If you want to boot directly to the Windows desktop in Windows 8.1, bypassing the start screen, follow these steps:
1. Go to the desktop
2. Right click on the taskbar
3. Choose Properties
4. Switch to th Navigation tab
5. Check "Go to the desktop instead of Start when I sign in"
Move your mouse to the right upper or right lower corner or swipe from the right.
Click on the wheel icon (lowest icon)
Click on Change PC settings
Click on Personalize.
Slide the slider to the one of the first four colors.
As you can see there are 21 background colors and around 18 fore ground colors.
In the beginning I thought, I could not change the Windows 8 start screen color to black because I focused on the little colored foreground squares, and they don’t contain the color black.
Often I hear people complain about the Microsoft Hyper-V manager, for instance: copying files from the host to virtual machine by using the clipboard is not possible, this is because the Hyper-V manager is not intended to be used like VMWare workstation or player.
Only use the Hyper-V manager to “manage” virtual machines eg start, stop, copy, clone, add or remove hardware etc.
Remote Desktop
When you want to connect to the desktop of the virtual machine, use Remote Desktop.With remote desktop it is possible to copy files from the host to the Hyper-V virtual machine by using CTRL-C and CTRL-V (using the clipboard). In windows 8 the remote desktop experience is really improved, so take a look at it.
TIP: You can still use free programs like Microsoft Remote Desktop Manager v2.2 to manage multiple rdp connections, but the “metro” windows 8 RDP app is pretty good.
If you want to make a clone / copy of an existing Windows 8 Hyper-V client virtual machine, follow the steps below:
Run Import wizard
Run the Hyper-V manager.
Click [Export Virtual Machine…].
Choose a export folder eg [C:\VHD\W8RLIDEV2012]
I will always move the contents of the created folder to the root folder, see screendump, but this is not necessary.
Click [Import Virtual Machine…].
On the Locate Folder page, enter the folder containing the Virtual Machine you want to clone / copy eg [C:\VHD\W8RLIDEV2012\Virtual Machines]
On the [Choose Import Type] page choose [Copy the virtual machine (create a new unique ID)].
Note
I use the location of the virtual machine to store snapshots etc.
On the [Choose Folders to Store Virtual Hard Disks] choose [C:\VHD\W8RLIDEV2012\Virtual Hard Disks]
The last thing I do is rename the Virtual Machine in the Hyper-V Manager.
Well I better start start pushing my new Windows 8 apps to the windows store 
Created a new developer license at 16-3-2012 and now I can create apps until 15-04-2012.
Keyboard shortcut for shutting down your Windows 8 pc: [WINKEY] + I, [UPARROW], [ENTER], [u]
Keyboard shortcut for restarting your Windows 8 pc: [WINKEY] + I, [UPARROW], [ENTER], [r]
Keyboard shortcut for sleeping your Windows 8 pc: [WINKEY] + I, [UPARROW], [ENTER], [s]
I ran into some cases, where the Windows 8 CP start screen didn’t respond any more. When I clicked on a title, the tile would show the “button click transformation”, but would not start any app. It would not even show the desktop or by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ESC show the task manager. The only thing that worked for me, without rebooting the system, was sign out and sign in again. The virtual machine that I was running would still be running after the sign in, sign out action.
If you want to remove hiberfil.sys from your Windows 8 installation, you must first disable hibernation.
1. Right click any where on the start screen
2. Click on All apps
3. Right click cmd and click Run as administrator
or
Open explorer and navigate to [C:\Windows\System32] right click cmd.exe and click on "Run as administrator".
2. Enter: powercfg -h off
3. Normally the file will now be deleted, if it isn’t you can manually remove it.
If you don’t run the command prompt with elevated privileges, you will get the error:
[An unexpected error condition has occurred. Unable to perform operation. You may not have permission to perform this operation.]
Before you read any further, as Dane pointed out, you can install Hyper-V on Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview, but after rebooting you will be presented by a “blue screen”, because a HAL_Memory_Allocation was thrown. This is broken since the beta build. Let’s hope they fix this in the RTM.
Meet the power of |”Intel VT-x/EPT”. Normally when you want to install Hyper-V on Windows 8 inside VMware Workstation 8 you will get the following message:
Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running.
Shutdown the machine and edit the Virtual Machine Settings > Hardware > Processors > check the “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT”:
One more thing you should do, is edit the vmx file of the Windows 8 VMware virtual machine and add the setting “hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”, as described here: http://www.veeam.com/blog/nesting-hyper-v-with-vmware-workstation-8-and-esxi-5.html
Now you can boot the Windows 8 VMware virtual machine and add install Hyper-V.
Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off >
Now you will get the message: “Provides the services that you can use to create and manage virtual machines and their resources”.
More information can be found, here: http://virtualizedgeek.com/2011/09/16/nested-win8-hyperv/
Just want to share a screen dump of the new Microsoft Windows 8 extraction progress window:
