I decided to upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 8 Pro. It was the best decision I have ever made. I didn’t upgrade purely because of all the hype surrounding Windows 8, but more because I wanted to start developing Windows 8 style apps.
Well, I must say that after playing with Windows 8, I am absolutely hooked. The UI is so intuitive and easy to navigate. Getting around the OS is a breeze and I don’t even want to mention the Windows Store. But let me start off from the beginning and go on from there.
Upgrading to Windows 8 took very long. The upgrade process was seamless though and went off without a glitch. It is the best upgrade experience I have ever had with a Microsoft Product. The best part of all was that Windows kept all my Settings, Applications and Data in tact. After quite a wait, and a few reboots later, I was looking at my new Windows 8 desktop.
One thing Windows 8 did right off the bat was check the compatibility of drivers and applications. After this was complete, it gave me a nice report. I noticed that Daemon Tools was not supported and I wondered if there was an update. I then remembered the mention of built in ISO support in Windows 8. I had an ISO of Office 2013 and decided to give the built in ISO support a whirl.
The task of mounting an ISO file in Windows 8 is as simple as right clicking on the ISO and selecting “Mount” from the context menu. The only thing was that I wasn’t seeing the “Mount” menu item. After searching around on the Internet a bit, I came across this article by Joe Dissmeyer. What he mentioned in the post actually made a lot of sense and I actually felt a bit silly for not thinking of it myself.
The problem lies in the File Association that Windows 8 makes with the ISO file types. I had Nero installed on my Laptop and that meant that the ISO file type was obviously associated with Nero. To correct this, I did the following.
- Right click the ISO file and select Properties.
- Click on the Change button
- In the File Associations list, select Windows Explorer
- Select OK and close Properties
If you now go and right click the ISO file, you will see “Mount” as the first option in the context menu. Personally I am very happy that Microsoft has finally included ISO support in Windows 8 (It is about time). My Windows 8 experience thus far has been a very good one. Everything just seems to work (sounds vaguely familiar… cough…apple…cough), and the ease at which Windows 8 presents settings and options to the user is beyond anything I have ever experienced in an OS (Including iOS). Time will tell how Windows 8 performs, but this OS is the most exciting (and most beautiful) thing to happen to Microsoft years!
Feel free to add comments about this article below. The laptop I installed Windows 8 on is a Dell Inspiron 17R N7110 with an Intel Core i7 CPU and 8 GB of RAM.
