Xivanki Share !!: I've gone all Microsoft.....

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So my oldest laptop (Lenovo 3000 N200 0769) has been struggling along with Windows XP which has started to feel really dated recently.  After installing the latest Ubuntu (v12.10) and having even worse performance even after tweaks, I decided to give the Windows 8 release preview a try!

First things first, get this now if you want to try out Windows 8 as it's the closest thing to the final release out of all the previous beta releases and is licensed until January 13 2013 for free!  Furthermore, you upgrade directly to a final version of Windows 8 from the release preview with ease. 

Installation was a breeze, I simply created a new partition in GParted from a Ubuntu live USB stick.  Windows 8 automatically recognises I have other OS's on the laptop and gives me a nice selection mouse-friendly menu before booting into Windows 8 by default.

First problem I had was graphics support for such an old laptop.  Interesting, this laptop was supplied with Windows Vista by Lenovo as factory default which within a few months caused the system to blue-screen and crash every so often randomly.  After I switched to Windows XP, I never faced the issue again which is why I remained with XP since.   I didn't get a bluescreen with Windows 8, but I had no resolution options and poor performance due to a legacy basic driver being used.  After installing the official driver from Lenovo for Windows Vista (which should be compatible), the machine intermittently showed correct pages but some apps failed to display correctly and I'd often be faced with a blank blue screen on boot.  This was rectified by using Shift & F8 (Note no longer just F8!) to access safe mode and remove the problematic driver!  Luckily, I managed to find a newer and subsequently the last update for the Nvidia Go 7300 (Hardware ID 01D7) which is perfectly compatible with Windows 8 64-bit, hooray!

You can download the driver here:  http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/27280-v25947-windows-7vista-64bit-hpcompaq-oem-inf/

One last thing, inside the downloaded driver download, once unzipped, there is a secondary zipped file called additional INF's, you need to extract these files into the same directory as the initial unzipped download.  I manually installed the driver from Device Manager and selected the appropriate .inf file to install.  I'm not sure if the official Nvidia setup package will notice the unzipped additional zips but you could try this!

So far, I'm really impressed with the performance of Windows 8, it has brought a new lease of life to my old laptop.  Furthermore, I have totally geek failed as I did not release my CPU (Intel Core2Duo T5450 Processor, (1.66GHz,667MHz,2MB L2 cache) was 64-bit and have been running 32-bit Windows XP for about 3 - 4 years!  Lenovo also confused the matter by sticking a 'Celeron' sticker on the case (which forced me to remove it and replace with an official Core2Duo sticker sourced from our good friend, eBay!).

In addition to Windows 8, I thought I'd give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and try out Internet Explorer 10.  This was primarily for a performance boost mind you since Google still don't have a 64-bit version of Chrome released!  And lastly, I purchased myself a lovely Xbox 360 slim so I could try out Kinect and all the games I'd missed as a PS3 user for so many years (e.g. Halo, Gears of War and most importantly for me: Forza Motorsport)

So as you can see, I haven't been geeky in the online world blog-wise although I have been trying out Microsoft offerings which has kept me busy!  Just a note though, I won't be purchasing Microsoft Surface tablet any time soon due to the price and Android is still a clear winner in the mobile states versus iOS and Windows phone in my eyes!

I took this photo! (San Francisco - June 2012)