Windows 8 To Go
Today was most interesting day so far at //BUILD Windows conference. I’ve attended few interesting sessions, but one of them was absolutely amazing. The session focused on Windows 8 To Go – a way create fully working bootable copy of Windows 8 which can be used to boot any PC (and not only PC – I’ve tried it on my brand new Windows 8 Tablet) and have fully working environment. This opens new horizons to companies, independent software developers, consultants and instructors (like myself) to have fully configured and working environment in pocket always ready to go. This option also leaves the physical machine running Windows 8 To Go absolutely intact. The session had a cool demos of almost-instant boot from USB 3.0 bootable USB-stick, but coolest one was suspending and resuming Windows 8 To Go controlled machine while USB-stick is pulled from the PC – the demo was to present video and pull the stick during the video. Then the machine stopped and when the USB-stick were inserted back it resumed from the same place.
After the session all the attendees got the personal Windows 8 To Go USB-stick – Kingston 32Gb USB 3.0.
We (me and Sasha Goldshtein) decided to check how it works on devices and booted my Windows 8 tablet.
It worked, but it was kinda expected. Then we tried to boot Sasha’s MacBook Air from the USB stick.
First setup took some time but finally it worked:
Subsequent boots were very fast and PC worked very zippy. The boot video:
After short boot-up Windows 8 start screen appeared:
We tried to start Visual Studio 2011 Express Edition and it loaded super-fast:
Finally we trued the same experiment with pulling out the USB stick from working machine and it worked:
Very very impressive!
I’m learning the new stuff and very soon will post cool articles about Windows 8 development.
Stay tuned for more updates,
Alex