Windows 8

I recently installed Windows 8 on a laptop to get a feel for how it worked on some real tin, rather than the virtual machine (VM) I tried it in before. This is the RTM image from MSDN subscriber downloads, not the preview edition and is Windows 8 Enterprise, EN-UK.

My laptop already has Windows 7 on it, and I didn’t want to lose that, so I decided to try dual-booting it with Windows 8. Actually, a colleague suggested this to me. The last time I tried dual-booting was years ago and was a pain.

Making space to install (and dual-boot) Windows 8

The first problem is freeing up some unallocated disk space. I have a 500GB drive, half of which is unused, but is allocated to my main drive partition. Last time I needed to rejig a drive I used PartitionMagic, but it turns out that Windows 7 can do this itself. In Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management I right-clicked on the C drive and chose Shrink Volume. It had a bit of a think, then I asked it to shrink by 128 GB, which it did, showing me my old C drive and a new lump of Unallocated Space.

Update: I did this on another machine, but first I had to delete some stuff to make space. You then also need to do a defrag, which consolidates your newly-made free space, in order to shrink. The shrink doesn’t automatically move things around it seems.

Burning the image

The next problem is that I downloaded the installation as an .iso image file and need to get it to the laptop at boot time. The laptop has a DVD burner so I inserted a blank DVD, right-clicked the ISO and chose Burn Disk Image. Or I would have, if it were there. I think some other DVD burning software had messed with the file extension associations. I right-clicked and chose Open WIth and then browsed to c:\windows\system32\isoburn.exe. This let me burn the image and the Burn Disk Image is now available when I right-click on .iso files. Again, it’s nice that the tools are just there (sort of) without requiring a bunch of third-party stuff.

Installing Windows 8

With the freshly-burnt DVD still in the drive I restarted the Windows 7 laptop, spammed F12 and chose to boot from DVD. A little blue window appears. And then nothing for 30+ seconds. Hmm. Hung at the first attempt? But no, some little wheeling dots appear to show me it’s still alive.

I chose Custom: Install Windows Only, which hopefully means “install Windows 8, but don’t trash my existing stuff”. It then asks where to put it, and I choose the 128GB Unallocated Space I made earlier. Then I wait a bit while it copies things and allocates bedrooms to the magic pixies or something.

Create a local logon (optional)

I deliberately do not have an internet connection at this point because my colleagues want to see the initial wireless networking connection experience so they know what to expect if users start turning up with Windows 8 devices in the near future.

A this point I have to give it a username and password. If it were connected to the interwebs then I could choose to login using my Windows Live account details instead, but I’m not so I have to give it something local for now. I’ll associate it with my Windows Live account later on.

Dual booting

Windows 8 has detected my previous installation of Windows 7 and has automatically setup a boot-loader. When I reboot the machine I get a pretty, blue menu which lets me choose Windows 8 (the default and will auto-boot in 30 seconds) or Windows 7. I try this and it seems to work – I can boot to Windows 7, reboot again and this time go to Windows 8 again.

Some basic stuff about Windows 8

I’ve summarised some basic stuff in this section which I will then refer back to later on.

The old, familiar Start Menu button has gone. Windows 8 is fronted by the new Metro start page (or whatever they end up calling it). This is designed with touch-screens in mind, but also works with a mouse.

A touch-screen device will, presumably, have a button to get you back to the start from where ever you happen to be. On a laptop the Windows Key (WinKey hereafter) does this. The WinKey is between Ctrl and Alt on my keyboard.

Mousing into the top-right corner of the screen brings up the “charms” menu, which is where some basic stuff such as searching & settings are kept. WinKey+C is quicker, especially if you have a multi-monitor setup as I keep missing the corner and going into the other screen.

WinKey+Q will open up the context-sensitive search charm and is something I use constantly.

WinKey+X opens an old-style context popup menu, but it contains most of the most-useful tools and utilities. This is probably the most important key combo for an experienced Windows user to know.

WinKey+D will get you to the desktop. This is just like the old Windows desktop, but the start menu button has gone – press the WinKey to bring up the start page.

Those apps that have not been updated for Windows 8 & Metro continue to work via the desktop and will install their start menu items as grey tiles on the new Metro start page. This can be a bit of a pain as they all get installed, so installing the driver for my Microsoft keyboard, for example, puts 5 tiles on the start page, of which I will use precisely none. However, it is easy to multi-select them (right click on each) then choose Unpin from Start. You can still access them from the Search charm via the Apps plugin, which is selected for you if you launch search from the start page, so you can re-pin them later if you want.

Wireless networking

I found some basic networking stuff via the Settings charm. I connected to our residential wireless network, which provides internet access, but no access to our core IT systems, and had to give my username with our network domain name prefixed, like: domainname\username. Makes sense to me, but I’m told this wasn’t required previously so could trip some people up.

Switching to the desktop (WinKey+D) I can see, in the notification tray, that I am connected to the network, but have no internet connection. This also makes sense as we run a browser-based logon as well which I’ll need to run through to get a connection out.

I open Internet Explorer and try to go to Google and get redirected to our login page. At this point I get certificate warnings, but I had this when I tried this earlier on Windows 7 so tell it to carry on (twice). It then downloads a little agent thingy that gives me the all-clear and asks me to wait 30 seconds before redirecting to our website. IE times out and cannot display the page. The notification tray still shows no internet connection. In the end it did fix itself, but it took it a couple of minutes.

The certificate problems are a pity, but I think the infrastructure people will get that sorted out.

Activation

Now I have the internet again I want to associate my local account with my Windows Live account so I go looking though the options under Charms > Settings. The first page here is about personalisation but it’s all disabled because Windows cannot activate.

WinKey+X > Event Viewer shows me that activation failed because it tried to activate against a local domain controller (which is also an activation server, or something, perhaps). Anyway, this is not what I expected. WinKey+X > System brings up a familiar page, which shows, under Windows activation, at the bottom of the page, that it tried to use an activation key that’s burned into the image (I’m guessing – it’s not one I gave it).

After some research I run “slui 3” from a elevated Command Prompt (WinKey+X > Command Prompt (Admin)). This lets me put in my own key from my MSDN Product Keys page and lets me activate directly with Microsoft.

Linking my local account to Windows Live

WinKey+C > Settings > Change PC Settings > Users lets me associate my local account with my Windows Live account and use my Windows Live email address and password.

This also brings down my account details for Facebook and Twitter automatically, as I already set them up on another copy of Windows 8. My contacts, etc., just come down and are then ready for use.

At this point I’d expect some people to start vaguely muttering about “privacy”, but since it was OK when Apple did it with the iPad, I guess those people can just shut the hell up.

First Impressions

It looks great. I like the new metro style and the managed search is good. Everything is quick and smooth and the UI transitions are nice.

Contact details from Facebook, Twitter, Exchange, etc. are all integrated into a single People app so I can just search or browse in one place to find everyone. Even better is the What’s New feature within People which shows all my friends’ updates from all providers in one timeline. I’d like to also get RSS feed items in this list, but didn’t see a way to do this. A Google Reader plugin would be perfect as I already have my feeds subscribed there, and I don’t think Microsoft have anything similar I could use instead.

The built-in Windows 8 music app works with my Zune subscription which is all tied together with my Windows Live account, so I can just start streaming music. My playlists (My Music\Playlists\*.zpl files on my Windows 7 partition) also work when I copy them over to the same place in Windows 8 (the folder didn’t exist so I had to create it). There’s no option to add the songs to my local collection, but I can just stream the playlist. Bit of a pain to have to go and get each song down again, but maybe I’ll find away around.

As an aside, there’s a minor UX annoyance here. I’d like my playlists decoupled from the physical files and also synced via Windows Live, so they can follow me from device to device. If I have a subscription then I should be able to have it download again to this device. I’d also like to be able to add tracks, even if they are not currently available from the marketplace (like a wish list).

A did have a weird sound problem, in that plugging headphones into the audio jack did not work – sound continued to come from the built-in, tinny, little laptop speakers. After a bit I used WinKey+X > Control Panel > Sounds and had a poke about. It seems that Windows 8 detects the speakers and the jack as two different audio devices and uses the speakers by default. I changed it to use the jack instead and it started to work as expected.

A Metro App for Skype is not available yet, although it seems one is coming very soon.

RSS feeds don’t seem to work if using Metro IE, but do if using IE on the desktop. I also didn’t see an easy way to integrate them

There doesn’t seem to be any built-in integration with Windows Phone 7.5 – I had to install the Zune software to the desktop.

One of the first automatic updates that comes down is the annoying Windows 8 “browser choice” we in the EU forced Microsoft to implement due to some weird idea that it was unfair to bundle Internet Explorer on Windows. It’s pretty ironic that the competition abandoned any idea of browser-agnosticism and all invented their own app stores anyway.

Stuff I have yet to try

Joining the domain.

Office. This is the killer of course. It’s used a lot here and needs to work. I’m sure it’s fine, but I’ve not tried it yet.