1901

Thanks all for the advice. As it turns out, all that I needed was a replacement hard drive so I can put off new PC-type decisions a bit longer.

1902

I used the windows 8 quick ‘refresh your pc without affecting your files’ option last night (somehow none of the visual studio installers/uninstallers would work any longer and I had to nuke from orbit). What an awesome feature! Totally clean PC in about 10 minutes.

1903

Useful free e-book by Ed Bott: Introducing Windows 8.1 for IT Professionals. Contains a bunch of overview & usage info for normal people, too.

1904

The update is available. Just click on the Store and there’s a big update to 8.1 tile.

Big ass download at over 3GB. It’s like were downloading the whole OS over again not just updates.

1905

I’m pretty sure it is, compared to the size of my RTM ISO.

1906

Weird it says update to windows 8.1 preview in the store.

EDIT: Ok it is the actual 8.1 not the preview someone put the wrong banner in my country store, or maybe is a conflict between default OS language, English and the country store language that is Portuguese.

1907

You basically are. After install, look at the root of C: There’s a windows.old folder that’s about 3.5 GB large. Use Disk Cleanup to remove it.

The good news is that I got around 10-15 GB of SSD space back after install. I have no idea what they did to shrink the install size, but daaaaamn.

And RIP Windows Experience Index. Or good riddance.

1908

I just installed it, and man, there are some annoying things about 8.1.

For example, having a Microsoft Account to use your computer is now required, where it was optional in 8.0. You must create one, which means your computer has a password, whether you want one or not. Fortunately I found a video telling me how to turn this “feature” off so I can use my computer without entering a password. I still have the option of manually selecting Lock if I want to password protect it temporarily.

There are “helpful” tips that pop up, and don’t go away until you use them. I was doing some work, and it said “hey, you can get to your last Modern App by swiping from the left!” And until I obeyed, part of my screen was obscured with the tip. No way to tell it “shut up, I’m busy.” Then it did it again, only this time telling me I could get to the Start Page by swiping from the right. Which I never want to do.

1909

You can bypass that stupid Microsoft Account requirement with an equally stupid trick: during setup select “Create a new account,” then “Continue with existing account,” meaning the offline account you used with Windows 8. The best thing about Windows 8.1 is that Classic Shell has already been updated for it…

1910

Ah, OK. I didn’t know that. It’s good that you can bypass it, but it wasn’t at all obvious that you could do that, since “create a new account” doesn’t sound like the option you want if you want to use an existing account.

On the positive side, I do like that idea that I can share settings between computers, now that I’m using a Microsoft account and I’ve got it set so it doesn’t ask me for the password. If I ever install Windows 8 on my desktop, which I probably will delay for as long as possible at this point. I’m already sharing Firefox bookmarks via their sharing mechanism, and it’s really handy to have a single set of bookmarks on both desktop and laptop.

1911

Completely agree, that was the sentiment I wanted to express. It’s not stupidly obvious but stupidly hidden.

1912

Do a search on your system for netplwiz. You can basically tell the PC to boot straight to a certain user account.

1913

That’s how I’m bypassing the password log-in. The video I mentioned pointed me to Netplwiz.

By the way, this harkens back to what I said earlier about searching for programs: there’s no natural way for a user to encounter Netplwiz, even though it’s installed as part of Windows 8.1. Someone has to tell you about it. The normal user account controls don’t permit this, neither the Modern app nor the Control Panel dialog.

1914

There are some other weird placements too, like how the checkbox for telling it to boot straight to the desktop is under the Taskbar properties, whereas I initially started scouring the Control Panel for it.

1915

Also, what’s up with the screaming yellow default theme? Even all the optional themes are ugly. I went with a solid background color instead. Can we have the nice backgrounds from previous versions back, please?

1916

I changed my theme - by which I assume you mean the various Window border colors - to the older light blue early on with Win 8, and 8.1 didn’t change that. My desktop is a rotating set of my photos, so I don’t have anything there, either. The Start Page - when I bother to look at it - has a dark blue background.

So I don’t know how you got the screaming yellow.

1917

It’s the new default theme, meaning desktop background here. You get it when you previously had a default theme, as I did. You had the background set to your own custom pictures so Windows kept that.

1918

Since my trip is upon me and I’m finally going to be using my laptop rather than just occasionally fiddling with it, I thought maybe I should set it up as another book reader. It’d be kind of silly to put away my laptop and grab my iPad if I just wanted to read, right?

My impression is that the Kindle app for Windows 8 is a bit lacking compared to the iPad app. It forces you to use a grid book cover view for your library, which I don’t much appreciate at all. There’s no easy display of how far you are in a book on the book list view, which in turn means it’s not easy to tell at a glance when viewing the “cloud” list which books are copied to your device. If you’re reading a book, you can’t just tap to bring up options, you have to right-click / press and hold. The font size options are very granular compared to the iOS version, there are precisely 4 sizes, and on my 15" 1920 x 1080 laptop it goes from too small to bigger than I really wanted, with nothing in between.

On a positive note, there’s a new option under Sync: you can set your “most recently read page” to your current location, rather than moving to the Internet-stored last page. That’s a much handier way of resetting your location than doing it via the Amazon web page. The iPad app should have that.

1919

Well, been a fun fucking day in Windows 8 land. I spent the first half of the day struggling to get some damn Windows Updates to install. Love how helpful those error messages and error codes are. Tried manually installing the updates, no luck. Did a scan with SFC which found no problems so I tried using DISM, which is what turned up from my Google searches. Still no luck, still incredibly unhelpful errors.

Decided maybe I could try some things in Safe Mode. So I reboot the machine and start hitting F8 so I can load into safe mode and realize that Microsoft has seen fit to change that for no fucking apparent reason. After a quick Google on my phone I figure out how to get it, tunnel through six screens or so, and finally get into safe mode. Only took me three times as many screens/clicks, which seems to be par for the course of all of Microsoft’s UI work lately (how I want to throw a brick at the engineers behind IIS7+, Modern UI, etc).

Then I remembered that whenever I reboot my computer (reboot, not recover from sleep) there is a 75% chance that I lose all my USB devices, they just die. I’ll click my mouse and the LEDs will flicker faintly but that’s it. Luckily, my front panel USB ports aren’t effected so I have to unplug my mouse, plus it into the front port, then go into the Control Panel and disable/enable the USB controllers. Fun times. So I jump through that hurdle and try to do some stuff with Windows Updates there but turns out I can’t do Windows Update with the built-in admin account for some reason. Maybe there’s a good reason for that, I don’t know, but it was a bust. Still have the same problem with DISM, so I reboot.

Great, there goes all my USB devices again. I fix that yet again and get back into Windows. I remember that hey, Windows 8.1 is out today, just maybe I can upgrade to that and it’ll bypass this mess? Worth a try, at least, although I’m doubtful. I find it in the Windows Store, start the long download/install process. Takes quite a while but finally the progress bar finishes and… failed. No error code given, no error message, just failed. Nice. Very helpful. Attempting a system Refresh was equally as successful and enlightening. Really, guys, for the love of god give me some fucking details!

So I finally give up, grab a 8.1 ISO, and start fresh. Now I’m going through the joy or moving my user folder, which Microsoft still doesn’t give a UI option to move during install for some unknown fucking reason. I’m sorry, but limited space SSD system drives just aren’t uncommon these days. Give me an option to change it via an “Advanced” section during install and not have to create answer files myself.

I’ve finally finished that process and now for some reason the text on Win8.1 is blurry. I have no idea what’s going on there, I’ve updated my video drivers, made sure the resolution and refresh rate are set properly, all sorts of stuff. No idea what’s going on there but hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out, I didn’t have the problem on Windows 8.

The only positive thing I can say is that they finally have addressed an extremely obnoxious bug which has been there since Win8’s original dev preview. Back when Win8 first came out it took me hours and hours to figure out what was causing those frequent hangs. No such problems on 8.1 so far so, uh, good job I guess?

Sorry for the rant, it’s just been one of those days…

EDIT: I’m also running into an issue where pop-up dialogs will not pop up on top, instead they’re coming up behind other windows. As an example, I’m deleting a folder and it hits a read-only file or whatever, bringing up a prompt asking what to do. Depending on the dialog, sometimes this locks up the dialog I’m using. It’s only after a few seconds figuring out WTF is going on that I notice that something is flashing on the taskbar. Then I alt-tab and get to the dialog in question and address it. Anyone else getting this issue?

1920

My upgrades went fine, except one computer had to manually activate with the 10,000 character long phone activation procedure. That was pretty annoying. It also killed my keyboard remaps, so I had to re-do them, and for some reason uninstalled the services for windows firewall control (a 3rd party program despite the name) and crashplan. Other than that it’s nearly identical, except for the combined search which is a huge improvement.

Obviously I’m not using a microsoft account, and that is kind of a debacle too. Pity, because I would like to try skydrive. Oh well.

Hopefully MS keeps to the yearly cadence. It’s nice to get a refresh every year.