Go Get Windows 8

The world was treated to a minor fiasco when various Microsoft blogs posts told of the availability of the newest Windows 8 download, the Release Preview. You can look around for it but my advice is to download an ISO image here, then burn it onto a DVD and go from there. The direct download siteactually tries to download Windows 8 onto your actual machine, which I do not recommend. You should put this on a sandbox or other machine, not the one you use daily.

I have a hot Sandy Bridge system next to my writing system, which is a Vista machine, and I install various versions of Windows and Linux distros onto it. It offers the challenge of having a SSD "hard disk," which some Microsoft beta products balk at. For example, it had no trouble loading the developer version of Windows 8, most of the betas so far, and almost all versions of Ubuntu.

I did try to load the interesting 0.3 Alpha version of the ReactOS, which is supposed to be a perfect clean room clone of Windows 7, but it simply refused. I suspect the SSD had something to do with it. It wouldn't run the LIVE CD either, much to my dismay.

I first wrote about the ReactOS back in 2008 and had high hopes that this open-source project would eventually become like Mozilla Firefox—and by that I mean a genuine competitor of Windows, the way Mozilla was a genuine competitor of Internet Explorer.

That was four years ago. I always assume that these ambitious open-source projects take a lot longer than commercial software, as was shown with Mozilla, which took forever to arrive. The ReactOS is a more complex problem and since it is still alpha code release 0.3, I wonder if it will ever be actually finished.

I have a hard time believing that Windows is going to forever be the dominant computing platform. It just makes no sense. The company has never made two missteps in a row and even if Windows 8 is a flop, I suspect Windows 9 will be better.

But ask yourself: where is the true alternative? (Beside Linux, which seems jinxed or something.) I am not counting the Mac in this discussion since it is a proprietary system.

Why is there no plug compatible Windows clone that sells for $50? Windows 8 will sell for upward of $200 and Microsoft shows no inclination of giving anyone a free upgrade.

I say this because my slickGoogle Nexus phone was recently upgraded to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). It was like getting an entirely new phone with different features and a sleeker interface. I like it and now tend to be an Android loyalist.

During the olden days of DOS, there were free upgrades. This was also true in the early days of Apple. You could upgrade for free. It was part of the deal. Everyone was up-to-date.

I've never been sure when exactly these old policies ended, but they sure ended. They were abolished to make more and more money off of the users who were locked into a platform. Maybe some genius will come along and fix the problem with a new and fun universal OS. I'd love that, but I'm not holding my breath. Download Windows 8 and at least get something for nothing for a few months, before Microsoft disables it and forces you to buy something new.