Windows 8.1 dont have hyper-v - cant use Windows Phone Emulator

Lately i wanted to get into Windows Phone 8 development and i installed Visual Studio 2013 + Windows Phone SDK 8 + Visual Studio 2013 Latest update. My system parameters are: - 8gb ram - Windows 8.1 64bit system - Intel i5 The moment i try to run a Windows Phone project a dialog appears and it says: Title - " Cant start the windows phone emulator" Subtitle - "The Windows Phone Emulator requires Hyper-V.Your PC is missing the following pre-requisites required to run Hyper-V: -Windows 8 Professional(64 bit)"

After i saw that i checked for how to upgrade Normal Windows 8.1 to Windows 8.1 Professional. With no luck i tried to find out more about to install Hyper-V with the BIOS configuration with no luck as well.

Usually i develop on Android with Eclipse(with the Emulator) so i can't understand the reason why a emulator of Windows Phone can't run on my system.

P.S I don't have Hyper-V feature to be turned on/off in the windows feature list.

Thanks heads up for each answer! :)

Solution 1:

I was in more or less the same situation. Current Hyper-V implementation requires 64bit OS and virtualization support on the processor level. Sadly, this only exists in relatively newer (gen 3 and 4 Intel) under Windows. To verify if your CPU supports the necessary virtualization requirements, use CoreInfo by Mark Russinovich from SysInternals.

If your CPU does not have the required support, you can still use a real phone for development/debugging. The good news: a Lumia 520 is only $55 in stores (probably less on eBay).

Solution 2:

I am running Windows 8.1 Professional on a Surface tablet (i5) and a laptop (i7). Both have Visual Studio 2013 installed, both have Hyper-V enabled and both have successfully run the Phone emulator.

It would seem that your hardware is up to the task, the only thing preventing you from enabling Hyper-V and running the emulator would appear to be the Windows edition: you need at least Professional.