With the Windows 8 beta, excuse me Consumer Preview, due out on February 29th it’s time for those of who love bleeding-edge operating systems to consider how to test it. Now, you can run the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on its own PC, but this is beta software. While I have PCs just for software that I know darn well isn’t ready for prime-time, you probably don’t For you, I recommend the use of virtual machines (VM).
The best of these, in my experience, are:
Of these, my particular favorite is Oracle’s VirtualBox. In my years of working with virtual machines, virtual operating systems just tend to run faster under VirtualBox. Over the years, I’ve also found that VirtualBox works well no matter what host operating system-Linux, Windows, whatever-I have running under it.
Virtually Windows 8: How to set up the Consumer Preview in VirtualBox. More >