Windows 8 Install
You have to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications, assuming you can find all of the requisite install media and product keys. You've got to track down drivers on manufacturer product pages that may or may not have even been updated with drivers for your computer. The install time you save versus doing an upgrade install will be more than wiped out by the time you spend getting everything just the way you like it.
Conventional wisdom usually says to do a clean install when upgrading your operating system, but operating systems have gotten better at dealing with upgrade installs. This charge is led by smartphones and tablets, which simplify even major updates by making them come down automatically over the Internet. We performed an upgrade install on a Windows 7 PC in daily use so we could see whether the stigma against upgrade installs is still applicable.
System requirementsBefore we begin, let's double-check our system specs to make sure we're good to go. We last looked at Windows 8's system requirements during the Release Preview phase of its development, and not much has changed since then. Anything sold with Windows 7 on it should run Windows 8 just fine without substantial hardware upgrades. Anything sold during the Vista era should run fine also, as long as you've got enough memory and a sufficient graphics card.
Microsoft's official line is that any computer that can run Windows 7 is capable of running Windows 8. In our experience this is generally true: slower and older hardware will run Windows 8 and desktop applications about as well as ran Windows 7 (and performance is improved in some cases, as we'll see in our benchmarking section). Drivers developed for Windows Vista and Windows 7 will generally work in Windows 8, though the older the drivers are the higher the risk is that something will go wrong.
However, there are computers that will run Windows 8, and then there are computers that will run Windows 8 well. While an old Atom netbook will run the new operating system, its slow CPU and integrated graphics processor will likely choke on games and other graphically intense applications from the Windows Store. Additionally, there are some features that won't work unless your system has certain hardware features—there will be games that require a tablet's motion sensors, for example, and snapping Windows 8-style apps requires a screen resolution of at least 1366×768. If your screen resolution is lower than 1024×768, you won't be able to run any Metro apps at all.
Even so, you don't need cutting-edge hardware to run Windows 8 and most of its apps well. Any mainstream dual-core processor and relatively recent Direct3D 10 or 11 graphics card will give you sufficient oomph to run just about anything Windows 8 can throw at your system. RAM is also cheap enough these days that getting the minimum amount for good performance (at least 2GB for 32-bit Windows 8, and at least 4GB for 64-bit) won't set you back much if you don't already have it.
For more specific hardware recommendations, we'll provide the table from our previous article: Microsoft's minimum Windows 8 requirements are on the left, and our recommended requirements are on the right.
Read more
How to Install Windows 8 on a MacIf you're an Apple user who wants to play around with the latest offering from Microsoft, here’s how to do it.
Mountain Lion and Windows 8 can live happily on one machine. There are two ways to get Win 8 running on a Mac.
To run Windows from startup, you'll need to install a bootable version of the OS using Apple's Boot Camp, a program that partitions the hard drive and gets your installation running (for the actual installation, you'll need to insert either a USB drive or a DVD with the install media on it). When you open Boot Camp, choose to both download and install support software. After that, the program will run mostly on its own, pausing only to ask how large you'd like the Windows partition to be. If you're using the 64-bit version of Windows, give it at least 25 gigabytes. (You can always delete the partition later.)
You can also run Windows as a virtual machine—a fully functioning independent OS within another OS—with virtualization software. Parallels ($80) is a good choice, but as with any virtualization program, it's not as fast as running Windows natively from a bootable partition. To get that kind of performance, plus the flexibility of virtualization, you can double up Boot Camp and Parallels. First, install Windows 8 via Boot Camp, thereby creating a separate partition. Then, choose the option in Parallels to treat the Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. That way you can run a speedy Windows 8 whenever you want, without restarting first. No matter which method you choose, using Windows 8 on your Mac will be inherently finicky, especially because it relies so heavily on gestures. Hot corners on your Mac may override Windows when you're in virtualization software, for instance, and getting your bootable Windows to accept right clicks on trackpads requires special drivers. You'll get most of this support software with any up-to-date Boot Camp, and it's also available on Apple's website. Source
You have to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications, assuming you can find all of the requisite install media and product keys. You've got to track down drivers on manufacturer product pages that may or may not have even been updated with drivers for your computer. The install time you save versus doing an upgrade install will be more than wiped out by the time you spend getting everything just the way you like it.
Conventional wisdom usually says to do a clean install when upgrading your operating system, but operating systems have gotten better at dealing with upgrade installs. This charge is led by smartphones and tablets, which simplify even major updates by making them come down automatically over the Internet. We performed an upgrade install on a Windows 7 PC in daily use so we could see whether the stigma against upgrade installs is still applicable.
System requirementsBefore we begin, let's double-check our system specs to make sure we're good to go. We last looked at Windows 8's system requirements during the Release Preview phase of its development, and not much has changed since then. Anything sold with Windows 7 on it should run Windows 8 just fine without substantial hardware upgrades. Anything sold during the Vista era should run fine also, as long as you've got enough memory and a sufficient graphics card.
Microsoft's official line is that any computer that can run Windows 7 is capable of running Windows 8. In our experience this is generally true: slower and older hardware will run Windows 8 and desktop applications about as well as ran Windows 7 (and performance is improved in some cases, as we'll see in our benchmarking section). Drivers developed for Windows Vista and Windows 7 will generally work in Windows 8, though the older the drivers are the higher the risk is that something will go wrong.
However, there are computers that will run Windows 8, and then there are computers that will run Windows 8 well. While an old Atom netbook will run the new operating system, its slow CPU and integrated graphics processor will likely choke on games and other graphically intense applications from the Windows Store. Additionally, there are some features that won't work unless your system has certain hardware features—there will be games that require a tablet's motion sensors, for example, and snapping Windows 8-style apps requires a screen resolution of at least 1366×768. If your screen resolution is lower than 1024×768, you won't be able to run any Metro apps at all.
Even so, you don't need cutting-edge hardware to run Windows 8 and most of its apps well. Any mainstream dual-core processor and relatively recent Direct3D 10 or 11 graphics card will give you sufficient oomph to run just about anything Windows 8 can throw at your system. RAM is also cheap enough these days that getting the minimum amount for good performance (at least 2GB for 32-bit Windows 8, and at least 4GB for 64-bit) won't set you back much if you don't already have it.
For more specific hardware recommendations, we'll provide the table from our previous article: Microsoft's minimum Windows 8 requirements are on the left, and our recommended requirements are on the right.
Read more
How to Install Windows 8 on a MacIf you're an Apple user who wants to play around with the latest offering from Microsoft, here’s how to do it.
Mountain Lion and Windows 8 can live happily on one machine. There are two ways to get Win 8 running on a Mac.
To run Windows from startup, you'll need to install a bootable version of the OS using Apple's Boot Camp, a program that partitions the hard drive and gets your installation running (for the actual installation, you'll need to insert either a USB drive or a DVD with the install media on it). When you open Boot Camp, choose to both download and install support software. After that, the program will run mostly on its own, pausing only to ask how large you'd like the Windows partition to be. If you're using the 64-bit version of Windows, give it at least 25 gigabytes. (You can always delete the partition later.)
You can also run Windows as a virtual machine—a fully functioning independent OS within another OS—with virtualization software. Parallels ($80) is a good choice, but as with any virtualization program, it's not as fast as running Windows natively from a bootable partition. To get that kind of performance, plus the flexibility of virtualization, you can double up Boot Camp and Parallels. First, install Windows 8 via Boot Camp, thereby creating a separate partition. Then, choose the option in Parallels to treat the Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. That way you can run a speedy Windows 8 whenever you want, without restarting first. No matter which method you choose, using Windows 8 on your Mac will be inherently finicky, especially because it relies so heavily on gestures. Hot corners on your Mac may override Windows when you're in virtualization software, for instance, and getting your bootable Windows to accept right clicks on trackpads requires special drivers. You'll get most of this support software with any up-to-date Boot Camp, and it's also available on Apple's website. Source
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