Installed Windows 8 Beta on a virtual drive

I know that may sound techie (and I suppose it is for those who don’t play with such stuff) but it was really kind of easy. I found a site with a free virtual machine manager (Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager) which I downloaded and installed. Then I downloaded the Windows 8 beta iso from Microsoft (which is also free) and using the VM manager created a virtual drive on the hard drive and then loaded Windows. This was made really easy by install instructions I found on the web that showed me which switches to flip on or off before creating the virtual drive, otherwise Windows would not have loaded correctly.

The only challenge I had was that after I installed the VirtualBox software I could not access the computer using remote desktop. I had to go into the firewall and enable remote access (don’t know why this happened but I know that installing the Oracle software initiated the problem. Once the firewall settings were fixed I was able to access the computer remotely and thus play with my new install of Windows. I will post more info as I play with it.

 

Windows 8 (or how I learned to like using my phone as a desktop computer)

Mind you I haven’t loaded Win 8 beta on a computer yet (downloaded the beta today and now I have to decide which PC gets wiped /crazy_face

The new interface is going to look like this

Which is essentially the Windows phone interface. For some interesting thoughts on the new OS and how it compares to the MAC OS please follow this link:

http://patrickbeja.com/2012/03/windows-8-the-biggest-shift-in-computing-since-the-mac-and-the-gui/

 

What is TCP?

TCP is an abbreviation for Troubleshooting Computer Problems.

I didn’t want a really long title for the blog so I decided that abbreviating those three words made sense, plus abbreviations are the norm for the IT world. Hopefully some of my adventures will be of interest to others.