Here's – nnish! Nishanth Anil

2009 was the year I wrote a post on Installing Windows 7 on VMware, and 2 years later with the same excitement here I am saying Hello to Windows 8. This time I am not elaborating on the installation but yes will share some interesting posts already on it.

Few approaches:

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in a virtual machine. – I did this, it worked for me!

Step by step instructions to install Windows 8 successfully on VMWare Workstation 8

“Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview as bootable VHD” – It yields much better performance, this will be my next shot!

Before I decided to install it on the Virtual Box, I gave an attempt on the Windows Virtual PC which came pre-installed with my OS (if Windows XP Mode is enabled). But then the Win 8 version I wanted to install was a 64 bit developer preview and unfortunately Virtual PC does not support 64bit guest OS. You will get this error “This 64-bit application couldn’t load because your PC doesn’t have a 64-bit processor”.

Installation on a VirtualBox was a different experience for me – BSODs and Graphical driver crash. No you may not face this because unlike me; you would never attempt to run a Virtual PC in parallel with a Virtual Box .

One important thing to do before you install is to check, if your processor supports Virtualization and enable it in your BIOS. If not you will get this error “Failed to start virtual machine (name of machine) VT-x is not available” when you start the VM.

If you are using an Intel Processor, check its specification at ark.intel.com, Intel Virtualization technology(VT-X) should be supported.

By default these features are disabled, so enable these from your BIOS settings.

Go ahead and complete your installation:

I must say this before I conclude this post – “Win 8 without a touch monitor on a VM is just a Win 7 with painful experience!” If you are a developer and you want your machine to respond as per your original hardware then do a clean install or use a VHD!.

Some interesting links:

Windows Developer Preview Guide

Metro Style App Examples

WinRT Capabilities

Note: Please read the disclaimer on my page before you get started.

/*Nish*/

I returned back from the tech-ed event with lot many TODOs, and the top most priority being exploring Windows 7. The very first thing to do was to Download Windows 7 RC and decide on the installation. Currently my machine(Toshiba m70 Laptop with Intel Centrino 1.7Ghz, 1.2Gb of Ram, Intel 915 mobile graphics and 60Gb HDD) runs a Windows XP which was pre-installed by the vendor. I never upgraded to Windows Vista, though lot many times I tried convincing myself for. After reading couple of news, articles, blogs on the problems with Vista it was too risky for me to take a call. I decided to stick to XP, as I was very comfortable and a need for an upgrade was never there. But VJ and Vic’s session on Windows 7 was an eye opener for me, and I still cant forget the statement on running Windows 7 on a 700 Mhz cpu. I thought I should really give this a try, and see what worst is kept for me, with the marriage of my old grandpa machine and the beautiful princess Windows 7. After a series of permutation and combination in my brain (the math on risk vs beauty) I decided not to try and Install as a parallel boot, rather go with another new concept which is installing it virtually. I downloaded the VMware WorkStation, and installed it on my machine to test drive the princess in a far more secured(from the grandpa) platform. I really doubted whether VM could detect the Windows 7 and to my surprise it detected as Windows Vista. I thought to go with it and see what happens, after all it is the Vista which is underneath.

Here are the few steps which may be helpful to you guys if you want to go with VMWare.

 Click on the File-> New Virtual Machine to get this screen and select Typical. Click Next 

Select the Iso image(Win 7 image file) and you can see that – “Windows Vista Detected”. Now Click next

Provide the Windows Key which you would have generated before the Windows Download. Also provide the disk space as per your requriement in the following forms. Inthe virtual machine name provide windows 7 or so. Follow the rest of the instructions and click finish.

You are done from the VMware side, now it will boot your Windows 7 setups, follow the instructions until complete. And that is it! So finally i had the Windows 7 in my laptop.

A simple note: Aero Expereince was disabled for me, since I did not have the graphic driver with WDDM support, and also VMware had defaulted my graphic driver to a VMware SVGA II. So guys if this feature is a must for you, then have a check on your graphic driver. If not just be happy with the basic display and trust me it is really smooth and fast.

My experience so far is really cool, I think this will be the next long lasting OS from MS after Windows XP.

More insights coming soon

Cheers!