Windows 8 so far

Windows 8 is out in the wild in the form of the Windows Developer Preview and it’s looking pretty awesome!

There are so many little changes as well as the more obvious big ones and my plan is to do a couple of posts covering those off but this post is a bit of a stop gap really.

I spent a good few hours trying to get it to run inside various virtual platforms and was having no luck at all. I eventually discovered (via a blog I can’t remember – sorry!) that you need to have Hardware Assisted Virtualization enabled in the BIOS of your machine for the Windows 8 Dev Preview to run inside VirtualBox!

That done I was able to step through the install process (a look at which will come soon) and boot up into Windows 8 – nice I could see all the lovely tiles for the Metro apps…but clicking on them did nothing Thanks to help from Twitter friends it was pointed out that you must have a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768. I upped it from the default 800×600 and boom…all the Metro apps were working.

Yesterday (20/09/11) I hooked up a multi touch Acer monitor to the laptop I’d managed to procure and started to experience Windows 8 in all it’s touchy, swipy goodness…and it was great!

However, I came in this morning and the machine completed a bunch of updates. I was happy about that as I hoped that new features might be enabled but no, existing features were broken. The green background of the desktop was gone, replaced with a broken looking white – as were the backgrounds of many apps…annoying but not too bad. I turned the monitor on and was met with a “no signal” error. I unplugged all the cables and re-affixed them but to no avail and now my issue is this…having used Windows 8 with touch for a day…I now find using a mouse…especially a laptop track pad…horribly fiddly and pre-historic! Hopefully this will be resolved in a future update.