windows – Page 6 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 6, 2012

Booting your Windows Bootcamp partition in VirtualBox

I have XP in my Bootcamp partition which I occasionally boot to run apps that I don’t have on Mac OS X, usually it’s for a Windows game. It annoys me to switch between Mac OS X and booting Windows from Bootcamp, as it takes a while to switch back and forth. The only reason I’ve ever considered buying Fusion or Parallels is to be able to boot from the Bootcamp partition and avoid having two Windows installs – one in Bootcamp and one on a virtual disk. Sometimes it’s fine to boot in a virtual machine, but othertimes you really want to boot natively to make full use of the graphics card and DirectX etc. Turns out you can set up VirtualBox to easily boot from a Bootcamp partition, and avoid having two installs.

I followed the instructions here, and after a bit of fiddling with with VirtualBox settings for my new VM, it booted fine. The instructions are for booting Windows 7 from Bootcamp in VirtualBox, but it works the same for XP too.

October 22, 2012

Gates shares reactions to Microsoft Surface tablet

Pre-orders for Microsoft’s Surface tablet are apparently now on back-order of up to 3 weeks, so there seems to be initial demand for the new tablet running Windows 8. Some stores will have the devices on the shelf on Oct 26th, the same day that Windows 8 launches.

Bill Gates is very positive about the new device and Windows 8 combination, although his excitement seems to be more about the form factor of the device itself, rather than Windows 8 “… just the beauty of the device… it is absolutely incredible”

February 6, 2012

Windows 8 UI looks a mess

Is it just me or does the Windows 8 UI look a mess? I understand the benefits in producing a cross-platform common look n feel (desktop, tablet, phone), but the current screenshots of a random set of oddly colored rectangles, looks, well, like something you’d expect on a Leapfrog electronic kids toy.

I only hope for Microsoft’s sake that these initial videos and screenshots are just prototype and mockups, because they’re looking pretty awful right now.

July 18, 2011

Will Microsoft fail again with their Windows 8 tablet strategy?

“We view the tablet as a PC” – precisely why their last attempt failed. Given the odd mix of touchscreen UI elements mixed inexplicably with the traditional Windows UI in a recent Windows 8 demo video, it looks like they’ve got it all wrong again.