I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to help you get Windows 8 running on your Mac.

There are several ways to accomplish this, but I'm going to look at four options--Boot Camp, Parallels, VMware Fusion and VirtualBox.

The first requires items that you probably have around the house--a recent Mac and OS X, which ships with Boot Camp, Apple's dual boot manager.

You might want to run Windows on an older machine, as Windows 8 actually has much less stringent hardware requirements than Mac OS X Lion, but the problem is that only Macs since about 2008 have firmware that can boot from disks with the modified boot sectors Microsoft started using in Vista. I was actually able to install an earlier preview release on a 2006 Core Solo Mac mini, but not the latest release, which is unfortunate. It is possible to extract the install into a new disk image with a normal boot sector, but , and you'd need an existing Windows install to attempt it.