Well, another windows release is upon us and all the buzz is ablaze again over this new shiny version of Windows. So I had to ask myself if upgrading my development laptop would be a smart move at this point, currently I am running Windows 7 and I have to admit, it is getting rather clunky at this point (I have yet to do a format since Win 7 came out). As with any new OS, you have to weigh the pros and cons of making such a move and see if it truly does make sense to make such a move, as this is the foundation of everything you do with your computer.
Pro: Windows 8 works well with the cloud and syncing to Windows mobile devices, too bad I have no windows mobile devices and I don’t plan on getting any either (Who really uses Windows Mobile devices at this point really? Apple has the majority of the device share out there and then android, I can get a windows phone, but the apps available for it are pretty scarce at this point)
Con: Windows 8 is designed for tablets, I have a laptop, probably wouldn’t be a good idea, for a tablet that is fine, but for my laptop, it would suck. The immediate first action is to turn it back into Windows 7.
Con: I have a lot of legacy software that I use for various tasks that HAS to work or stuff just won’t get done. Take SVN for example, I can’t be sure there will be a version available for it for Windows 8 and I am not too fond of running development in a VM myself.
Con: How buggy is Windows 8 going to be? As with just about every Microsoft product I have ever seen, there will be bugs.
Pro: Windows upgrade is much improved, which is nice, but doesn’t really matter if stuff doesn’t work, lol.
Con: There are rumors that Windows 8 will block or severely limit 3rd party browsers like google chrome or mozilla firefox, look HERE. This looks to be only on the ARM version at this point, so that won’t effect what I am doing but can you say ANTITRUST??
Before you make the move to Windows 8, install this to see what software on your machine will/won’t work. Below is the results of this tool on my machine, the big ones that stand out to me are the issues with SQL server as our company needs to support those for a while so the only answer would be to run those within a VM, here is the link to that issue here:
I believe I will take a “Wait and see” approach on this OS for now, way too many questions for me at this point, especially with my work PC.
UPDATE — It looks like my machine has gotten some malware attached to it recently and has caused the firewall to just stop working as well as the performance has just really been declining to the point of dragging, so I have decided to install Windows 8 instead of reinstalling 7. I figured I might as well start learning the new OS and it looks like the issuew with SQL server are minimal, all I need is to make sure that I have the latest service pack and I am good to go.
