rei
1701
use www.voidtools.com everything in desktop mode.
Gedd
1702
LMN8R, do you happen to know if 8.1 brings any updates to Storage Spaces? I tried some googling on it and was only able to find some changes to WS 2012.
Gedd
1704
No problem at all! Just thought I’d ask in case you did.
Wolff
1705
I only have win8 on a surface pro. will I still need to create a microsoft id to access basic functions like mail?
Vesper
1706
I used Storage Spaces on my Server Essentials system for about a year and then got annoyed with it. It’s really poorly setup for changing the configuration at all - no way to remove drives easily, etc. For example, I was out of storage space for media and wanted to swap a 1 TB drive with a 3 TB drive. This was extremely difficult and involved copying files to spare drives back and forth.
I recommend checking out Drive Bender (www.drivebender.com) as an alternative. Works much like Drive Extended in Home Server - makes a pool out of whatever drives you throw at it, duplicating files on multiple drives (configurable) for redundancy.
Oh, hey, that’s great. I decided to bite the bullet and install 8.1 on my tablet, only to find out that you can’t on any of the Clover Trail atom-powered tablets. Cool.
LMN8R
1708
Yup - some Intel driver issue, supposed to be resolved within the next few days, maybe a week I think?
Cool, thanks. It just has a general ‘we should fix this problem’ message up there, which gave me little hope for something any time soon. I mean, if they fixed it in August or September, I’d probably just wait for the real thing.
LMN8R
1710
It’s absolutely critical that Clover Trail devices get substantial preview time well before the final release, so you don’t need to be worried about the time being in months. Or even multiple weeks.
How do I change my wifi properties in 8.1? Googling says in 8 you just right click on the SSID, but that’s not working for me in 8.1…
rei
1712
did they fix the win8 pita where you couldn’t delete a previously joined wireless AP if you weren’t connected to it currently without a GUI and had to do it from commandline?
I’m running Windows 8.0 and in the last several days my computer’s CPU is encountering huge slowdowns, especially in the first 10-15 minutes after startup.
A little research led me to find that the executable MsMpEng.exe appears to be a prime suspect; its “I/O write bytes” lead the second place abuser of my CPU (namely, System is second place) by more than double the bytes.
Has anyone else encountered this issue, and know how to resolve it? Many thanks in advance.
Can’t wait for those Bing ads on the desktop! (Theoretically, since I don’t use Win8.)
LMN8R
1715
That story about ads in Windows 8.1 is an unfortunate display of talking about a feature for businesses who want to advertise without correctly setting expectations for users.
If you’re doing an instantsearch in the same way as Vista/Win7/Win8, there are no ads. Just instant results along the side of the screen.
Here’s an example if I simply search for “Word”, there are no ads. Just a pane that shows up on the right-hand side of the screen:
If you scroll down past all your local content, you see auto-suggestions for web content, again no ads:
If you click on one of the web results, it loads the combined search. All of your local files are shown first, and only after that will you see any web results. Only the web results will have ads, just like any web search will show you:
And you can turn it off in PC Settings. Flip the top option, you won’t see any web results in combined search, and hence you won’t see any ads or auto-correct web results in instant search:
Installed 8.1 preview I’m planning on a complete PC refresh so I ill do that when RTM ships.
First impression was that they should make the desktop wallpaper the default in start screen makes it a very smooth transition for people the mostly use the desktop, the transition is one of the top complains I year about the start screen this in my view solves it.
Like the new shortcuts on the right click menu on start button, namely the shutdown, but it is still missing one to the device and printers menu, maybe is because I have the default printer driver but there is still no easy way to access the printer preferences and the printer queue, on Windows 7 devices and printers was a top link in the star menu, and the devices menu on the charms bar does almost nothing. But maybe this is a issue that is solved by windows 8 specific drivers.
I wasn’t bothered by the lack of start button but this button is nicer then the previous miniature start screen icon.
I can see using more metro apps now that we can resize them to usable sizes, but when I put a metro app half screen with the desktop, when I got back to full width desktop I have to resize my windows manually, so maybe a more intelligent system for resizing desktop windows when you resize the all desktop would be a great feature.
The unified search is good and the addition of web search can be a nice feature, I don’t think ads are a problem after all web search is a ad supported service, there isn’t a practical way to search Google without ads so I don’t expect Bing to be different. What is a big problem is how US centric Bing continues to be, the slow or non existent roll-out of Bing services internationally is big misstep. At Build they talked about Bing platform services that seems like a good idea, and talked about 14 % market share in the US forgetting to mention that they are below 5% in most of the world because they don’t offer the same level of service. Maybe that will finally change if not I probably will disable automatic web search.
So probably a dumb question, but I’ve been using Windows 8 a bit and I was wondering if there’s a way to straight from an app, such as the Notepad app or whatever it is called, back to the desktop without having to land on Metro first? Right now I have to go to Metro and then go to the desktop. I want to alt-tab or something like that to the desktop and avoid the extra step.
From a metro app? Windows-D should work. Notepad is a desktop app, so you should be there anyway.
There’s some kind of app that’s like Notepad on our Metro screen. I probably installed it from the Windows store. Thanks for the tip.
I wonder why there isn’t a desktop shortcut in the charms? They have one for Metro. It would be nice to have one for the desktop too.
That’s the upper-left corner hotspot or, if you’re using a touchscreen, swipe in from the left side and immediately back out. Doing either of those should give you a thumbnail list of all your open apps kind of like alt-tab, and in this case the whole desktop is considered an ‘app’, not its individual windows/programs. If you want to be able to select individual windows, you can grab the desktop app from the list and drag it over to the side of the screen to do the ‘snap’ thing. In snap view you’ll have the whole notepad app take up 3/4 of the screen and a thumbnailed list of each open window on the desktop (like win7 alt-tab, but vertical) on the last quarter. Selecting one from the list will split the screen in reverse (desktop taking up 3/4, notepad shrunk to 1/4). You can go back and forth from them at will at that point.
