Windows 8 Testing

Our Saturday service at church sets up in a temporary location and has an old laptop with MediaShout on it and we are getting ready to upgrade the computer and to start using PP5. Mac is not in the budget, so going to get a new PC, probably Lenovo. Most of these computers ship with Win8 and since I hadn’t even really read about it, I decided that I needed to do some testing. I was not brave enough to install Windows 8 with the new “Metro” interface on a work PC or the church’s current laptop, so I decided to do a risk free virtual install on VMWare Fusion on my Mac.

I downloaded the install and created the thumbdrive media install.

I use VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro, so made a copy of my Win7 Virtual OS and did a Win7->Win8 upgrade on the copy. Install went pretty quick.

Surprise, Win8 ran MUCH faster under VMWare Fusion 4 than Win7 did. VMWare 4.0 does not even officially support Lion, or Win8. After the 7-8 upgrade on my virtual install, I upgraded VMWare Fusion to 5. It runs really fast. Probably 3 times as fast as Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion 4.0.

Back when I went from XP to Win7 as a virtual OS on my Mac, it was so slow that I rarely used it. Only used it to access my Map program which isn’t available on the Mac. Win7 was so slow that it was unusable as a virtual OS. Win8 runs fast enough to leave it open all the time. It seems to very smoothly share resources between the OS’s.

It also seems that the upgrade kept all my installed programs intact.

Now the bad news. Win8 Metro interface is confusing and silly. It keeps switching back and forth to an almost Win7 desktop to the Win8 Metro Tablet interface. Don’t understand what Microsoft was thinking?? The switch between the two seems visually jarring.

I downloaded a program called Classic Shell
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

It pretty much lets you set everything back to the way it should be.

I think this will be what I do with the church computer.

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