Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Windows 8: Post-RTM Update

I know, this blog isn’t about Windows 8 and yet I have some important news to share with the readers of my blog who already run Windows 8 on their systems.

Since the first public beta of Windows 8 I run it on a bunch of my machines (work and privately owned) and I must say I am very impressed. Even the much discussed (or flamed) interface works very well on my systems which none of them is touch enabled.

What I like about Windows 8? Many things but these are the main items:

  • Speed
    • From a cold boot my system is up & running in less then two minutes;
    • When recovering from sleep my system is up & running in less then 10 seconds;
    • When recovering from hibernation my system is up & running in less then a minute;
    • While running the applications are snappier and are fun to work with;
    • Yes, I have a SSD drive BUT use it only for my VMs not for the OS itself which runs from an old fashioned drive.
  • Hyper-V
    • Is integrated with Windows 8 now;
    • With a SSD drive, 16 GBs of RAM I can run 7 VMs with no sweat at all;
    • When hibernating the system, the VMs enter a saved state. When the system is started again, the VMs are started from the point where they entered a saved state.
  • Stability
    • My notebook runs for a month now without being switched off. Every time I am done I put the system into hibernation and until now, it wakes up perfectly;
    • The RTM version hasn’t failed on me yet;
    • All applications are running just fine, not a single glitch.

OK, as you see I am very happy and impressed with Windows 8. For myself no Windows 7 even though I liked that OS very much as well.

The good news is that I want to share is that Microsoft released a post-RTM update for it.

As Microsoft writes on their blog: ‘…We are pleased to be releasing a set of improvements to Windows 8 in broad areas of performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility…’

The update can be downloaded from here, the Microsoft Update-Catalog website. Please download the proper version for your Windows 8 OS (x86 or x64). As you can see, there is a Windows Server 2012 update available as well. So back home my lab is going to be updated as well:
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