Installing Windows 8 Preview on the HTC Shift

The HTC Shift is a wonderful anachronism left over from the results of earlier HTC and Microsoft love-ins, flirting with touchscreens, neat hybrid form factors and ULV CPU’s. It’s origins lie in hardware that was created to run the ill-fated Origami platform on top of Vista. That combined with a Windows Mobile 5/6 device (on the ARM side) managing a 3G connection and low power access to mails, contacts and the like made for one very interesting bit of hardware.

I have been happily using the Shift for a few years now (since a good friend kindly passed it on to me) with various Windows and Linux setups (on both the ARM and x86 side).

But in fairness I have been using it less and less of late. As it feels that the Origami work is spiritually being dusted off and rolled into Windows 8 with the healthy dose of the Metro design language and friends it seemed only right to dust off the venerable old Shift and see how it coped with the latest software incarnation.

No part of this process is very complicated, it mostly came down to installing the right drivers in the right order , just read the post and follow each point and you should not go far wrong.

Read this: Please make sure….

• You are 100% happy to totally wipe the Shift’s HDD. Don’t bother with an upgrade from Windows 7. Not worth the hassle!
• You don’t mind manually reinstalling Windows Vista or Windows 7 when you decide 8 is not for you.
• You are signed up on XDA Developers
• You are well aware you are installing an unsupported pre-beta bit of software on your device, and the device is under MS’s recommended minimum specs. The chances are it will not work well! But it’s fun to try.
• You understand not all the hardware is 100% supported and there may be driver issues.
• You have removed any external storage from the device other than the USB stick (no SD card inserted, no random USB HDD connected etc.).
• You have enabled WiFi using the Shift Control Panel before you start the install inside the old OS. If you don’t you may need to have a USB Ethernet adaptor before you can enable WiFi to get on the internet.

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