Installing Windows 8 with secure boot

Is a system with secure boot really more secure? I doubt it. Is this about vendor lock in? You betcha. A tech savvy person should be able to get around secure boot if a system has it enabled by default. A person who is a little less savvy will be stuck, just as Microsoft wants them to be.

My impulse is to buy motherboards without the secure boot/ UEFI crap if I can find them. I hate supporting MS in any way more than I have to. But work sometimes requires Windows.. I wonder (I suppose I should just google it) if Win8 would run in a virtual machine on a motherboard without the crap.

I thought Windows 8 would work fine in a machine without Secure Boot as long as it was a retail version and not the version issued by the OEM.

I probably haven't been following this as closely as I should, but isn't this an issue for ARM processors only?

In response to the various posts:

Yes, this is all about lock-in but will Microsoft say so? http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/security/56075-micros...

Retail boards will, I presume, come with secure boot off by default. But turning it on or off isn't difficult as I discovered. As I mentioned in the article, secure boot is made possible by the new BIOS replacement known as UEFI. Microsoft has just chosen to implement it and vendors are co-operating with the company.

Windows 8 will work fine in a machine without secure boot. I thought I had made that clear in my article. I also wrote about installing it on an older PC: http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/57536-...

And finally, no, this is not an issue for ARM alone. The difference is that on ARM, you can't turn off secure boot; on x86, you can.

Sam Varghese

RTFA, eh? I've read so many of these kinds of articles that it has left me confused.. so beg pardon for not reading yours. Humbly chastised! /jd

With Microsoft it's never clear if you're dealing with malice, incompetence, or both.

I simply assume both, TC. That seems to work fairly well.

What's really funny is, when M$ does it, it's malice, but when Steve Jobs did it, it was genius.

@notbob, I never thought of anything Steve Jobs did as genius.