Windows 8 Windows 8 beta has arrived ...

[Ian]

Not long to go until the beta is here...

Anyone here going to take the plunge and give it a whirl?

 

[EvanDavis]

Not long to go until the beta is here...

Anyone here going to take the plunge and give it a whirl?

Thought they had dropped the BETA name to rather use Consumer Preview ? I shall give it a go, but as I don't have touch screen I really don't see the point. And after playing with the Dev preview, the Metro GUI still doesn't do it for me.

 

[V_R]

Tempted, but not as excited about it as i was with Win 7....

 

[Ian]

Yeah, it's called the "consumer preview" - but it's a beta in all but name .

I'm in the same boat V_R - interested, but not half as excited as with Windows 7. Even so, I'm 100% sure I'll have it downloaded and running once it arrives

 

[Anon_F]

no!
win7 fine for me.

 

[floppybootstomp]

I'll probably try it out of curiosity.

We're not as excited about Win 8 as we were about Win 7 arriving cos Win 7 is actually quite good imo whereas when Win 7 arrived it was to replace Vista - 'nuff said

 

[V_R]

Download is now live!

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/preview

Or better still just download the straight .iso version.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/iso

 

[Becky]

Nice work!

 

[Ian]

Thanks V_R - downloading now

 

[V_R]

Hmm, the more i read around the more i like the look of this and want to play!

This guys doing a load of screenshots etc via his Twitter page...

https://twitter.com/#!/mrbell1984

It does look rather nice doesn't it!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Have just burnt the 64 bit iso to DVD, will be trying in next hour or so.

Unfortunately my version of Mint 11 just went belly-up on me, failed to init so I'm trying to pull some data, bookmarks and pix amongst other things, from the disk atm. Mint 11 had been going gradually flaky on me for the past month or so, lots of little glitches and it eventually died. Am also running Mint 12 - that's ok

Anyhow, will report back later although I might be heading off to the pub, we shall see.

 

[EvanDavis]

????

 

[V_R]

Will probs download this tonight, was out at Top Golf yesterday so wasn't able to play....

 

[floppybootstomp]

Ok, I may be missing something here.... I load in a freshly NTFS formatted 120Gb HDD to try Win 8 Beta HDD (caddy tray) and after looking at what appears to be a blue goldfish, not being given a choice to use 'UK English' as my chosen language but being forced to choose 'US English' I am prompted to enter an activation code.

WTF?

And that's as far as I got. I'm thinking maybe this means Mr Ballmer intends for his new baby only to be installed alongside a current licensed Microsoft operating system.

I have three legal copies of Windows here on three different machines, 7, Vista and XP and I don't want to change the setup of any of them. So I suppose I won't get to see what the fuss is about. Oh well.

And that's 3.3Gb bandwidth and a DVD wasted. Hmmph.

 

[V_R]

Used the keys on the download page?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/iso

 

[floppybootstomp]

Used the keys on the download page?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/iso

What, those numbers on the right marked 'Sha 1 hash? I thought they were the md5 checksums.

 

[V_R]

English

64-bit (x64) Download (3.3 GB) Sha 1 hash — 1288519C5035BCAC83CBFA23A33038CCF5522749

32-bit (x86) Download (2.5 GB) Sha 1 hash — E91ED665B01A46F4344C36D9D88C8BF78E9A1B39

Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

 

[floppybootstomp]

Oh. Right

You know what? I couldn't see it for looking, lol, one of those blind spots for me.

Ok, will try it a little later.

Oh, and thanks

 

[V_R]

Ah ha, don't worry i've done that before too, hidden in plain sight as they say.

 

[Anon_F]

@ 3.3gb download may wait till it comes out on a pc mag cover disc.
with our bb it would take about 30hrs+ to download!