Microsoft released the Windows 8 Release Preview on, 31-May-12. I’ve pulled down the preview, with all of the Metro Apps and installed it…and then I promptly nuked my Asus Eee T101MT Touch netbook and restored Windows 7 to it.
Why? Well, that’s pretty simple…
The OS couldn’t turn on the Wi-Fi Radio.
I have Comcast cable internet coming into the house providing me with a speedy 50Mbps down/20Mbps up pipe. I’ve got 802.11g/n Wi-Fi in the house as well, and I know that when things are humming right and cooking with gas, I can push 22-25MB/s of data across my home network (That’s equivalent to 176-200Mpbs, kids…). Oh yes… It’s a beautiful thing.
Soft32 will continue to provide in depth, thought provoking analysis on all major platform upgrades and advances, and the summer of 2012 looks to be a very active season. There’s a lot happening in the desktop operating system world right now. So after downloading the 2.65GB ISO image of the 32bit version of Windows 8 Release Preview, with Apps last night, I set out to install the revised OS on my T101MT so that I could begin evaluating the delta (or change) between it and the Consumer Preview.
I plugged the Eee PC into one of the five wired Ethernet ports of the network switch I have in my home office and turned off the Wi-Fi radio. Over the years, I’ve learned that having more than one active network adapter running at the same time on a single PC (like having the Wi-Fi radio on and connected to your wireless router or access point while having a network cable plugged into your wired Ethernet port) can cause network performance issues on Windows PC’s. After many conversations with Microsoft technicians and technical beta team leads, I’ve learned that a Windows PC can become confused when trying to determine which network adapter to send and receive IP traffic through if more than one networking adapter is active in the same PC at once. So, I turned the Wi-Fi radio in the Eee PC off after plugging in the Ethernet cable. It seemed reasonable, logical, and it’s what my experience has taught me to do over the years.
Yeah…someone please remind me not to do that again…Big mistake.
After Windows 8 Release Preview installed and I unplugged the Ethernet cable from the netbooks LAN port, I couldn’t get the wireless radio to turn on to save my life. I fiddled with every setting and registry nugget I could find. I pulled the driver out, deleted the files and let the PC find everything again to no avail.
After a couple hours, I threw in the towel and activated the recovery partition on the netbook. I blew the entire contents of the PC and will start over from scratch this weekend…this time, leaving the wireless network adapter on after plugging in the Ethernet cable.
Come back next time, and I’ll give you the run down on what actually happened, why it happened and what this means to the Windows computing public in general.
