windows 8 and minecraft?

danbim

nanny is buying my son a laptop for xmas, he asked for windows 7 as he wantsto play minecraft and has been told by friends it wont work on 8, has anyone got any idea as have been on the minecraft forums and so confused

-TangleFoot-

Does this help?

DCFC79

Well his friends dont know jack then do they.

MollyJoe

I would be very interested to know this too please.

Lum

Minecraft is written in Java. It'll run on any computer capable of running the Java VM. i.e. Windows, MacOS and certain versions of Unix/Linux.

Java is officially supported on Windows 8. They have some helpful advice here though it's mostly advice about switching between desktop and metro in Win8 since Java only runs in desktop mode.

Edit: LOL Oracle (the current maintainers of Java) even have an FAQ entry about Minecraft. I guess Minecraft is one of the few valid reasons a home user should even have Java installed these days!

danbim

thanks for the replies, still a little confused so much info on the link, but i wil try and work it out.

DCFC79s find your answer a bit harsh I was only asking for advice and he is a young 13 year old with 13 year old friends who were just trying to help. and whats with the quote at the bottom?

Lum

You don't need to worry too much about all the stuff in that Java on Win8 FAQ. I only really linked it to show that Java is indeed supported on Windows 8.

Your son is 13, I'm sure he'll figure out the oddities in Windows 8 himself soon enough, the same way that people of my generation figured out how to program the VCR for our parents!

Edit: I should probably add that the biggest thing that will affect the performance of Minecraft is the graphics hardware in the laptop. Intel HD graphics, found in lower end graphics will be a bit slow but not too bad, higher end dedicated graphics from nVidia or ATI will run a lot better and will also be necessary for other big name games.

The hardware guide Tanglefoot linked shows this well.

Johnmcl7

As above, Minecraft should work fine under Windows 8 - just checked it on a machine I'm building at the moment and it opened and ran without issue.

John