I downloaded it from WinRaid forums. There are two versions that I will test: One for Windows 7 and one for Windows 8+.
Serious question. Why not use the RTM win8? It is still one of the lightest operating systems MS ever made since vista, with all modern features included.
Windows 8.0 it's the best NT6 OS you can use - Ex7forW8 want more? - Immersivekill.exe - MetroKiller.exe (fxxkmetro.zip) even more? - Winaero Charms bar killer - Winaero Skip Metro Suite - StartIsGone - StartKiller not yet? - rename c:\windows\system32\windows.immersiveshell.serviceprovider.dll alternative shell? - WinXShell you can also use LogonUI.exe from Windows Developer Preview M3 8102.101 (well I'm not sure if this one is related to metro)
Ever heard of classic shell? Win8 is by far the fastest and the lightest Windows 6.x+, It's also the best looking except for few things like the Icons that are still the ugly ones from the vista days, but that's a minor detail easy to fix). Perhaps Win8 RP (build 8400) is even nicer given it retains also the transparency, and nicer buttons in explorer. Vista, on the other hand, even if SP2 is a big improvement over the tragedy that Vista SP0 was, is still an half cooked OS, plenty of pointless UI quirks, with an UI that looked baroque the day it was released, let alone in 2024, being as slow as a cleaned up Win11, but lacking most of the features that any modern windows has. (no native vhd support, no vhdx support, no Hyper-V, no RemoteFX, no deduplication, no hosted network support, and so on.)
I surrender when facing such detailed technical motivations Eh. Moving in the opposite direction of the herd is always satisfying, but is usually harder Win8, just like Vista, is treated both by MS and most users as the son of a lesser God and seem that nobody cared to port the NVME drivers to win8, given both 7 and 8.1 have them, but I didn't search extensively.
OFA 1.4 and 1.5 are indeed problematic, couldn't get them to work properly as well. Version 1.3 is considered the "last good/most compatible" version it seems. WinRaid also has an OCZ/Toshiba nvme driver, maybe that could work as well. I remember that daniel_k backported the Microsoft W8.1 NVME driver for W7 and W8 so it should work with M3 as well. Will see if I can dig it up from my archives.