Microsoft released Windows 8 Consumer Preview a couple of days ago (1 Mar 2012). This is the second Windows 8 pre release. As I do not have spare hardware, I only tried the first developer preview using virtual machine. At the time the developer release was out, I had a few problems running it inside a virtual machine. When using Hyper-V, 3D acceleration is not supported so experience was not great. Tried using VMware player, but it crashed. Only VirtualBox worked. May be because I had been using VMware product for too long, I am never a big fan of VirtualBox. But finally, VMware released player 4.0 which works perfectly with Windows 8 consumer preview. Now let’s start the installation, there are a few things you need.
- Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview from here or the ISO here. I used the ISO because I am installing using virtual machine.
- Download VMware player 4.0 here.
- Of course you also need to make sure your machine meet the requirement to run VMware player 4.0 and also powerful enough to run Windows 8 as guest.
When you have everything ready and installed VMware player, create a new virtual machine and select ‘I will install the operating system later’.
Make sure you select Microsoft Windows 7 x64. I set the machine with two CPUs, 127GB hard disk and assigned 4096MB RAM to it.
After creating the virtual machine, make sure the virtual DVD-ROM is connected to the ISO then start the virtual machine.
The DVD will boot and begin installation. Note the metro style fish boot splash screen compared to the original picture of fish in Windows 7 beta.
The system reserved partition has increased from 100MB in Windows 7 to 350MB in Windows 8. I only created a 32GB partition.
The installation was very quick. It took less than 30 minutes on my not so new computer. I will blog about the rest of the installation experience and more about Windows 8 in my next post.
Behind Simplicity 