Hello from Windows 8

Windows 8 proved very easy to install. I believe in starting from a clean slate (sorry) so I backed up my entire machine last night and this morning at 8:30 I started the upgrade by booting from a CD, deleting all the partitions from the disk and starting from scratch. I had the machine working under Windows 8 well before 9:00. Looks very good so far. One thing to be aware of (although this might just be me). We have an eduroam WiFi network at Hull which is authenticated using a self signed certificate. When you connect to it you sometimes get a message saying that the certificate is not as secure as it might be, and do you really want to do this. You just have to say OK to continue to connect.

When I first installed Windows 8 this didn’t work. The machine just refused to connect to the university WiFi. It knew that the password was correct, but it didn’t give me the option to ignore the certificate. However, once I’d connected via the wired network, and logged onto the machine with my Windows Live account it worked perfectly. It might be the case (although I’m really just guessing here) that Windows 8 insists on having a “proper” login before it will enable the option to ignore certificate errors like this. I’d love to know if you have hit this problem too, so put a comment on the end of this post if you get problems.

As for me, I’ve installed Windows Essentials and got Live Writer working (hence this post). Next it is on to Visual Studio 2012 and the other stuff.

Comments

[Carl Pickering]

I found Windows 8 RC to be a breeze to install and has been very fast compared with XP. Vista was unusable on this hardware. (Dual Core 2, 2GB RAM Dell Inspiron 6400) which is surprising considering it was the OS shipped with the laptop.

The phone SDK said it wouldn't run on my Windows 8 installation (32 bit) so you might have some trouble.

[Abdul]

I have the same problem with the WiFi at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I've installed Win8 as well, and can't seem to connect because of the certificate (username and password correct). It worked perfectly on Windows 7 though.

[James Croft]

I managed to connect to eduroam with Windows 8 Release Preview...

[Jamie Roos]

I've kept Windows 7 and installed Windows 8 alongside it on my new SSD, its very fast and i'm loving using it, however I am hesitant to switch to Windows 8 permanently because of Visual Studio and the lack of XNA support in the new OS.

Windows 8 has seemed a little tricky when it comes to some of the older games that i've been playing too.

[Weronika Slusarska]

Even via polish academic web there was a problem too.

[Rob]

It worked fine with the Release Preview. And it seems to have stopped working again now. And the WiFi works fine on non-Eduroam networks. Very strange.

[Rob]

I found this:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/windows8/eduroam

It seems quite sensible. I'll have a go with it tomorrow.

[JSMinch]

I'm tempted to download the (English-United Kingdom) version just to see how it's different than the US version. A lot more "-ou"s I imagine.

[Rob]

Put Windows 8 on the desktop. Built it onto a new SSD and the performance is stunning. Boot time is tiny. Only one problem. The Shutdown command doesn't turn the power off. Not sure if this is a scary Skynet thing or not....

[Jules]

I'm currently dual booting, because I need VS 2010 to do serious stuff on Windows 7, and XNA development.

But Windows 8 is really fast, and looking great on a decent Tablet. But I am still not convinced of Windows 8 Desktop. Too much fiddling around trying to poke my mouse into corners to get to use. Hopefully Microsoft will sort out Desktop mode when they realise that general business users will not buy into this experience.

[Jon]

Works fine for me on eduroam at Lancaster