From the guy that brought you Windows 3.11 on a phone, and Windows 7 running on 128 MB of RAM comes a new feat: Windows 8 on 128 MB of RAM. It doesn’t do a whole lot, but it’s possible. Definitely not recommended for any purpose other than showing it can be done (can you even buy DDR2 or DDR3 in 128 MB sticks?!).

With all the Windows 8 news lately, the annual meeting with Wall Street analysts went barely noticed. However, investors noticed that Microsoft really hasn’t done much as far as company management and stock prices are concerned. With Ballmer at the helm for the past 11 years, he has seen the stock price drop in half and some shareholders are calling for his resignation. While I haven’t been too impressed with Ballmer myself, I think he is doing a great job considering the market he has been dealt with.

Ballmer, whose tenure as CEO has included the collapse of the tech stock boom shortly after he took over, did not address recent remarks by influential hedge fund manager David Einhorn. Einhorn called for Ballmer’s removal and demanded the sale of the online services unit, including Bing. The unit has lost more than $6 billion in the last three years.

Sorry about the outage of the site the past day and a half. We had some server issues, and had to move to a new host (large amount of traffic killed the server!). This should scale a bit better and I am looking for a dedicated server to host the site on if traffic continues to be this high. Now that I am on a new server, I will be taking the time to increase the library of knowledge base entries as well as more frequent news postings.

If there are any problems or issues that you notice, please let me know using the Contact link above, or email me directly at dharper@mstechpages.com.

Thank you for your continued support and patronage.

Microsoft has redone the GUI for the defrag program. Many people were dissatisfied with the lack of information from the Vista/7 GUI, so the new one is a bit more involved, but still very simple. You can analyze the drive before “optimizing” it, and it tells you the status of the process as well.

Windows 8 has a friendlier blue screen of death. It may not be too informative, but it tells you that something is wrong and a basic thing to search for to fix the problem. Not bad.

Ed Bott has posted a fairly in depth look at Windows 8 developer build that was announced this morning at BUILD. I would write an article on it, but it would be based on all second hand information from videos and other articles. I plan on downloading the dev build tonight and thoroughly going through it and sharing the secrets I find with all of you. I’m definitely excited about this new OS!

The new OS has more than its share of rough edges, and the new “modern shell” is disorienting—at least initially. And Windows boss Steven Sinofsky took great pains to stress that this is not a launch but rather the initial availability of the platform for developers. Still, after a few hours of increasingly addictive hands-on experience, I am convinced that this new release will indeed be a very big deal.

Windows 8 has been said to boot fast, but until now it’s been a Microsoft story. Now, Tom Warren from WinRumors has proven it to be very true. I am very impressed. Remember, this is a developer preview and not a beta or final product. It should become even faster by the time Windows 8 is released, not only because of more efficient programming, but because of new hardware between now and then.

Steven Sinofsky has announced that tonight at 8PM PDT Microsoft will release a developers preview of Windows 8. I can imagine that the response will be great, so download speeds may not be the best. But, I can assure you I will be downloading it starting at 8:00:01 PDT, along with many others. I can’t wait to give it a whirl!

EDIT: Download Link Here – It is now available for download.

Upgrade from Windows 7 installation is not supported for pre-release code; only clean installs are supported. Reminder: this is a developer preview release and is not meant for production. It is not a beta release. We will be updating the release with various quality updates and drivers over the coming weeks/months just to exercise our overall update and telemetry mechanisms.

Windows 8 is set to be shown to the world today at BUILD, Microsoft’s new event. You can watch the keynote live at BuildWindows.com. Apparently, there has already been a few breaking of the NDA’s there, so some news may already be out there.

BUILD is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. Learn how to work with the all new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world.

Fox News, with help from research firm Gartner, has it’s doubts that Windows 8 will make much of a splash in the enterprise market when it is released. Claiming that Windows 7 was such a success and many still on Windows XP that they will just skip Windows 8 as they did with Windows Vista. Of course, the “saving grace” of the next edition of Windows is going to be the tablet market. For an operating system that hasn’t even been released, or shown to the public in any beta form, people are making some harsh judgments on the software.

Michael Silver, a vice president at research firm Gartner who studies personal computers, exclusively told FoxNews.com that many companies have what he calls “migration fatigue” and will skip Windows 8 entirely.

 UPDATE: Ed Bott does an excellent job rebutting the article from Fox News with some excellent responses.