Windows 8 Consumer Preview

[enecosse]

You can do that and it should work fine. The only thing to remember is it is a preview (it WILL be more buggy in some shape or form, though you probably won't notice for the most part), and it contains a time bomb. When it reaches a certain date it will inform you that the test is over, then shut itself down etc. You will then need to reinstall a final retail version.

[jnorman]

thanks ene

[valis]

I'm actually going to do that for my wife and see how it works out, even though I have a Win7 Home 64bit license sitting here for her. I've had her using Pinguy OS just to see how transparent it was for a non linux user (fork of Ubuntu with a ton of preinstalled crap) and I think she'll take ok to it on her little i3 laptop. My reasoning is the apparently smaller footprint and possible higher power savings that they've promised with Win 8.

When they did this with Win7 they had another version ready at each stage of the process and I was able to carry every machine I used those on up to a nice inexpensive preorder copy that they still run to date. So if they follow a similar pattern, the only real caveat with the timebomb is moving their data over to the new installs that you'll be facing at each stage. All I did was my usual method of keeping backups of any installers on hand that I've used and backing up the user directory content that matters (appdata & various documents/pics etc folders). A usb drive works fine for that...

[norbury brook]

Originally Posted by valis

I'm actually going to do that for my wife and see how it works out, even though I have a Win7 Home 64bit license sitting here for her. I've had her using Pinguy OS just to see how transparent it was for a non linux user (fork of Ubuntu with a ton of preinstalled crap) and I think she'll take ok to it on her little i3 laptop. My reasoning is the apparently smaller footprint and possible higher power savings that they've promised with Win 8.

When they did this with Win7 they had another version ready at each stage of the process and I was able to carry every machine I used those on up to a nice inexpensive preorder copy that they still run to date. So if they follow a similar pattern, the only real caveat with the timebomb is moving their data over to the new installs that you'll be facing at each stage. All I did was my usual method of keeping backups of any installers on hand that I've used and backing up the user directory content that matters (appdata & various documents/pics etc folders). A usb drive works fine for that...

I did exactly the same, I was running OSX at the time and win 7 x64 brought me back to windows.


MC

[xgman]

From what I can see so far this looks like a real jumbled mess of old and new and pad and desktop that doesn't quite get along so well, yet . . .

[valis]

Honestly I'm less concerned about whether the new UI stuff is fully fleshed out, and more concerned with how it will run casual apps for my wife (as the above poster stated). Win7 64bit was no worse than Vista64 on launch but it wasn't usable for my daily workload. I did full installs of most of my work software on each new version and while I could have moved with the final RC or so I waited until launch to commit. However it was useful as a daily OS for a casual user from the get-go, and with a bit of learning or disabling of broken features I'm betting Win8 will be too.

So for a GS user while it might be worth having a Win8 partition to test your DAW app(s) & plugins, I can't imagine using it for a work install unless you're completely skint.