Windows 8

[Aluviel Nakamura]

hello All,

 Ihave a friend who tried to login and cant seem to get past the region login part. He has windows 8 and claims that many games are not compatable. Is there anything special he can do to fix this so he can get in?

[Miserlie]

Not sure, i was offered a update of it, didn't want to. I heard Secondlife isn't even supported with windows 8. It is still fairly new, and alot of people aren't doing a huge upgrade to it, So game developers aren't trippin' on trying to make it work for windows 8.

[Aluviel Nakamura]

wow thats good to know.

thank you

 

[Miserlie]

Is there a way to unupgrade ?

He can also try different viewers.

[Ansariel Hiller]

Often the problem are the default drivers installed by Windows 8 itself. Let your friend install a driver directly from nvidia, ATI or Intel depending on what GPU they have.

[Ansariel Hiller]

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Miserlie wrote:

Is there a way to unupgrade ?

He can also try different viewers.

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A computer that came Windows 8 actually includes a downgrade right to Windows 7. But you are not allowed to install a Windows 7 and 8 installation based on the same license at the same time.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Windows 8 is not the problem.  The "new" operating system is not a revamping of Windows 7.  It can be consdered a an upgrade to Windows 7 much like a service pack.  The main difference between the two systems is Windows 8 support touch screen where the user has a monitor capable of such an interface.  It also has many security enhancements (like your typical service packs have).  The system has been called "Windows 7 fixed"..........and that definition probably fits quite well.  What does cause issues is that when you get a computer with Win 8 pre-installed Microsoft includes drivers for all known devices that a computer will typically have.  Some are universal drivers like mice, keyboards, LAN, optical drives and monitors.  Those devices seldom have issues because they will work just fine with the drivers that Microsoft includes in the software.  Other hardware devices like video cards/adapters and some audio devices will not work to their fullest using those "universal" drivers.  To get the best your video card/adapter can give you need to replace that "universal" driver with a specific driver for the device.  Since SL is rather graphic intensive in nature, the proper driver needs to be installed for the viewer to even successfully launch.

All that said, update your graphics driver.  Windows 8 is entirely compatible with SL (and SL is entirely compatible with Windows 8).  It's not like the jump from Window 98 (or Window ME) to XP was..........XP was a completely different operating with a completely different file system.  Since XP each Windows operating system upgrade produced little compatibility issues.  They just were not that different as far as operating the system.  A new UI and a few more features (along with some security enhancements) are basically the difference.....well efficiency is another change (but that usually leads to better compatibilty and not worse).

[solstyse]

Actually, you can run as many operating systems as you want. there are several ways to do it, and licencing has nothing to do with it. Windows does not include a "downgrade" of any kind. It has a "legacy screen" that gives you an experience similar to windows 7 except that it's not as pretty, adn lacks a start button unless you get one from a third party download.

To run both Windows 7 and Windows 8, you'll need a copy of the one that is not factory for your system that is licenced as "system builder." Most OEM installs use 3 or 4 primary partitions, and only 4 can be used, so if you want to give your new copy of Windows it's own partition you'll have to do away with either the factory restore partition or the OEM system tools partition. I don't suggest this. It's very risky.

If you want to dual boot, then you can use a virtual hard drive, which is basically a logical partitiion inside of a primary partition. This is one way that Ubuntu or Linux Mint get installed. The only difference is that your copy of Windows won't do it automatically like Linux will.

If you want to always boot into one OS, and have access to the other, you can do so through a virtual machine. It runs like a program, inside of a window and everything.

the biggest problem with Windows8 by far is that there's not a good enough information flow from the manufacturers to the consumers, and apparently even to the other manufacturers. I'm running SL perfectly on a computer that HP claims is untested/unsupported for Windows8. All I had to do was check what hardware I had, and download the drivers from the people that HP bought their parts from. That's all there was to it. Windows8 did end up replacing some of my Win7 drivers with generic ones, but that took less than an hour to fix. Win8 is nowhere near as alien as it's initial appearance would make you think. Once the drivers are sorted out, it'll do everything Windows7 did quicker, and it'll support things that Windows7 didn't. there is no need for LL or anyone else to rewrite anything for Win8.