Anyone found the dual boot tool?

It's almost like the idea for this train wreck, as Brad calls it (and very well), was born when someone at MS said 'We need more apps for our Windows phones so we can make them popular and also profit 30% from the work of others via a Windows store, just like Apple are doing now with their App store! How can we do that?' and someone else replied 'I know! Let's force all the thousands of Windows developers to make apps for our phones! Just make desktop Windows a big phone UI!'.

And everybody clapped at how clever and devious they were.

This may be a little off topic, but I remember how excited I was to buy Windows Vista when it first came out.  I bought it the first day it came out, and this was before the world realized how clunky, slow, and buggy it was.  Yes, Vista was a resource hog, but at least it was far different from XP, which I was tired of using at the time.  I loved using Aero at first (before I bought WB), and the fact that I could resize Windows explorer icons all the way up to 256px, adding even more eye-candy.  Vista was pure eye-candy at the time.  But now Aero is growing stale and boring, and we need a freakin' new interface Microsoft.   And I don't mean Metro. I can't believe that Vista's been out for over 5 years.  And it died in just 2. 

And now, there is just no hype for me whatsoever for Windows 8.  Even if Windows 8 was free, I probably wouldn't use it very much.   I wasn't excited for Windows 7 neither, mostly because it resembled Vista too much.  But Vista was a radical change from XP, especially in the eye-candy department.

 Edit: guess that was an older preview. bleh..

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/getting-started-with-the-windows-8-consumer-preview.ars

I have to laugh at the article title - 'Old dogs, get ready for new tricks'

hahaha

It should have read "How to confuse the hell out of people 101"

I seriously don't get it.  It took me about a half hour using the dev preview and I was comfortable with it.

Which is why I laughed so hard at 'old dogs'

As the annoying little shit in the Mazda commercials says, zoom zoom!

I still love it.  I got like two hours of sleep last night though so all you'll get from me right now is I got my Storage Spaces pool set up and am copying shiz to it.

OK, just for grins and giggles.

Running Win7 and Win 8 on the same laptop.

Win 7 gets higher WEI score than does Win 8. Just saying...

Indexing is updated as and when there are advancements in hardware ... in theory your WEI should end up going backwards each time you retest it....

I went all in and did an in place upgrade.  Everything still works.  There's a learning curve but once you get used to it it's quicker to use than 7.

I got my SATA and eSATA drive set as a Storage Space pool and that's awesome.  Uninstalled Perfectdisk and cFosSpeed before I dove in, since storage spaces autodefrag, my other disks are SSDs, and the networking is improved over 7.  Uninstalled Adobe Reader for Metro Reader just now.

There're a lot of right click actions that you don't expect at first but once you know where everything is it's fantastic.

Metro is undoubtedly not 'pretty' but it gets everything out of the way so you can focus better on what you're actually doing.

My only gripe is Windows Update...switching from Metro to the Control Panel ver for more information is just silly.  Not really a huge deal but annoying.

I'd check my WEI score but I'm not really concerned.  The drivers aren't final yet so whether it went up or down I'd shrug.

And the game/store apps don't seem to think I'm logged into my WinLive account.  Not a deal breaker but keeping me from viewing the extra apps.

WEI is still 7.4 here.

I think everyone would agree that 8 is progress in many ways. Microsoft is constantly adding features and refining things that make Windows more useful, like Storage Spaces. That's a neat idea, although I'm still not sure why you wouldn't simply RAID instead.

What I'm concerned about is that it has two UI's on it and you have to switch all the time. For example, user settings are split between classic Control Panel and Metro PC Settings: some are in one spot and some are in another. It's certainly not unusable but it's quirky in an annoying way.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

Q) Are Storage Spaces some kind of RAID? If it is, what RAID versions do you implement?

Fundamentally, Storage Spaces virtualizes storage in order to be able to deliver a multitude of capabilities in a cost-effective and easy-to-use manner. Storage Spaces delivers resiliency to physical disk (and other similar) failures by maintaining multiple copies of data. To maximize performance, Storage Spaces always stripes data across multiple physical disks. While the RAID concepts of mirroring and striping are used within Storage Spaces, the implementation is optimized for minimized user complexity, maximized flexibility in physical disk utilization and allocation, and fast recovery from physical disk failures. Given these significant differences in objectives and implementation between Storage Spaces and traditional inflexible RAID implementations, the RAID nomenclature is not used by Storage Spaces.

Q) How does the read performance of a space compare to RAID 0 or RAID 10?

For both mirrored and striped spaces, read performance is very competitive with optimized RAID 0 or RAID 10 implementations.

It also utilizes the file system differently than your normal drive partition (256 meg blocks which the OS decides how best to fill rather than it just being a normal drive to the OS) and can be used with all types of drives (eSATA, SATA, USB 2.0/3.0, Thunderbolt, whatever) in the same pool.

Where can I get the dual boot tool. I want to run it on my laptop.