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Windows 8 Developer Preview – A Quick View

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16 Sep 2011CPOL1 min read 13.8K  
Windows 8 Developer Preview – A Quick View

Lured with “MetroUI” and “ARM processor support”, I don't want to wait until next year for RTM release. I downloaded the 64-bit Developer Preview with Development Tools from here.

Environment

I believed that Windows Virtual PC could be the only choice to install Win8DevPrew. However, it throws “This 64-bit application couldn’t load because your PC doesn’t have a 64-bit processor” error message during the setup. Later, I came to know from Adrian’s ZDNet blog post that Virtual Box is the only and best choice. He explained the various settings you should do before installing Windows 8 on Virtual Box.

Note that allocate at least 25 GB for VDI, 2 GB RAM and 30 MB for Video RAM in the Virtual Box settings.

Installing

The installation overall took 30 minutes, here are some screen shots:

Win8 Initial Setup

Image 2

Image 3

Post the installation, you have to create a user account as shown in the below figure:

Image 4

Starting Windows

After completing the installation, Windows 8 takes 19 seconds to load. You will see a full-screen wallpaper as shown below:

Image 5

You get a feel of using Mobile operating system. You have to drag this screen to see the login screen as like below:

Image 6

So, “touch” is the main user input medium for Windows 8, though mouse and keyboard are available. After the successful login, you will see the “Metro” styled start screen.

Image 7

By tapping the “Computer” tile (in the above figure – not shown), you can see the classic explorer window and start menu as well, but again, tiles are the main interface to access all the features in Metro style.

Image 8

Ok… Let me explore more before writing more about Windows 8.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)