[PCWorld]

Post your comments for How to test-drive Windows 8 for free in VirtualBox here

[georgiahomeboy]

I'm still rocking the consumer preview in a virtual machine, we'll see how long that lasts!

[LiveBrianD]

Quote

I'm still rocking the consumer preview in a virtual machine, we'll see how long that lasts!

15 Jan 2013

[imapcgeek]

It's neat to see that in my experience, Windows 8 boots faster in VirtualBox than Windows 7 does on hardware.

[jscott418]

Worked ith Windows 8 for a couple weeks and just could not get past the lousy interface ona non toch screen PC. Might be just fine on a tablet or touch screen enabled PC. Yes, the boot times are impressive but I don't boot my PC's that much so I cannot embrace Windows 8 just for that. But hey, its nice to see Virtual Box get some good press.

[jamd315]

Quote

Worked ith Windows 8 for a couple weeks and just could not get past the lousy interface ona non toch screen PC. Might be just fine on a tablet or touch screen enabled PC. Yes, the boot times are impressive but I don't boot my PC's that much so I cannot embrace Windows 8 just for that. But hey, its nice to see Virtual Box get some good press.

I completely agree.

[rodo]

I like it

[rodo]

could be really good to try this version of windows-8

[rosamala]

ok, so I saw this in the current issue of the magazine, and I've been trying to do it. it's not completing the process, it keeps having problems. where's the "hassle-free" come in? I need some help or maybe just a different way of doing it if that's even possible. ALL I wanna do is try it out long enough to see if it's worth upgrading anytime soon. PLEASE!?!

[ArtM]

I'm having problems with Windows 8 in the latest release of Virtualbox (subrelease .10) also. W8 keeps hanging the VM

Virtual machines will always boot faster than physical machines because there is no physical hardware initialization. This will change over time as more and more features to "dedicate" the hardware to the VM become available.

[Luisrp]

I have been using the Windows 8 Evaluation for a few weeks already. The interface is definitely clunky in a desktop pc with mouse and keyboard but it is not as bad as it seems at first due to keyboard shortcuts. Since I already use keyboard shortcuts on a regular basis and my left hand is near the keyboard most of the time is not as bad. However, it is not very intuitive and when working in the Metro interface the use of the right mouse button is rendered less useful because it won't open a context menu at the mouse pointer location but rather at the bottom of the screen which requires an extra mouse movement. That may be fine for touch screen but not for mouse and keyboard. And let's not go into the gestures thing to bring things to the screen.

Anyhow, I was not able to get it running under VirtualBox under Windows 7 64-bit as the host. However it works beautifully with VMware Player. Just create a new VM and set it as Windows 7 with 25 GB of HD and 1 GB of RAM. Then load the ISO and you are good to go. I installed the 32-bit version.