Windows 8 Consumer Preview installed

With just the right amount of hype, Microsoft releases Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

It is far better than the developer’s release back in September 11, 2011 and you can tell they have been working fast and furious, keeping to a tight schedule.    Definitely good stuff.

I installed it on one of my virtual machines, and it runs like a charm!

Installation experience side notes:

1. I had to download it twice, as the first time did not download completelly
2. If you are installing on VMware Workstation 8  and you get an <Product Key> error, then   follow this link as to how to circumvent it. (Pretty easy)

Some notables:

Hardware requirements, Microsoft recommends:

• 1 GHz or faster processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Microsoft  recommendation for the Consumer Preview  to be ran  natively on bear metal… But realistically, who is going to do that?

More at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/29/running-the-consumer-preview-system-recommendations.aspx

What’s next?

after playing with the product, I will get a new hard drive, install it onto bear metal, and begin to use it as my primary OS…   Will keep you posted!