Virtualized Windows 8.1 with Hyper-V as a home PC?

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm getting ready to reimage my Windows 8.1 home PC as it has been unreliable of late and I simply don't have the time to invest troubleshooting the various oddities of its behavior. Since this is something I tend to do somewhat regularly, though, I began
to wonder if maybe this time I should do something different. I'm considering installing Hyper-V and configuring a virtual machine to use as my daily PC, then making that machine's virtual disk my bootable volume.
I know this probably isn't ideal but there's two big reasons that make this sound like an attractive option to me. First and foremost, I tinker with my PC all the time. As a consequence, I break things on a regular basis. That's usually fine, but eventually
I simply want to get on with using my PC and so I have to invest time reimaging, repairing, etc. to get my system back to normal. Virtualizing my system would mean I could accomplish this incredibly easily, simply by reverting to an earlier snapshot.
The other point is that I am currently attending school to become a network administrator and, well, what better way to acquaint myself better with Hyper-V than to use it on a daily basis! I'm already fairly familiar with virtualization having used VMWare
Workstation/Player and Oracle VirtualBox rather extensively at work and for school.
Anyway, this sounds wonderful in my head but I have some concerns I can't really find answers for...
1.It doesn't sound like I can simply install Hyper-V as my "host" OS without installing Windows 8 in non-virtualized form. I don't really want to have a Windows 8 host on which I run a Windows 8 guest VM. I want to simply boot to a virtualized
Windows 8 environment that I can manage from the hypervisor, no mucking with a host OS.
2.If the above is possible, how much of a performance overhead is this going to have in my system? My PC is more than well equipped to handle a VM or two but as I use it for gaming and other resource-intensive applications I would not want to do this if
there's, say, a 5%+ performance loss.
Has anyone done this? Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I don't know much about Hyper-V, but I use VMware virtual machines all the time for tinkering.  That's a good way to keep from doing potentially damaging things to your bootable host system.  I don't know whether Hyper-V offers snapshots, but I
can restore a VM to an earlier configuration in an eyeblink - VERY handy.
Keep in mind a virtual machine will have lower performance than the host system, so unless you just have overwhelming resources and power perhaps you'll want to keep to using your host system for most things.
There are a lot of good habits and things you can do to keep a system stable.  I noticed you mentioned having to reinstall Windows quite often.  I find that unacceptable, and in fact every system I've run - going all the way back to Windows
95 - I've only ever installed once.  I'm not kidding.  I've even restored Windows from backup onto a replacement system on two different occasions and was back up and running with a fully configured system in very short order - saving all the hassle
of reinstallation, copying of data, etc.  I've documented how I manage systems in my books.
First and foremost, I'd suggest NEVER running an automatic "cleaner" application.  Would you invite a stranger into your home to just delete whatever they feel like?  Of course not.
But there are a few things you should do from time to time to keep a system running healthy, including bettering your default security environment and running a SysInternals tool called Autoruns to look over all the programs that have installed themselves
to run in the background.  I have MOST of those disabled, because they're simply not needed!
To beef up security, probably the best thing you can do is to download something called the MVPS hosts file, which blocks named access to literally tens of thousands of parasite web sites.  The key is that it does so passively, meaning you're not running
any more software.  It just causes Windows to locally resolve parasite web site names to address 0.0.0.0.  It's very effective.  Beyond that, reconfigure Internet Explorer to not run ActiveX from any site in the Internet Zone.  Finally,
replace Windows' own security software with something better - I prefer Avast! myself.
We've already discussed using virtual machines to do your poking around.  That's really effective.
I encourage you to get into virtualization.  It opens up whole new realms of possibilities.
Good luck!
-Noel
Detailed how-to in my eBooks:  
Configure The Windows 7 "To Work" Options
Configure The Windows 8 "To Work" Options