FastForward

Windows 8 Developer Preview Findings

I installed Windows 8 Developer Preview (64 bits) on my machine today (no, not VHD/Virtual install, the daredevil way, directly on the hardware as the sole OS). Here I would like to share my findings and bugs with you. So this will be a work in progress.

UPDATE: running Windows 8 as my sole production platform for a week now. Remarkably stable. Not one BSOD, just some minor inconveniences.

New Interface

- The new interface is tricky when not working on a touch device. If you click in the bottom left a Start button appears, but there is no “Programs” option there anymore. On the new Metro desktop there is an option “Desktop”which bring up the old trusted Windows desktop, yet again without programs or an old-fashioned start button. Typing a program name while on the Metro desktop will work most of the times, but it’s a new way to find the stuff you are looking for. Not quite sure how easy this will be on a touch only device (trying to find Device Manager for example).

- There is no button for Restart or Shut Down. In the Metro desktop you can click on your profile picture and you will find an option to log off. To Shutdown you need to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, go to the symbol in the right bottom corner and select Restart of Shut Down there. (How you CTRL+ALT+DELETE in touch mode eludes me for now).

- Two Control Panels. It seems that the Metro interface has its own Control Panel (with an option at the bottom to go to the classic control panel options. The personalization options in this Metro Control Panel are different from anything in the classic option though. The Windows Update option in the Metro Control Panel doesn’t seem to do anything. For updating you have to go to the desktop first or to the traditional Control Panel. Wonder why the option is there in the Metro Control Panel at all.

- Applications can be started by just starting to type their name in the Metro interface as already stated, once you find an app you are able to look at some advanced properties by right-clicking on the app. How you should be able to close running Metro Apps without using touch still eludes me (other than killing them from within task manager, which looks great by the way.

Software installations and issues

- Installed Office Professional Plus, 32 bits > OK

- Installed Microsoft Project Professional > OK

- Installed Office Communicator 2007 R2 > OK

- Windows Live Essentials 2011 (Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and Writer) > OK

- ForeFront EndPoint Protection 2010 > had to run it in Windows 7 compatibility mode

- Getronics VPN Connection Manager > had to run it in Windows 7 compatibility mode

- SCCM Client 2012 > OK

Cool Features

- Installing Windows 8 actually delivers a complete new GRAPHICAL boot manager (and I have been told also graphical BSOD’s). Looks very slick!

- I had to do a re-install of Windows 8, and I made it a thorough one. Deleted all partitions and created them from scratch. After re-installing Windows and starting up IE10 I noticed that all my favorites had magically been preserved. So Windows 8 seems to come with some Cloud Features build-in. Which I expected while looking at the Metro Control Panel, where I saw the “Sync PC Settings” option, where you can enable Windows to sync Themes, Language Preferences, Favorites, Account Pictures, Home Groups, Ease of Access features, some passwords and tons of stuff across all your PC’s!

- If you install Windows 8 as a standalone/non-domain machine you can now login using your Windows Live ID. Which is probably the linking pin for the “Sync PC”options described below. If you are logged on as a domain user you have the ability to link ONE Windows Live account to your domain account (and this account will presumably sync your settings in the cloud).

- Extreme Windows Live integration! Connect all your other social media account to Windows Live on the web and see how pictures and search etc, appear seamlessly within Windows.
I linked:

- Facebook

- LinkedIn

- Flickr

- SlideShare

- YouTube

Yet the actual effects will not show up until a later build, as most of the Windows 8 Metro apps shown in the demo that use this integration are not shipped with the developer preview.

- Virus scanner built in by default, and in the final version Windows Defender in Windows 8 will include real-time anti-virus protection! Currently Windows Defender protects the system from adware and spyware, but that will be replaced by Microsoft’s Security Essentials (the free consumer version of ForeFront).

- The new Task manager is pretty cool. looks great, although it presumably tends to get cluttered quite fast.

Findings and Bugs

- Running Excel 2010 on Windows 8 seems to generate strange display behavior, Cells seem empty, borders seem to be missing. Selecting all the cells seems to temporary restoring it.

- Some icons don’t seem to work properly. E.g. the Lync 2010 and the icon for Adobe documents seem to have turned blank.

- The Volume Shadow Copies enabled feature of “Previous Versions” is now no longer a tab in a documents or folders properties, but has now been integrated as a History option in the new Windows Explorer Ribbon.

OLD NEW

- Internet Explorer 10 now seems to have a build-in spell checking functionality. However this seems to be so slow that you seem to loose every 4th character even if you just type at average speed. Posting on Facebook is proving to be quite a hassle. Trying to disable it, is no simple feat either, see this excellent post for details: http://schmitta.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/windows-8-developer-preview-disable-spell-checker/

- Closing non responsive Windows is sometimes impossible. You can click the little red cross al you want, the window won’t close and most of the times you will not get the Windows intervention option (wait for app to respond, close window, etc.) either. At some points it will merely turn your screen completely black for a considerable amount of time, with quite some hard disk activity going on, but no noticeable end-results. So be prepared for quite some rebooting (which you presumably are if you are familiar with alfa builds.

- While deleting (the SHIFT+DELETE way) the old Windows.old files from my hard drive I get an error message that “the file names would be too long for the destination folder”. So somehow instead of really getting rid of the file Windows seems to move it somewhere hidden. And no it’s not the Recycle Bin.

- At this moment Windows 8 doesn’t seem to be very good at spotting light conditions and adjusting the brightness accordingly. Not sure if this is a driver issue or a Windows issue yet, but it’s quite annoying (albeit pretty “Green”). So I just disabled the “Adaptive Brightness”Setting (which is hidden deep within the Display settings). Adjustment of brightness is now part of the power plan settings, which makes sense!

- There seems to be a new feature around turning Windows features On and Off (enabling .Net frameworks for example). If an application needs this you will receive a message if you want to turn this feature on, after which t shows another message telling you it needs to contact Windows Update to complete the installation. The interface needs some more work in my humble opinion as nothing is shown (as compared to normal Windows Update operation) on what is being downloaded, how much progress is made and how long the remaining download will approximately need.

- Internet Explorer 64 bits is now default. So for Flash, you need the 64 bits release candidate from the Adobe website (IE will not warn you, you need to figure this one out yourself). However, Silverlight is still requiring 32 bits, so running the SCCM Software catalog is not working on the default Explorer, you have to copy-paste the URL to the 32 bit Internet Explorer client.

- The snipping tool (for screen capturing) sometimes opens on the Metro desktop while you are trying to capture something on the traditional desktop. Kind of trial-and-error behavior here.

Suspicions

Looks to me that the new Windows 8 install uses your hard disk a LOT. Now this might also been the case for Windows 7, but in Windows 7 we don’t have such a cool Task Manager. Also this might stem from the freshness of the install. Perhaps Windows is just still busy indexing and optimizing.

Miscellaneous

- Desktop gadgets; no changes, improvements or additions compared to Windows 7. As you can imagine Microsoft seems keen to replace them with Metro “live tiles”.

- Metro live tiles:

-Tweet@rama, a live tile that comes with Windows 8, it’s actually a nice looking Twitter client. Allows you to post and add messages, but that’s about it. Looks kinda fun though, though a bit limited in its capabilities at the moment (no URL shortener, no long tweets, etc.)

- Weather tile. This tile doesn’t seem to be live, nor does it allows for anything other than temperatures in Fahrenheit, even when you change the regional settings to Metric. It would have been cool if this tile would look at that setting.

- News: a live tile that hides within one of the most beautiful RSS readers I have ever seen on Windows!

- Metro Live Tiles shown in the Anaheim launch, but missing from the Windows 8 Developer Preview:

- Photo: the cool live tile that seamlessly integrated your local photos and online Flickr photos;

- Calendar: the one with the cool interaction with the lock screen

Facebook and my personal data, can I get it back?

The last couple of days there was a bit of a row on the fact that Facebook had aggregated all the mobile numbers of your contacts. There were two ways the numbers could end up in your Contact list. You have either actively shared your phone number with your friends on Facebook, or you shared your number with a friend, who then had synced them to Facebook.

Trouble is I don't want Facebook to accumulate this data without me knowing it. I have always loved the old definition of privacy of " The right to be left in peace". Coincidently it seems my phone number also seem to have made its way back into the telemarketeer databases, although it has been listed in the Dutch "Don't-Call-Me-Register" since September 2009.

Now how can I make sure Facebook doesn't retain my phone number? Well, I can't, and it's hard to make them as well. THEY didn't actively acquire my number, it was a willful action by one of my "friends" to share that information with Facebook (Facebook even told them to make sure all their friends were comfortable with them sharing the information).

Now how to make sure this personal information remains personal. Well, you can't. The only thing any Facebook user can do is to request the synchronisation of phone numbers from their mobile phone to be annulled.
(as discussed in this ZDNET article: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/how-facebook-got-your-phone-number-and-how-to-take-it-back/2497).

This doesn't necessarily mean Facebook doesn't have my phone number anymore, as there is no way for me to be sure ALL my friends have annulled the synchronisation, or that there is no shadow backup at Facebook.

And I can't force Facebook to remove it, as it wasn't Facebook, but one of my friends that shared my private phone number online, so Facebook can simply state that the were not at fault.

Still I feel there should be a way in which I, as the owner om my personal information, should have a way to check what personal information of myself Facebook has in its databases and reclaim their ownership when I feel I didn't give permission to share it. Facebook may not have stolen this information themselves, they at least seem to have fenced it...

Anyone with legal expertise that can shine some light on the options Facebook users may have under their local and under U.S. Law?

Office 2010 Features Overview

Getting a Linksys SPA962 IP phone to work with a Zyxel 2602HW connected to Telfort

After extensive tuning I finally got my Linksys SPA962 IP Phone to work flawlessly with my Zyxel 2602HW modem connected to Telfort.

Configuring the Zyxel 2602HW modem

First you have to make sure the “Enable SIP ALG” setting on the modem is enabled. For some reason a lot of tips on the internet tell you to disable this option on Zyxel modem, but for me this caused the phone to be unable to do a proper the SIP registration.
To enable this feature look under Network\NAT and choose the tab ALG:

Configuring the Linksys SPA962

Now for the Linksys SPA962 IP phone. Not being a VOIP or SIP specialist this took quite some trial and error to get this one right. I went through all the hassle of failed registration, inability to make call to the phone having to be rebooted after every call I made.

Finally it now works perfectly. When you log onto the phone’s build-in web server, make sure you log in as administrator and choose advanced from the menu.

Under System:
set connection type to DHCP

Under SIP:
fill in the following:

Under EXT 1 (or any other of the 6 extensions) fill in the following:

And:
  
Make sure the “Register expires” time and the “Proxy Fallback Intvl” values are exactly the same. I am under the impression this was why my phone had to be reset after making a single call (or even just picking up the phone), don’t ask why…

Finally under SPA932 make sure the entries look like this:

That should do the trick. If for you this still doesn’t work, drop me a comment, perhaps I missed a key setting in the examples above.

Happy calling,
Kees.

I like these graphs…

Simple and true. I encounter this a lot in my work…

Nice visualization, strong point:

And more complex and beautiful: