Running Windows 8 Consumer Preview On OS X With VirtualBox

So you've heard all the hype about Windows 8 and you want to try the consumer preview, but you use a Mac with OS X. What's a geek to do? Well, here's a free and easy way to try out Windows 8 Consumer Preview by using Oracle's free VirtualBox virtualization software package.

The first thing you want to do is download VirtualBox. You can download VirtualBox by visiting www.virtualbox.org and heading over to the downloads section.

Once you've downloaded and installed VirtualBox, you'll need to get the Windows 8 Consumer Preview from Microsoft. Grab the .ISO file from here. You'll need the .ISO file in order to install and run Windows 8 Consumer Preview in VirtualBox. We downloaded the 32-bit ISO image and then sat back for a while because the download is a bit large at 2.5GB.

Once we downloaded the ISO image, we fired up VirtualBox and went through the process of adding a new operating system. You'll want to give it a name, in our case we chose Windows 8 Preview and then we were able to choose Microsoft Windows as the operating system and Windows 8 (not Windows 8 64-bit) as the version of Windows we wanted to install. Once you start going through the next few setup screens, you'll want to just use the defaults that VirtualBox recommends. 

Once you've gone through the setup for the new operating system, simply click on the green START arrow, select the location of your ISO file and run through the usual Windows setup. You'll be running the consumer preview version of Windows 8 in no time and you'll be able to see what all the fuss is about! As for us, we were not that impressed with what we saw.