With the release to web of the Windows Developer Preview yesterday, I chose my most suitable PC for the task to get it up and running. The W500 is a slate device with a keyboard docking station attachment, and as you can see from it's Windows 7 WEI score - it's at the low end of the scale in terms of CPU power, but is more than adequat with it's on CPU GPU.
After backing up the existing Windows 7 instance to WHS, I attached a keyboard so that I could change the default boot device to the 8GB USB flash drive I had preloaded with both the 32 and 64 bit versions, but installed the 32 bit version due to the system only having 2GB of RAM which is not upgradeable.
Setup took about 15 minutes, so there have been some obvious improvements to this process, and for those of you familiar with the setup process of Windows 7 you will find a similar folder structure, as well the as the expected WIM files. This means I can still use my favourite approach of preparing a bootable install flash drive with diskpart via the following steps within Windows. The 32 and 64 bit installs both fit onto a single 8GB flash drive, and don't really benefit from trying to apply compression as most of the space is taken up by the WIM files which are already compressed.
1. Insert USB flash drive
2. Run diskpart
3. Type "List Disk" (or "lis dis") to determine which drive is the flash drive
4. Type "Select Disk x" (or "Sel Dis x") with x being the drive number of the flash drive
5. Type "Clean"
6. Type "Create Partition Primary" (or "Cre Par Pri")
7. Type "Format FS=NTFS QUICK"
8. Type "Active"
9. Type "Exit"
10. Use your preferred ISO extraction tool to extract the files out the flash drive.
There were a few little hiccups I experienced prior to a succesful install, and that involved removing the CF Card I was using for additional storage, changing the boot device order to put the Flash Drive first and then the SSD second (the boot order I had was preventing setup from being able to select an appropriate hard drive), but then everything went smoothly, and as I also called out, quite quickly. There are still a few devices in Device Manager that need some attention, and I'll look into that when I get a bit more time to explore and play.