Having played with Windows 8 in several builds since June, I was excited about the RTM release to TechNet in August and the excitement continued all the way through General Availability. The big draw there was that new hardware would be out running Windows 8 and that I might obtain some of that.
However, my wallet and my lovely wife talked some sense into me and reminded me that I do not “NEED” a new laptop. To continue playing with Windows 8 I am going to check out VMware Fusion 5 (or 5.0.1) and the RTM bits on my Mac Book Pro. The cost of Fusion is much less than the cost of a new HP Envy laptop running Windows 8. This will allow me to use Windows 8 and save money for a new device, maybe a laptop, maybe a Surface with Win 8 Pro on it sometime in 2013.
I am curious about the new Fusion and how Windows 8 handles on it, but most of all how the two run on the Mid 2010 Mac Book. Hopefully well or my overall faith in the laptop will continue to slide. I like the hardware on this notebook and am beyond the “I hate Macs” phase of my IT Pro career, but the thing is just slow when using VMware or Parallels. Definitely an iffy experience there, even with 8GB of RAM. Would like to bump to 16GB Ram, but somehow the hardware won’t support it, and worse, neither will Apple. Limiting hardware to the specs liked at the time of creation died a long time ago… Ram should be allowed to go as large as can fit on the number of sticks I can put in the unit (much more than 8GB, its 2012 ya know).
Well enough griping… Im off to get my Win 8 ISO and build my new Windows 8 RTM machine.
Virtualization seems to have saved the day, or at least a few hundred bucks for me.
Have you tried Boot Camp on the Macbook? Dual boot between OS X and Windows. No cost, and you get the full use of system resources when running Windows. Plus, as a bonus, Fusion can use the Boot Camp partition for those times when you want to access Windows without a reboot.
I have tried working with boot camp and been anything but successful… may try again just for kicks, but the VM doesn’t seem to lag or anything (yet).