I was really excited the other day because I was downloading the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. If you’re unaware, I’m a nerd.

I was excited until I started installing it. I’ve tried four times now and I can’t get it to work. When I was installing from inside Windows 7, it would hang at 72% completed. When I booted from the DVD and installed, it wouldn’t recognize my hard drive and I couldn’t even begin to install.

I have a hunch why it’s doing this, it might have to do with the extra OEM partition on the drive, but I’m not up to playing with it any more today.

I have to use an old hard drive because I don’t want to screw up the drive already in my laptop. I still have nine months of service left and if I screw something up now, it will make my life a pain in the ass while I wait to have access to my PC supplies.

To quench my thirst for installing a new operating system today, I decided to try out OpenELEC. I came across this a few months back and I want to use it on the HTPC I’ll build when I’m home later this year. I’ve used XBMC on my old XBOX and was quite pleased with this. OpenELEC is essentially XBMC without the base operation system. It boots fast and has a tiny footprint on a disk.

I installed it in almost no time and it worked perfectly. I was actually happier watching movies on it than in Windows 7 because my Windows install likes to start sucking system resources at random and it makes my video and audio all choppy. Not in OpenELEC. I’ve decided this is the perfect operation system for my HTPC (though I hope they expand the Blu-Ray support soon).

I might not be able to do everything I want to do with computers because I’m 5,000 miles away from home, but I certainly can do enough to keep myself satisfied.