Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

On a single disk PC, you must select the partition on which Windows 7 is installed—it’s almost always the C: drive—right-click it, and choose Shrink Volume. In the Shrink window, shown in Figure 2-22, enter the amount of space to shrink the partition in MB. This space will be used for the Windows 8 partition, which you’ll create next.

Figure 2-21:Disk Management

Figure 2-22:Use the Shrink tool to resize your Windows 7 partition and make room for Windows 8.

Then, click the Shrink button.

Back in Disk Management, you’ll see the new empty disk space you just created. Right-click this and choose New Simple Volume. Step through the wizard, give it all the available space, assign it a drive letter, and be sure to assign it an obvious name, like Windows 8 .

Now you’re ready to install Windows 8 in a dual-boot configuration. Reboot the computer, and boot it using the Setup media you previously acquired or created.

In Windows Setup, there are two critical points where you must choose correctly:

Install type:You will be prompted to choose between Upgrade and Custom install types. You must choose Custom here, since you are not upgrading Windows 7 and are instead clean installing Windows 8 alongside Windows 7.

Where do you want to install Windows?In the next Setup step, you will be asked to pick a partition or hard drive on which to install Windows 8. You cannot install Windows 8 to the same partition or hard drive to which Windows 7 is installed . Instead, you must choose a different partition or hard drive. So choose the partition you created earlier.

Windows 8 will install normally and eventually boot into the new OS.

By default, your PC will boot into the most recently-installed OS, which in this case is Windows 8. But it will briefly stop at a new boot menu, which gives you the opportunity to choose the OS at boot time. This menu will resemble Figure 2-23 and will contain entries for both Windows 8 and Windows 7.

This menu only displays for several seconds, so you need to think quick if you want to change from the default boot choice. (Or simply tap an arrow key on the keyboard to stop the countdown.)

You can configure this boot menu by clicking Change defaults or choose other options. When you do so, you’ll be presented with the screen shown in Figure 2-24.

The following options are available:

• Change the timer:By default, the boot menu only appears for 30 seconds (which, frankly, is reasonable). Here, you can change this to other time limits, including 5 minutes or 5 seconds.

• Choose a default operating system:By default, your PC will boot into the most recently installed OS if the menu timer expires. With this option, you can choose a different Windows version as the default.

• Choose other options:This option triggers the Windows 8 recovery tools menu, which we discuss in Chapter 11.

Figure 2-23:The Windows 8 boot menu

You can also modify this boot menu a bit from within Windows 8 (but not from within Windows 7). Of course, you may be wondering: Why bother? Well, this other interface provides a bit more fine-grained control over the boot options, especially for the boot menu timer.

To access these capabilities, you have to find a very well-hidden Startup and Recovery interface that’s available via the classic System control panel from previous Windows versions. There are numerous ways to find it, but the easiest, as always, is Start Search: Look for system , select Settings, and then choose System from the results list. In the System window, click Advanced system settings on the left, then select the Advanced tab of System Properties. And then click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section. (Whew!)

Figure 2-24:The Options screen for the Windows 8 boot menu

You’ll be presented with the window shown in Figure 2-25.

Figure 2-25:You can configure Windows 8 boot options from this well-hidden interface.

You can also use this interface to enable the recovery options at boot time if you’d like. Generally speaking, this isn’t advisable, but if you’re having issues with the computer, it’s not a bad idea to have this capability at the ready.

From this window, you can configure the following boot menu options:

• The default operating system:It will be Windows 8 initially, but if you prefer it to default to Windows 7, this is the place.

• The time to display the list of operating systems:By default, the Windows 8 boot menu will display for 3 seconds. Here, you can change the value to any number of seconds you like.

For a few years there, Mac “switchers” made inroads in the PC world, starting with the poorly received Windows Vista and Apple’s antagonistic “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advertisements. But then something interesting happened. Microsoft got its mojo back with Windows 7, releasing an OS that was both competent and efficient. And then it released Windows 8 and triggered renewed excitement in Windows in a way we hadn’t seen in, well, a couple of decades.

Of course, with thousands of Mac users out there wondering what went wrong, it’s no surprise that many are suddenly regretting their expensive side-trip to the Apple side of the computing fence. But have no fear, unhappy Mac users. Windows 8 will work on your computer too. After all, Macs are nothing more than expensive and beautiful PCs.

As with previous versions of Windows, you can install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on your Mac in three basic ways: virtualized, using a solution like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, in a dual-boot configuration using Apple’s Boot Camp utility, or as the sole OS, replacing Mac OS X once and for all.

Nothing would make us happier than recommending the latter approach because, after all, every time someone uses Mac OS X a unicorn dies. But we can’t recommend it for a simple and pragmatic reason: There are some things you can only do on a Mac using Mac OS X, including updating the device’s firmware. So you really should keep at least a small OS X partition available, if only for that reason.

The Mac’s various virtualization solutions are straightforward and have their own unique advantages, but since the goal here is to replace Mac OS X to the extent possible, we’ll focus on the Boot Camp approach. Besides, it’s free and comes with every Mac. Wasn’t Apple nice to do that?

Before getting started, make sure that OS X is up to date with all the latest software updates and that you have a bootable Windows 8 Setup DVD; a USB flash drive-based Setup type doesn’t work with Boot Camp. And depending on which kind of Mac you have, you may need a 32-bit version of Windows. But modern Macs generally can work with the preferred 64-bit versions of Windows 8.