Tag: Windows 8

Posted on

Windows 8 System Image Tool, Where did it go?

Quick one….

Here is how you can do a full disk image of a Windows 8 system.

If you are like me and just finished setting up your shinny new Windows 8 system, you installed all of your non-metro apps, you activated all of your professional software and now thought, “damn good time to take a image” then had a hard time figuring out where it went…. you are not alone.

In what looks like a ridiculous and frustrating war between Microsoft and Windows Desktop the backup tool is now called “Windows 7 File Recovery”. They also took out direct links to “create a system image” as well.

Yes you are not losing your mind, its not Windows 7, nor is it only file recovery, it’s the only place to get to total system imaging.

Simply Search Metro for “Windows 7 File Recovery” and click the Settings area on the right and you will find it.

image

image

Once in the “Windows 7 File Recovery Tool” go to the top left “Create a system image”

image

Posted on

Installing Windows 8 RTM to Apple Macbook Air (Boot Camp)

Hey everyone, I wanted to make a few notes to help others get Windows 8 running on their Macbook Air without it locking, freezing, or poor network performance.

First we should stop that whole freezing problem or you will get very upset in the middle of a driver install (been there.)

You need to open a command prompt as administrator. You can do this by clicking start, then typing “cmd” right clicking on the cmd icon and selecting “Run as Administrator’”

Once open run this command:

bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes

For those who want to know what this does please check out this great post: http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/06/28/workaround-for-windows-8-freezing-issues/

Once installed you will need reboot then install the boot camp drivers. This is done by making the install disk in Apple OS (Mountain Kitty). THERE IS NO DOWNLOAD LINK FOR THIS! DARN YOU APPLE!!! WHAT A PAIN! /RANT OFF

Once you have the Boot Camp disk, copy the contents to a folder on your desktop. Right click on the setup.exe, go to the compatibility tab, then click “Change settings for all users” button on the bottom.

On the next screen change the  “run this program in compatibility mode for:” to Windows 7. Additionally check off the bottom box for “run this program as an administrator”.

Then click OK, then OK again, then run the setup.exe

Once installed go ahead and reboot. This should get you part of the way.

Don’t delete that BootCamp Install folder just yet, deep in there we need the following folder. Just be aware, we will use it soon.

\Drivers\NVidia\NVidiaChipset64

Now lets click the start button, type “device manager” and click the settings “thing” on the top right to discover the “device manager” icon from the remains of the control panel.

Once device manager is open we have a few things to do. First lets take care of those two peskey un-drivered devices “coprocessor” and “SM Bus”.

Right click on one at a time and update the driver. Direct Windows to that folder on the desktop for \Drivers\NVidia\NVidiaChipset64 (or 32 if you are running x86). This folder should be able to updated both missing drivers.

NEXT lets go ahead and change the WiFi driver back to the native Windows 8 driver (Bootcamp had replaced it with a lesser driver that has some issues only in windows 8.)

Simply find the Wireless Network Adapter, its something like “Boardcom 802.11n” right click then “update driver software”, then Search Automaticly for updated drivers.

Thank should do it. Go ahead and reboot one last time for good measure.

Hopefully that saves some of you some time. IF I have helped you all I ask in return is leave a comment and say so. I get a great kick out of it.

Cheers!

-Eric

Posted on

Windows 8 | Task Manager Performance Monitor

While I have to write a longer post about my overall feeling of Windows 8 and Metro I wanted to toss this one out there.

THANK YOU Microsoft for the Task Manager Performance Monitoring built it. Look how sexy and plan English my transfer rate is for copying a number of large files to my desktop (click for larger version):

image

Just fantastic, shows me the CPU is doing fine as it decompresses directly from network share and shows me that Network is in fact the bottleneck as the Disk I/O is not maxed.