Playing with Windows 8 - Build 8250

So I put a spare hard drive in my laptop and installed a fresh copy of Windows 8.
The installation was FAST!  The only driver I had to add was the video card driver from NVidia.  The basic M$ driver allows full res but is not usable because of the lack of hardware acceleration.
It is a bit weird getting used to using Windows without a start button.  And when you press the Windows Flag button on your keyboard a bunch of tiles show up, like the navigation menu to a phone (especially Windows 7 Phone).
This is definitely an interface designed for touch, making me wish my laptop supported it.
I have yet to be disappointed, but it is a bit of a learning curve.  I like to customize things so I found myself with a few navigational questions:

1. How do I easily get to the control panel?
2. How do I navigate all my installed programs?  Do I really need to press the windows button and use that tile interface?

Then I ran into hover corners.  Hover your mouse into each corner and you get some neat icons.  The Right corner pops up multiple icons including a Cog wheel - this is still NOT control panel.  It looks very similar to the metro-style settings on Windows Phone 7.  Right now, the only way I know how to get into control panel is to press the Windows button and start typing - after pressing the C button it begins to search all my apps and Control Panel immediately pops up.

When it comes to using Windows 8 in a business environment, I see the large tile thing getting turned off.  Touch, at least in the near future is not a feature that will be featured at the desk of a typical office.

Windows-R still works (Thank God) - so starting snippingtool wasn't be a problem.

BitCoin

If you do not have an active BitCoin client and are not currently watcing and buying bitcoins, I think you are totally getting behind.  This may never take over for national currency, but the power and technology behind it is amazing!

It's technical architecture was described in detail at: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-287.pdf

OneNote 2010 and Windows Mobile 6 on MotoQ9m

So this was frustrating, I spent a bunch of time trying to get OneNote 2010 Moible on my phone, I could not find a CAB file or anything.  All I found was articles affirming that Office Mobile is released FREE for Windows Mobile 6.5.  My guess is that there is no version of OneNote Mobile 2010 for my Windows Mobile 6.0 phone.

So I pulled out my old Office 2007 Enterprise CD, opened the OneNote CAB file, found the Onenote Mobile CAB file (ONMOBILE.CAB_1033), and copied it to my desktop.  I then renamed it to ONMOBILE.CAB and copied it to the external storage card on my phone.

From the phone I executed and installed it.  Now I can sync my OneNotes from my phone to OneNote 2010, as long as I keep my Mobile Workbook in 2007 mode.

Whew!

Plagiarized!

In 2005 I wrote several knowledgebase aritcles for my company's support website (http://support.digitalfoundation.net/). Just yesterday I got a phone call from a confused and frustrated TechXpress customer wondering how we got the data he was attempting to send in to TechXpress for support. The problem is that TechXpress copied these articles that had instructions to email the support info to my company's support account.

Needless to say, I am disappointed in TechXpress and amused at the same time.

To make things more interesting, it as out on the newswire
Old URL: www.prweb.com/releases/2009/02/prweb2186994.htm

So I took advantage of of the situation and wrote a press release on my own company site. I have since been contacted by the owner who removed my articles and asked me to take down my press release.

Enterprise Search

Several months ago Microsoft released a new search tool call Windows Search 4.0 (an update to Windows Desktop Search). With Windows Search a user on Windows XP or Vista Machines can perform a search onthe network drive and recieve instant results.

This type of search capability is extremely powerful and productive, previously tools that provided such capability were extremely expensive (Google search appliance) and/or complicated (dtSearch).

I myself created an ASP based webpage that my clients could browse to. The webpage would perform an ISXXO query to the Index Server on the file server. This worked pretty good - but was a but buggy, not as fast, and definitely not integrated into the user experience.

It has taken me so long to figure out the Remote Query Capability of Windows Search because for me it was just not working. I finally ran into this article (http://biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=416) that explained for the Remote Query functionality of desktop search to work - the path you had to be accessing in the file explorer is \\computername\share using the IP address or FQDN woudl not work. I look forward to Microsoft updating this limitation in future versions of Desktop Search.

Windows 7

Yes the next versionafter Vista. Really Vista nowadays is a fine operating system. It is stable, pretty, and has some fancy features. But it is also a bit clunky in its attempt to provide tighter security.

Widnows 7 is what Vista should have been - it is FAST (was faster than Vista) - just as secure but ot nearly as obtrusive. Also has some great new Windows management tools. The Beta is comming out soon and I am really looking forward to it.

Back up your data!

About a year ago I had a client lose all their pictures on the Hard drive f their home PC. They did not have backups and all the computer tools a typical tech guy has would not work. I had to send this out to a company that specializes in data recovery - in the end it cost $2000 and they got back ALL the data.

Recently, this happened again to another client who list their financial data in quicken. They certainly did not want to shell out $2,000 - I was hoping I could start putting the skills I have been developing in HTCIA to use. I met with the Computer Forensics Investigator for the SLO PD - he showed me plenty of tools - lucky for me this was not an easy recovery so there was alot for me to watch. In the end I was able to recover the Quicken data and have used these skills more than once on other hard drives.

Please, backup your data - and also be careful with what you store and transmit digitally.