Hyper-V and sleep–what more could you ask for?

Although I’ve installed it a couple of days ago, I am still smiling. Why? Because after several long years of waiting, I’ve finally installed a versi0n of Windows that supports Hyper-v virtualization and sleep at the same time – the new Windows 8 consumer preview.

For years I‘ve been using Windows Servers on my laptop in order to get Hyper-V, but lack of support for sleep and the necessity to cleanly shutdown and boot up the operating system over and over again was killing me. So the promise that we will get it all in Windows 8 was appealing.

I have installed Windows 8 as a dual boot configuration using boot from vhd. Quick hints on how to do that: prepare a vhd file of appropriate size (30GB in my case), boot from windows installation dvd, Shift-F10 to jump in the command prompt, attach the vhd file, in the “where do you want to install Windows” dialog point to the vhd file and go on with the setup. See here for info on creating a vhd file and attaching it from the command line. Windows will take care of installing the new loader and configuring dual boot.

For info on how to enable Hyper-V in Windows 8 CP go here. Hyper-V works like a charm. One nice surprise: it supports connecting virtual networks directly to wireless network card. No workarounds required. It just works.

Unfortunately, the Sleep option was nowhere to find. This page hinted that the video driver may be the reason why the Sleep option doesn’t appear in the Shutdown menu.

I have HP Elitebook 8740w with NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800 graphic card. Luckily NVIDIA had the updated driver. Once the proper driver was installed the Sleep option appeared.

End of a happy story. My laptop is going to sleep now. Good night.