Posts Categorised: Windows

0windows 8 logoWindows 8250 consumer preview: Traditional start menu

Posted by & filed under Windows.

Win­dows 8 looks to have many nice new fea­tures, but unfor­tu­nately, as I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, Microsoft has decided to cre­ate a phone/tablet user inter­face and foist it upon desktop users as well.  This would­n’t be such a prob­lem if Microsoft had left an option to turn the excel­lent and well estab­lished tra­di­tion­al inter­face back on, but in their infin­ite wis­dom Microsoft has­n’t provided any such option.  For­tu­nately there are 2 options for get­ting the tra­di­tion­al start but­ton and menu back.

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19windows 8 logoWindows 8: Horrible Horrible Horrible Metro UI

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

OK, I sus­pect the title is going to give it away.  I down­loaded Win­dows 8 8250 con­sumer pre­view today, and almost imme­di­ately real­ised that as it stands I am going to avoid Win­dows 8 like the plague.  As far as I’m con­cerned the UI changes cur­rently make Win­dows 8 the worst release of Win­dows ever (even worse than Win­dows ME!)

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11Windows Update IconFix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve.  This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve.  One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1.  It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated.  It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.… Read Full Article

0Serial Key LogoRetrieving serials from Windows

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I am fre­quently giv­en PCs to repair that require a rein­stall of win­dows.  These often don’t come with a full list of seri­al num­bers for the soft­ware installed on them.  To avoid the hassle of ask­ing the own­er to dig the seri­als out, it is easi­er to simply pull the seri­als from the old install before wip­ing.… Read Full Article

0Internet Explorer 9 LogoUnattended IE7 & IE8 during Windows XP setup

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Over the years I’ve cre­ated quite a few unat­ten­ded Win­dows install­a­tion disks. One of the toughest prob­lems to solve has been how to install Inter­net Explorer 7 (and now 8 ) dur­ing setup without caus­ing post-setup prob­lems. The prob­lem is caused by the way the install­a­tion routine cre­ates files in the dllcache which get over-writ­ten by win­dows setup.
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