Category: Windows 8
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Windows 8 Enterprise: What’s What?
This post was originally written for the Canadian IT Pro Connection blog, and can be seen there at http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2012/09/12/windows-8-enterprise-what-s-what.aspx Since the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 8 I have had a lot of people ask me the differences between the Pro SKU and the Enterprise SKU. It is a fair question, because ever since…
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Default File Locations in Hyper-V
This post was originally written for the Canadian IT Pro Connection blog, and can be seen there at http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2012/09/11/default-file-locations-in-hyper-v.aspx. Note: This article applies equally to the server-side and client-side hypervisor. Although some scenarios may not apply to older versions, the technical steps apply to all versions of Hyper-V released to date. A virtual machine in…
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User Account Options in Windows 8
Earlier today I discussed the Picture Password and PIN codes in Windows 8. What I didn’t mention is that for non-corporate users (who will still continue to log on using domain accounts) you have a new option in Windows 8… and that is to use your Microsoft Account to log on to your system. Cool,…
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Logon Options in Windows 8
The three-fingers salute is gone. Okay, that is not entirely true, but if your computer is not domain-joined, you will no longer need to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log onto Windows. That doesn’t mean that you won’t be asked for a password… However, built into Windows 8 there are two new ways to log on: PIN…
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Client-Side Hyper-V: How Microsoft is changing the game
I have been a virtualization guy for a long time, so when Microsoft released Hyper-V 2.0 with Windows Server 2008 R2 I was among the first to ask why they weren’t including it in the client OS. In my opinion it was a no-brainer. With the launch of Windows 8 with the client-side Hyper-V, they…
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Windows 8 Experience Index… What it means and how to check it
Six years ago Microsoft introduced the Windows Experience Index, a better way to measure the actual speed of computers, rather than simply relying on the single measurement of the CPU speed. Although it really is more complicated than this, Microsoft has broken the speed of a computer down to five components: CPU, RAM, graphics and…
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Windows to Go: Better (and easier!) in the RTM!
A couple of months ago I posted an article on Windows To Go (Windows To Go: This is going to be a game changer!) outlining the benefits and use cases for Windows to Go, as well as the steps to build your WTG key. In the RTM release of Windows 8 it has gotten easier…
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Making Your Windows 8 ISO work for You
Tomorrow is the day that a huge number of you will be downloading and installing the final bits (RTM) of Windows 8. You now have an ISO image of Windows, and you need to install it onto your computer. In order to do that you have to put it onto media – DVD or in…
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Windows 8: .NET Installation Issue
I couldn’t believe it. I had finally installed Windows 8, and I wasn’t able to blog about it. I use Windows Live Writer as my blogging tool (most of the time). One of the required pre-requisites is .NET Framework 3.5, and for whatever reason it would not install for me (see screenshot). The error code…
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Smart Screen? Smart!
Unlike most people I was (and am) a big fan of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7 (and even Vista). I have often referred to it as the ‘Are you really sure you want to do something stupid?’ button; it let you know that you were about to do something that would affect your…
The World According to Mitch 