Just curious, is Windows 8 stable enough to run as a secondary system? My primary system at work is Win 7 and at home is OSX, but my laptop bounces between the two and is running Ubuntu Linux 10.04. Given I replace Linux with Windows 8 has anyone seen any show stopping bugs which might prevent me from using a system with Win 8 for casual use? The only mainstream application I'd really like to install is SQL Server 2008 R2 Dev Edition, which I've read in a few places does work on Win 8, but I'm just curious to see how stable you guys think it is at this point.



Take care --

Sam

In short... no. if you notice most folks are ether using a dual boot or VM to play with 8. Why? because it is by its very title "developer build" unstable. It's still in production. Microsoft let us have this to provide feedback on how it is SO FAR Also a nice preview for folks who are planning to build apps for it. It's a baby.

hmm well i'd say it depends on what u call stable....cause IMO stable means no or minimal crashing.....

PS all my normal apps run seamlessly on Win 8

the only thing ive noticed is inconsistent boot times....sometimes lightening fast @ others 3-5 times the usual

I don't use metro ui, with a desktop gui its rock stable and slightly faster than win7. But please keep important data backed up because there may be unknown bugs and you don't want to lose stuff.

I installed it on a seperate HDD so that it is seperated from Win7 (no double boot). After an initial problem which I ironed out, it runs very well. I have even installed some real "husky" programs that operate perfectly.

Like Bill. I work mostly thru the desktop, but sometimes you have to use the dreaded Metro. And imaging all your partitions on the system is a good idea. That was my initial problem . Windows 8 kept corrupting other partitions - even on the other drives (but I had my images).

I like to live dangerously. As such, I have made the Windows 8 Dev preview my only operating system on both my Desktop and laptop. My desktop has fared much better than my laptop. There are only a few minor things that have gone wrong on it (unable to print to network printer, for example). My laptop, however, will regularly freeze and not leave a crash dump or anything to help me diagnose the problem. Also, it is unable to exit hibernation, hanging on the screen that says "Windows Developer Preview" without the animation starting.

I am putting myself through this in order to get used to the new user interface. Hopefully, my computer is sending valuable information to the people at Microsoft to get this thing to be more stable.

Hi, freelancer91!

I take it you like to reinstall your OS over and over again on your main system until the final release, eh?

This isn't even the craziest thing I've done with my system. The craziest would either be the time I tried out Arch Linux or the time I Hackintoshed both of my machines. I don't have any data that I would be devastated to lose. If something does go wrong, I use a program like Acronis to restore.

There are bugs in the DP version, should be iron out in the beta if not RTM.