Windows 8 on a VM

If you’re looking to play around with the Windows 8 developer build that Microsoft pushed out this week, be aware that it won’t run on VMware player or any version of VMware Workstation prior to version 8.

It does, however, reportedly work on Virtualbox if you use the Windows XP compatibility settings.

Reportedly the problem is lack of ACPI 2.0.

I’m planning to run VMs on my new PC so I can run Windows and Ubuntu at the same time. So I’ll probably grab Win8 and try it out on the machine too, while I’m at it.

From what the various tech sites are saying, on a PC, Metro acts more like the offspring of Windows 7 and a smartphone, so at least it’s usable. Putting a busload of ever-changing widgets on a screen that spends 90% of its time hidden behind my web browser and word processor and spreadsheet and command prompts seems like a waste of computing power to me, but we’ll see. Supposedly it still runs comfortably on anything that Windows 7 runs comfortably on.

Due to what I do for a living, eventually I’m going to have to live with Windows 8. I don’t have to like it, but since I’m going to have to learn how to live with it, I might as well start getting familiar with it. I’m annoyed with the decision to put the counter-productive ribbon in Explorer, but I still do at least half of my file manipulating from a command line anyway. If the ribbon takes away the ability to move and copy files without clicking on a bunch of arrows to un-hide the options, I can fall back on the command line.

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