Dear Microsoft

Since Windows 8 Developer Preview has been released a few days ago. I will write a little something about my first Hands on Windows 8.

Windows 7 is not too old yet and Microsoft is about to drop the next operating system in about a year or something. I’ve been working on Windows 7 for the last year and have to admit, I’m quite happy with it. I did not really check on the informations on Windows 8 that were leaked / released before and i was not even watching any screenshots of earlier versions of Windows 8.

Yesterday I tried to install Windwos 8 on a ESX Server but I failed.

This morning I grabbed an old PC to install Windows 8. The machine is not the fastest but I guess for a first look it’s ok.

The setup looks exactly as we know it from windows 7. After selecting the disc to install it to, the setup starts and copys all the files.

After a reboot setup will check all your devices and get them ready to use.

Another reboot and the system will first start up.

The first thing completly new is the creation of some new users and making the basic system settings. At fist you’ll have to enter a name for your computer.

Then you are asked if you want to share your printers with other users in your network. If you select the first option you will be able to share printers with others in your location. This will be used in a company or home network. If you are in a public place, you may want to choose the secont option.

In the next screen you can enable or disable windows updates and some other settings for the upcoming Microsoft Online Store or whatever they will call it.

If you want to make Windows and apps better you should totaly select some of the following options.

Some more settings for you to choose. The Error reporting cannot be disabled in the Developer Preview but I guess in the final version it must be possible.

Something new comes on your screen. You could use your Live ID to logon to your computer and if you don’t want that you could select the second option. But you can see the second option is not really easy to bee seen so you will most likely logon with your Live ID. This will setup some stuff like your profile picture from Live and will add your name to your computer account. You can still create other users later if you like. So we go with the Live ID here.

After that your account will be created. It takes just a few minutes.

After about 30 Minutes your computer will have completed the setup process.

The computer will then login automatically the first time.

The whole setup process will take around 30 minutes which is quite fast. My computer was a pretty slow one with just 512MB of memory and an old Pentium 4 processor. So if you’re running a actual computer you might be finished in like no time.

Your System is now ready to use. But wait what the hell is this.

Microsoft decided to add some Tablet or Mobile feeling to his latest operating system. Windows 8 feels like Windows Phone 7 at first. To me this is quite annoying because it makes no sense.

All the Stuff you knew was there for the last 15 years or something is gone. Nothing really looks like you knew it before. Let’s take the start menu.

Where do I logoff? Where do I make a restart, which is quite important as we are working with a Microsoft operating system. To logoff your user you’ll have to klick on your user Icon in the top right corner. Why did they change it? Was it not good enough where it has been for the last 15 years?

Still asking myself where can i restart my computer? There must be a hidden button somewhere behind all this fancy stuff. THERE IS NOOOOT. To logoff you’ll have to klick on the Start Button and then select Settings. A menu will slide into your screen from the right side. There you will find a Poer button which you can click. you’ll then have to click restart or shutdown in the menu. but there is a faster way to do a shutdown. More on that a bit later.

OK let’s see if there is some kind of desktop where I can work somehow. Let’s try Win + d to get to the desktop. Nice they didn’t change this. At least something I don’t have to learn again. And look this is almost like we knew it from windows 7. Let’s click on the start menu to see if they changed it here too. Damn back where I was before. Lets klick on that desktop link there.

I’m back to the desktop. Let’s see the explorer then. Looks like it has become some part of Office program. Funny Ribbons and stuff.

If you go to computer you will have a real use of these Ribbons. You can click to see the properties of a folder directly and you can switch to Control Panel directly. You can also see your system properties in one click. Which is nice. You can map nework drives in one click. you could have done that in Windows 7 but there was no fancy Icon besides it.

The Ribbons become to make sense somehow. For example if you want to see the the properties of you harddrive or folder you just click on the folder and select the properties Ribbon. This saves you one rightclick.

You wouldn’t expect too much if you click on the Open Control Panel Rebbon. Actually there is nothing happening. It just opens. But it’s nice anyway to have it as a Ribbon.

The same with the System properties. Nice to have but not actually neccessary.

One pretty good thing though is that Microsoft added some Tabs to explorer. For example if you wanted to defrag a disk, you had to go to a path somewhere in the start menu. In windows 8 we have the possibility to do that directly from Explorer. If you selected your harddrive in Explorer, the Drive Tab will appear. You can then select to defrag, format or cleanup your harddisk.

So there is one question. Where is the command prompt? Actually they have made it into Explorer as well. if you select File you can run a command prompt. They even added a Run as Administrator entry. Nice isn’t it?

The first really good thing I noticed about Windwos 8 is the new designed Task Manager. They have discovered that it would be nice if you use some colors to see which processes are using the most ressources. I really like this one.

That was enough for the moment. I saw Windows 8. looks interesting but was it really neccessary to chanche all the good things of earlier versions? I mean what was wrong about the start menu? Or why did you copy Apples Launchpad? Do we really need this in Windows? Does Windows need these things? And why did you bring Windows Phone 7 to the computer? Because it sucks and you need another flop as we had it with Windows Vista? These are some questions that I was asking myself in the last few hours. I know that I can change Windows 8 to look like Windows 7. I know that this is not the final. I know that there may be some changes. I’m totally fine with it but I don’t like where this is going. There is going to be a lot of new crap that no operating system really needs in Windows 8. So let’s see how the final is going to be.

That’s it from my side
peace out
eXe

I almost forgot. The easiest way to shutdown Windows 8 is still the same as in all versions before:
Win + r
shutdown -s -f -t 0
Enter

In Exchange 2007 and also most likely in Exchange 2010, you can give someone the full access permissions to a mailbox. But the person might not be able do send mails as this person. This happens because there’s a difference between the Send As and the Full Access permission. You might have the Full Mailbox permissions but as a matter of fact the Send As permission is not part of the Full Access permission. You need to give the user the right to send mails specifically.

All the information on the different permission types can be read in the Technet Article right here.

After installing OSX 10.7 Lion your CPU might go to 100% and not going down. As a result the fan is turning to a maximum speed.

There are two possibilities what’s happening.

1. Lion is indexing all your files. This might take some time. While indexing your CPU will be used to 100%. This is normal and no need to worry. You can see if your System is indexing if you check the spotlight icon in the top right corner. If the magnifier has a small dot in the center your system is indexing.

2. If there is no indexing in progress go to activity monitor and see what process is causing the problem. One of the process can be AGAdminService running as root. This process can be part of Citrix Online Plugin. If you have Citrix Plugin installed you can try to uninstall it. If it’s not working and the process still on 100% load, you have to execute the following command in a terminal session.

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.citrix.agadminservice.plist

You’ll have to enter your root password. If you execute the command the Service should disappear and shouldn’t appear at the next logon.

Thanks for this solution to mahbool in the following thread in the Apple support forums.
Link to Apple Discussions

If you want to open a SSH connection in Mac OS X you might use Terminal to do so.

In Spotlight write terminal

Start the application.

Once the terminal window is open, press the following combination: Shift + Apple (cmd) + K

Then another window opens and you can select SSH in the left menu. In the right menu you can enter the server address by clicking the + symbol. Now just enter your username for the server in the user field.

Select the Protocol you want and click connect. The connection to your server will be established.

Wenn auf einem Rechner mit Outlook mehrere Browser installiert sind und einer der Browser anschliessend deinstalliert wird, kann es sein das Outlook weder Links auf Websites noch Mailto Links öffnen kann. Die Ursache liegt in der Deinstallation des Browsers. Dabei werden diverse Registry werte nicht mehr auf die default Werte zurückgesetzt. Diverse Lösungen im Netz empfehlen den Standardbrowser neu zu definieren. Leider funktioniert dies nicht immer.

In folgendem Beitrag habe ich die Anleitung gefunden welche das Problem bei mir behoben hat.

http://www.drwindows.de/programme-und-tools/18451-geloest-vorgang-wurde-wegen-beschraenkungen-diesem-computer-3.html#post174046

a) Dazu druecke auf der Tastatur die Windows-Taste und die Taste[R] (alternativ auf Start und anschließend auf Aufuehren klicken).
b) Bitte gib nun “regedit” in die Befehlszeile, bestaetige mit OK (ohne Anfuehrungszeichen)
c) Wir befinden uns nun im Registrierungseditor.
d) Bitte öffne nun den ersten Schluessel (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT)
e) Navigiere bitte nun zum Schluessel .htm! Hier sollte ein Verweis auf einen anderen Registrierungsschluessel erstellt worden sein, dieser wurde durch “Google-Chrome” ersetzt.
f) Navigiere zurueck zum Schluessel .htm, auf der rechten Seite klicke bitte auf Standard. Trage hier nun den Wert “htmlfile” ein. (ohne Anfuehrungszeichen)
g) Diese Vorgangsweise benoetigen wir fuer folgende, weitere Schluessel:
.htm – Standard-Wert in “htmlfile” aendern
.html – Standard-Wert in “htmlfile” aendern
.mdbhtml – Standard-Wert in “Accesshtmlfile” aendern
.mht – Standard-Wert in “mhtmlfile” aendern
.mhtml – Standard-Wert in “mhtmlfile” aendern
.shtm – Standard-Wert in “htmlfile” aendern
.shtml – Standard-Wert in “htmlfile” aendern
.stm – Standard-Wert in “htmlfile” aendern
(Ohne Anfuehrungszeichen)

Danke an alterkater für das erfassen dieser Lösung.

If you try to install an application you might receive an error 0xc000000F saying Windows cannot launch the application.

This happens if your Application is installed from a network Share. To solve the Problem you should copy the application to your local disc and start the installation procedure from this place. There is a HotFix by Microsoft as well. I did not test this personally but it might work as well.

The patch can be loaded here.
The corresponding KB article can be found here.

There might be a problem if you have a domain controller that is NTP server for the domain. The server might not update the time from external NTP server, even if you added an existing NTP server from the internet. There is a simple reason for that. By default windows is configured to update time from internet but there is a registry key that is not set correctly to effectively update the time from this server.

First go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters
in the key NtpServer you can set your preferred NTP server in the internet. For example pool.ntp.org

Then go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters
find the key called Type and change it’s value to NTP

After adjusting these keys open cmd and run the following command:
net stop w32time && net start w32time

The system time should change within the next few minutes.

All that is described in a Microsoft KB article: KB816042

There might be a problem with LiveUpdate of Sage50. You receive a list with updates available and live update is loading the updates and installing them as well. When finished and you run live update again the same updates will show up again.
The reason for that is an update failing without giving you information. In that case there is a simple solution. You’ll have to install the updates directly without LiveUpdate.
Go to the Sage FTP server to download a collection of all updates for your product.
ftp://ftp.sagesesam.ch/KnowledgeDB/Deutsch/Sage50/Version_2009/Liveupdate/
If you need another language than German just navigate to the corresponding path on the FTP. There is a ZIP file to the latest version (for German it would be LUPSage50_CHD_9190.zip) Download the package and run the batch file included. Then all the patches are being installed one after another.
After installing you can run LiveUpdate again to check if all the updates were installed.

Backup Exec fails with a writer status error. The backup exec error code is E000FED1. It appears in the eventlog of the server with the ID 34113.

This can happen if one of the writers fails while performing backup of the shadow copies.

There is a KB article from Symantec for this specific error. It can be found here.

You could check the points mentioned in the post or just reboot your server to solve the issue.

Update: The solution provided above does only work on a 2003 server based system. Thanks to John for the hint.

Just in case someone wants to sync his Xperia X10 with Outlook and is wondering why it’s not working, here is the solution.

Sony Ericsson (SE) does not support sync with outlook by default. They deliver various tools. But by default you’re just able to sync your Outlook Contacts to Google and then back to your Mobile. Or If you have Push mail, you can use the preinstalled Moxier Client.

If you just want to sync your local Outlook you have to use third party software such as My Phone Explorer. You can download that application on the following Site.

http://www.fjsoft.at/en/downloads.php

You will have to enable USB debugging on your phone before it will work. You have to enable usb debugging. This can be found under
Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging

Then you can configure the software on your computer and initialize the synchronization.

Just in Case your Mobile is not recognized by your computer, you may want to install PC Companion from SE Website. This might help.

Hope this article may halt some of you guys.
Thanks to the developer of the My Phone Explorer for this great application. The solution provided by SE is a total pain in the ass!