Posts Tagged: windows 8

0Windows Media Center eHome LogoGet Media Center 8 free

Posted by & filed under Windows Media Center.

If you’ve got Win­dows 8 Pro, and wish to add Media Cen­ter to it you need a key from Microsoft.  In future this wont be free, but you can get one free until 31st Jan 2013 thanks to a Microsoft offer.  I have registered for mine, even though I don’t run Win­dows 8 because I may want to use it in future so why not!

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0codecsComplete codec setup guide for Windows 7⁄8

Posted by & filed under Codecs.

Win­dows 8 is fin­ished and will soon be avail­able for retail sale. With that in mind it seemed a good time to write an updated guide to get­ting codecs set up for a fully oper­a­tion­al HTPC for both Win­dows 7 and 8. For this guide I’m using a new fea­ture of HTML5 which cre­ates expand­able instruc­tions. At the time of writ­ing this is only sup­por­ted by chrome and safari 6 but hope­fully oth­er browsers will add sup­port in the near future.

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3windows 8 logoHow to restore a proper UI to Windows 8 & Server 2012

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Win­dows 8 and Serv­er 2012 have now RTMed and as expec­ted the good old UI of desktop and start­menu has been replaced with a [int­link id=“2543” type=“post”]horrible new UI[/intlink] (pre­vi­ously called Metro).  In their ulti­mate wis­dom Microsoft have left no way to switch back to the old desktop/start menu sys­tem, but thanks to vari­ous tweaks and tools it is pos­sible to get 90% of the inter­face restored — good enough to be fully usable.  Below I doc­u­ment the vari­ous steps and tweaks required.

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0windows 8 logoWindows 8: Fix the start menu

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

So, Win­dows 8 is com­ing in late July (Octo­ber for retail cus­tom­ers).  There are no signs that Microsoft will relent provide an option to switch back to the Win­dows 7 start menu, and instead will force the [int­link id=“2543” type=“post”]horrible metro interface[/intlink] upon every­one.  As a res­ult many of us will undoubtedly stick quite hap­pily with Win­dows 7, how­ever there are 2 reas­ons to use Win­dows 8: being forced to as it will come on all new PCs soon and for improve­ments includ­ing a per­form­ance increase and the new [int­link id=“2283” type=“post”]storage spaces[/intlink] fea­ture amongst oth­ers.  If you fall into either of these camps but, like me, can­’t stand metro, there are now more options avail­able than when I [int­link id=“2552” type=“post”]last wrote[/intlink] about this issue.

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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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0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces.  I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth.  How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.”  To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAID.  Until Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure.  Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too.  If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion.  Thanks Microsoft!