anything earlier than that.

From what I've seen of it so far, I think it will flop worse than Microsoft Bob

Retroactive compatibility needs to be core.
Lack of emulation will tick off a lot of business (and home use) customers, again.

I got my first Server 2012 BSOD

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1348589651.jpg

i am downloading win8 right now. this should be fun. i think i'll use an external drive and take my regular drives offline, just in case.

Any idea what caused that BSOD on 2012 Server?

You set them up in a VM right? That should take the hardware issues mostly off the table I'd think.

Mine has been plugging along just fine, but it's all by itself on a fairly current Proliant.

Actually, I think it's because it's in a VM - it's on ESX 4.0; I will try again on a newer version of ESX (5.0.1)

WIndows 8! Make your development machine look like a phone!

i chickened out during the install to my main hard drive, even though i have an empty partition.

however, i did install to a spare drive i have and i am posting this with Win8. i like it. very streamlined and seems wicked fast. what i always hated about windows was all the overhead BS that it wants to do.

cheers!

Anyone running it under Parallels yet? I might be a guinea pig for that if not.