TOPIC: MICROSOFT WINDOWS
Killing Windows processes from the command line
26th September 2015During my days at work, I often hear about the need to restart a server because something has gone awry with it. This makes me wonder if you can kill processes from the command line, like you do in Linux and UNIX. A recent need to reset Windows Update on a Windows 10 machine gave me enough reason to answer the question.
Because I already knew the names of the services, I had no need to look at the Services tab in the Task Manager like you otherwise would. Then, it was a matter of opening up a command line session with Administrator privileges and issuing a command like the following (replacing [service name] with the name of the service):
sc queryex [service name]
From the output of the above command, you can find the process identifier, or PID. With that information, you can execute a command like the following in the same command line session (replacing [PID] with the actual numeric value of the PID):
taskkill /f /pid [PID]
After the above, the process no longer exists and the service can be restarted. With any system, you need to find the service that is stuck to kill it, but that would be the subject of another posting. What I have not got to testing is whether these work in PowerShell, since I used them with the legacy command line instead. Along with processes belonging to software applications (think Word, Excel, Firefox, etc.), that may be something else to try should the occasion arise.
Resolving Windows Update Error 0x80244019 on Windows 10
21st August 2015In Windows 10, the preferred place to look if you fancy prompting an update of the system is in the Update & Security section of the Settings application. At the top is the Windows Update, and the process usually is as simple as pressing the Check for updates button. For most of the time, that has been my experience, but it stopped working on my main Windows 10 virtual machine, so I needed to resolve the problem.
Initially, going into the Advanced Options section and deselecting the tick box for Give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows helped. However, it seemed a non-ideal solution, so I looked further. When it was then that I found that manually resetting a system's Windows Updates components helped others, I tried that and restarted the system.
The first part of the process was to right-click on the Start Menu button and select the Windows PowerShell (Admin) entry from the menu that appeared. This may be replaced by Command Prompt (Admin) on your system on your machine, but the next steps in the process are the same. In fact, you could include any commands you see below in a script file and execute that if you prefer. Here, I will run through each group in succession.
From either PowerShell or the Command Prompt, you need to stop the Windows Update, Cryptographic, BITS (or Background Intelligent Transfer Service) and MSI Installer services. To accomplish this, execute the following commands at a command prompt:
net stop wuauserv
net stop cryptSvc
net stop bits
net stop msiserver
With the services stopped, it is then possible to rename the SoftwareDistribution and Catroot2 folders so you can refresh everything to remove them. To accomplish this, execute the following pair of commands using either PowerShell or the Command Prompt:
ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 Catroot2.old
Once you have the folders renamed, then you can start the Windows Update, Cryptographic, BITS and MSI Installer services by executing the following commands in either PowerShell or the Command Prompt:
net start wuauserv
net start cryptSvc
net start bits
net start msiserver
Once these have completed, you may close the PowerShell or Command Prompt window that you were using and restart the machine. Going into the Update & Security section of the Settings tool afterwards and pressing the Check for updates button now builds new versions of the folders that you renamed, and this takes a little while longer than the usual update process. Otherwise, you could let your system rebuild things in its own time. As it happens, I opted for manual intervention and all has worked well since then.
More thoughts on Windows 10
11th August 2015Now that I have left Windows 8.x behind me and there are a number of my machines running Windows 10, I have decided to revisit my impressions of the operating system. The first Technical Preview was something that I installed in a virtual machine, and I have been keeping an eye on how things have developed since then and intend to retain a Windows Insider installation to see what might be heading our way as Windows 10 evolves as now expected.
After elaborating on the all important upgrade process earlier, I am now moving onto other topics. While the Start Menu is a big item, there are others, as you will see below.
Start Menu
Let's start with an admission: the prototype Start Menu that we got in the initial Windows 10 Technical Preview was more to my liking. Unpinning all the tiles allowed the menu to collapse back to the sort of width that anyone familiar with Windows 7 would have liked. If there was a setting to expunge all tiles at once and produce this state, I would have been well happy.
It was later that we got to learn that Microsoft was not about to consign the Windows 8 Modern interface entirely to history, as many would have wanted. Some elements remain with us, such as a Start Menu with a mandatory area for tiles and the ability to have it display full screen. Some are live, only for this can be turned off on a tile by tile basis and unneeded ones can be removed altogether. It is even possible to uninstall most apps by right-clicking on a tile or other Start Menu entry and selecting the required option from the resulting context menu. For others, there is a command line alternative that uses PowerShell to do removals. After this pruning, things were left in such a state that I have not been moved to restore Classic Shell so far.
While the Start Menu settings used to be in the same place as those for the taskbar, they are found now in the new Settings tool. Some are in the Personalisation section, and it has its own Start subsection for setting full screen mode or highlighting of new apps, among other things. The equivalent Colours subsection is where you find other settings like assigning background colours based on those in a desktop background image, which itself is assigned in it own subsection in the Personalisation area.
Virtual Desktops
Initially, I failed to see the point in how Microsoft implemented these and favoured VirtuaWin instead. My main complaint was the taskbar showed buttons for all open apps regardless of the screen in which they are opened. However, that was changed, so your taskbar shows different buttons for each virtual desktop, just like the way that Linux and UNIX do things. Switching between desktops may not be as smooth as those yet, but the default setting is a move in the right direction, and you can change it if you like.
Cortana
Though this was presented to the world as a voice operated personal assistant like Apple's Siri, I cannot say that I am keen on such things, so I decided to work as I usually do instead. Keyboard interaction works fine, and I have neutered things to leave off web searches on Bing to use the thing much in the same way as the search box on the Windows 7 Start Menu. While it may be able to do more than that, I am more than happy to keep my workflow unchanged for now. Cortana's settings are available via its pop-up menu. Collapsing the search box to an icon to save space for your pinned and open applications is available from the Search section of the taskbar context menu (right-clicking the taskbar produces this).
Settings
In Windows 8.x, the Control Panel was not the only area for settings but remained feature complete. However, the same is not the case for Windows 10 where the new Settings panel is starting to take over from it. Though the two co-exist for now, it seems clear that Settings is where everything is headed.
Though the Personalisation section of the tool has been mentioned in relation to the Start Menu, there are plenty of others. For instance, the Privacy one is one that definitely needs reviewing, and I found myself changing a lot of the default settings in there. Naturally, there are some other sections in Settings that hardly need any attention from most of us and these include Ease of Access (accessibility), Time & language, Devices and Network & Internet. The System section has a few settings like tablet mode that may need review, while the Update & security one has backup and recovery subsections that may be of interest. The latter of these is where you find the tools for refreshing the state of the system following instability or returning to a previous Windows version (7 or 8.x) within thirty days of the upgrade.
Migrating to Windows 10
10th August 2015While I have had preview builds of Windows 10 in various virtual machines for the most of twelve months, actually upgrading physical and virtual devices that you use for more critical work is a very different matter. Also, Windows 10 is set to be a rolling release with enhancements coming on an occasional basis, so I would like to see what comes before it hits the actual machines that I need to use. That means that a VirtualBox instance of the preview build is being retained to see what happens to that over time.
While some might call it incautious, I have taken the plunge and completely moved from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. The first machine that I upgraded was more expendable, and success with that encouraged me to move onto others before even including a Windows 7 machine to see how that went. The 30-day restoration period allows an added degree of comfort when doing all this. The list of machines that I upgraded were a VMware VM with 32-bit Windows 8.1 Pro (itself part of a 32-bit upgrade cascade involving Windows 7 Home and Windows 8 Pro), a VirtualBox VM with 64-bit Windows 8.1, a physical PC that dual booted Linux Mint 17.2 and 64-bit Windows 8.1 and an HP Pavilion dm4 laptop (Intel Core i3 with 8 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSHD) with Windows 7.
The main issue that I uncovered with the virtual machines is that the Windows 10 update tool that is downloaded onto Windows 7 and 8.x does not accept the graphics capability on there. This is a bug because the functionality works fine on the Windows Insider builds. The solution was to download the appropriate Windows 10 ISO image for use in the ensuing upgrade. There are 32-bit and 64-bit disk images with Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro installation files on each. My own actions used both disk images.
During the virtual machine upgrades, most of the applications that considered important were carried over from Windows 8.1 to Windows without a bother. Anyone would expect Microsoft's own software like Word, Excel and others to make the transition, but others like Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom made it too, as did Mozilla's Firefox, albeit requiring a trip to Settings to set it as the default option for opening web pages. Less well-known desktop applications like Zinio (digital magazines) or Mapyx Quo (maps for cycling, walking and the like) were the same. Classic Shell was an exception but the Windows 10 Start Menu suffices for now anyway. Also, there was a need to reinstate Bitdefender Antivirus Plus using its new Windows 10 compatible installation file. Still, the experience was a big change from the way things used to be in the days when you used to have to reinstall nearly all your software following a Windows upgrade.
The Windows 10 update tool worked well for the Windows 8.1 PC, so no installation disks were needed. Neither was the bootloader overwritten so the Windows option needed selecting from GRUB every time there was a system reboot as part of the installation process, a temporary nuisance that was tolerated since booting into Linux Mint was preserved. Again, no critical software was lost in the process apart from Kaspersky Internet Security, which needed the Windows 10 compatible version installed, much like Bitdefender, or Epson scanning software that I found was easy to reinstall anyway. Usefully, Anquet's Outdoor Map Navigator (again used for working with walking and cycling maps) continued to function properly after the changeover.
For the Windows 7 laptop, it was much the same story, albeit with the upgrade being delivered using Windows Update. Then, the main Windows account could be connected to my Outlook account to get everything tied up with the other machines for the first time. Before the obligatory change of background picture, the browns in the one that I was using were causing interface items to appear in red, not exactly my favourite colour for application menus and the like. Now they are in blue, and all the upheaval surrounding the operating system upgrade had no effect on the Dropbox or Kaspersky installations that I had in place before it all started. If there is any irritation, it is that unpinning of application tiles from the Start Menu or turning off live tiles is not always as instantaneous as I would have liked, and that is all done now anyway.
While writing the above, I could not help thinking that more observations on Windows 10 may follow, but these will do for now. Microsoft had to get this upgrade process right, and it does appear that they have, so credit is due to them for that. So far, I have Windows 10 to be stable and will be seeing how things develop from here, especially when those new features arrive occasionally as is the promise that has been made to us users. Hopefully, that will be as painless as it needs to be to ensure trust is retained.
Migrating a virtual machine from VirtualBox to VMware Player on Linux
1st February 2015The progress of Windows 10 is something that I have been watching. Early signs have been promising, and the most recent live event certainly contained its share of excitement. The subsequent build that was released was another step in the journey, though the new Start Menu appears more of a work in progress than it did in previous builds. Keeping up with these advances sometimes steps ahead of VirtualBox support for them, and I discovered that again in the last few days. VMware Player seems unaffected, so I thought that I'd try a migration of the VirtualBox VM with Windows 10 onto there. In the past, I did something similar with a 32-bit instance of Windows 7 that subsequently got upgraded all the way up to 8.1, but that may not have been as slick as the latest effort, so I thought that I would share it here.
The first step was to export the virtual machine as an OVF appliance, and I used File > Export Appliance... only to make a foolish choice regarding the version of OVF. The one that I picked was 2.0 only to subsequently discover that 1.0 was the better option. The equivalent command line would look like the following (there are two dashes before the ovf10 option below):
VboxManage export [name of VM] -o [name of file].ova --ovf10
VMware has a tool for extracting virtual machines from OVF files that will generate a set of files that will work with Player and other similar products of theirs. It goes under the unsurprising name of OVF Tool and usefully works from a command line session. When I first tried it with an OVF 2.0 files, I got the following error, and it stopped doing anything as a result:
Line 2: Incorrect namespace http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/2 found.
The only solution was to create a version 1.0 file and use a command like the following:
ovftool --lax [name of file].ova [directory location of VM files]/[name of file].vmx
The --lax option is needed to ensure successful execution, even with an OVF 1.0 file as the input. Once I had done this on my Ubuntu GNOME system, the virtual machine could be opened up on VMware Player and I could use the latest build of Windows 10 at full screen, something that was not possible with VirtualBox. This may be how I survey the various builds of the operating that appear before its final edition is launched later this year.
Sorting a stalled Windows Update service
30th January 2015Following a recent family death, I have ended up with the laptop belonging to the deceased and, since it has been offline most of its life, I set to getting it updated. The McAfee security suite was straightforward enough but trying Windows Update produced errors suggesting that it was not working and that a system restart was needed. Doing that did nothing, so a little further investigation was needed.
The solution turned out to be stopping the Windows Update service and clearing a certain folder before starting it again. To stop the service, I typed in services.msc into the search box on the Start Menu and clicked on the entry that appeared, which was called Services. Then I sought out the Windows Update entry, selected it and clicked on the Stop link on the left-hand side. After that, I used Windows Explorer to navigate C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and deleted everything in there. The, I went back to the Services window and started Windows Update again. That sorted the problem and the system began to be updated as needed.
All of this was on Windows 7, hence the mention of the Start Menu, and the machine is a Toshiba Satellite C660 from 2011 with an AMD E-300 APU, 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. Those specs may not be the most impressive, but it feels spritely enough and is far better than the lethargic Toshiba Equium A200-1VO that I acquired in 2008, though the HP Pavilion dm4 that I bought in November 2011 probably will travel more often than either of these if truth be told. After all, it now has 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB Samsung SSHD along with its Core i3 CPU, so it should serve me for a while yet.
Initial impressions of Windows 10
31st October 2014Being ever curious on the technology front, the release of the first build of a Technical Preview of Windows 10 was enough to get me having a look at what was on offer. The furore regarding Windows 8.x added to the interest, so I went to the download page to get a 64-bit installation ISO image.
That got installed into a fresh VirtualBox virtual machine and the process worked smoothly to give something not so far removed from Windows 8.1. However, it took until release 4.3.18 of VirtualBox before the Guest additions had caught up with the Windows prototype, so I signed up for the Windows Insider program and got a 64-bit ISO image to install the Enterprise preview of Windows 10 into a VMware virtual machine since and that supported full screen display of the preview while VirtualBox caught up with it.
Of course, the most obvious development was the return of the Start Menu, and it works exactly as expected too. Initially, the apparent lack of an easy way to disable App panels had me going to Classic Shell for an acceptable Start Menu. It was only later that it dawned on me that unpinning these panels would deliver to me the undistracting result that I wanted.
Another feature that attracted my interest is the new virtual desktop functionality. Here I was expecting something like what I have used on Linux and UNIX. There, each workspace is a distinct desktop, with only the applications open in a given workspace showing on a panel in there. Windows does not work that way with all applications visible on the taskbar regardless of what workspace they occupy, which causes clutter. Another deficiency is not having a desktop indicator on the taskbar instead of the Task View button. On Windows 7 and 8.x, I have been a user of VirtuaWin and this still works largely in the way that I expect of it too, except for any application windows that have some persistence associated with them; the Task Manager is an example and I include some security software in the same category too.
Even so, here are some keyboard shortcuts for anyone who wants to take advantage of the Windows 10 virtual desktop feature:
- Create a new desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + D
- Switch to previous desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + Left arrow
- Switch to next desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + Right arrow
Otherwise, stability is excellent for a preview of a version of Windows that is early on its road to final release. An upgrade to a whole new build went smoothly when initiated following a prompt from the operating system itself. All installed applications were retained, and a new taskbar button for notifications made its appearance alongside the existing Action Centre icon. So far, I am unsure what this does and whether the Action Centre button will be replaced in the fullness of time, yet I am happy to await where things go with this.
All is polished up to now, and there is nothing to suggest that Windows 10 will not be to 8.x what 7 was to Vista. The Start Screen has been dispatched after what has proved to be a misadventure for Microsoft. Regardless of what was hyped a few years ago, the PC still is with us; touchscreen devices like tablets are augmenting it instead of replacing it for any tasks involving some sort of creation. If anything, we have seen the PC evolve with laptops perhaps becoming more like the Surface Pro, at least when it comes to hybrid devices. However, we are not as happy to smudge our PC screens quite like those on phones and tablets, so a return to a more keyboard and mouse centred approach for some devices is welcome.
What I have here are just a few observations; there are more elsewhere, including a useful article by Ed Bott on ZDNet. All in all, we are early in the process for Windows 10 and, though it looks favourable so far, I will continue to keep an eye on how it progresses. The need to be less experimental than Windows 8.x is being fulfilled: so far, it certainly is less schizophrenic and should not be a major jump for users of Windows 7.
A reappraisal of Windows 8 and 8.1 licensing
15th November 2013With the release of Windows 8 around this time last year, I thought that the full retail version that some of us got for fresh installations on PC's, real or virtual, had become a thing of the past. In fact, it did seem that every respecting technology news website and magazine was saying just that. The release that you would buy from Microsoft or from mainstream computer stores was labelled as an upgrade. That made it look as if you needed the OEM or System Builder edition for those PC's that needed a new Windows installation, and that the licence that you bought was then attached to the machine from when it got installed on there.
As is usual with Microsoft, the situation is less clear-cut than that. For instance, there was some back-pedalling to allow OEM editions of Windows to be licensed for personal use on real or virtual PC's. With Windows 7 and its predecessors, it even was possible to be able to install afresh on a PC without Windows by first installing on inactivated copy on there and then upgrading that as if it were a previous version of Windows. Of course, an actual licence was of the previous version of Windows was needed for full compliance, if not the actual installation. At times, Microsoft muddies waters to keep its support costs down.
Even with Microsoft's track record in mind, it still surprised me when I noticed that Amazon was selling what appeared to be full versions of both Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Pro. Having set up a 64-bit VirtualBox virtual machine for Windows 8.1, I got to discover the same for software purchased from the Microsoft website. However, unlike the DVD versions, you do need an active Windows installation if you fancy a same day installation of the downloaded software. For those without Windows on a machine, this can be as simple as downloading either the 32-bit or the 64-bit 90-day evaluation editions of Windows 8.1 Enterprise and using that as a springboard for the next steps. Though this not only be an actual in-situ installation, there are options to create an ISO or USB image of the installation disk for later installation.
In my case, I created a 64-bit ISO image and used that to reboot the virtual machine that had Windows 8.1 Enterprise on there before continuing with the installation. By all appearances, there seemed to be little need for a pre-existing Windows instance for it to work, so it looks as if upgrades have fallen by the wayside and only full editions of Windows 8.1 are available now. The OEM version saves money so long as you are happy to stick with just one machine, and most users probably will do that. As for the portability of the full retail version, that is not something that I have tested, so I am unsure that I will go beyond what I have done already.
My main machine has seen a change of motherboard, CPU and memory, so it could have deactivated a pre-existing Windows licence. However, I run Linux as my main operating system and, apart possibly from one surmountable hiccup, this proves surprisingly resilient in the face of such major system changes. For running Windows, I turn to virtual machines and there were no messages about licence activation during the changeover either. Microsoft is anything but confiding when it comes to declaring what hardware changes inactivate a licence. Changing a virtual machine from VirtualBox to VMware or vice versa definitely does it, so I tend to avoid doing that. One item that is fundamental to either a virtual or a real PC is the motherboard, and I have seen suggestions that this is the critical component for Windows licence activation, which would make sense if that was the case.
However, this rule is not hard and fast either, since there appears to be room for manoeuvre should your PC break. It might be worth calling Microsoft after a motherboard replacement to see if they can help you, and I have noticed that it is. All in all, Microsoft often makes what appear to be simple rules only to override them when faced with what happens in the real world. Is that why they can be unclear about some matters at times? Do they still hanker after how they want things to be, even when they are impossible to keep like that?
A look at Windows 8.1
4th July 2013Last week, Microsoft released a preview of Windows 8.1 and some hailed the return of the Start button, yet the reality is not as simple as that. Being a Linux user, I am left wondering if ideas have been borrowed from GNOME Shell instead of putting back the Start Menu like it was in Windows 7. What we have got is a smoothing of the interface that is there for those who like to tweak settings and not available by default. GNOME Shell has been controversial too, so borrowing from it is not an uncontentious move, even if there are people like me who are at home with that kind of interface.
What you get now is more configuration options to go with the new Start button. While right-clicking on the latter does get you a menu, this is no Start Menu like we had before. Instead, we get a settings menu with a "Shut down" entry. That's better than before, which might be saying something about what was done in Windows 8, and it produces a sub-menu with options of shutting down or restarting your PC as well as putting it to sleep. Otherwise, it is a place for accessing system configuration items and not your more usual software, not a bad thing, but it's best to be clear about these things. Holding down the Windows key and pressing X will pop up the same menu if you prefer keyboard shortcuts, and I have a soft spot for them too.
The real power is to be discovered when you right-click on the task bar and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Within the dialogue box that appears, there is the Navigation tab that contains a whole plethora of interesting options. Corner navigation can be scaled back to remove the options of switching between applications in the upper-left corner or getting what is called the Charms menu from the upper-right corner. Things get interesting in the Start Screen section. This where you tell Windows to boot to the desktop instead of the Start Screen and adjust what the Start button gives you. For instance, you can make it use your desktop background and display the Start Screen Apps View. Both of these make the new Start interface less intrusive and make the Apps View feel not unlike the way GNOME Shell overlays your screen when you hit the Activities button or hover over the upper-left corner of the desktop.
It all seems rather more like a series of little concessions, and not the restoration that some (many?) would prefer. Classic Shell still works for all those seeking an actual Start Menu and even replaces the restored Microsoft Start button too. So, if the new improvements aren't enough for you, you still can take matters into your own hands until you start to take advantage of what's new in 8.1.
Apart from the refusal to give us back a Windows 7 style desktop experience, we now have a touchscreen keyboard button added to the taskbar. So far, it always appears there even when I try turning it off. For me, that's a bug, so it's something that I'd like to see fixed before the final release.
All in all, Windows 8.1 feels more polished than Windows 8 was and will be a free update when the production version is released. My explorations have taken place within a separate VMware virtual machine because updating a Windows 8 installation to the 8.1 preview is forcing a complete re-installation on yourself later on. Though there are talks about Windows 9 now, I am left wondering if going for point releases like 8.2, 8.3, etc. might be a better strategy for Microsoft. It still looks as if Windows 8 could do with continual polishing before it gets more acceptable to users. 8.1 is a step forward, and more like it may be needed yet.
Upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in a VMWare Virtual Machine
1st November 2012Though my main home PC runs Linux Mint, I do like to have the facility to use Windows software occasionally, and virtualisation has allowed me to continue doing that. For a good while, it was a Windows 7 guest within a VirtualBox virtual machine and, before that, one running Windows XP fulfilled the same role. However, it did feel as if things were running slower in VirtualBox than once might have been the case, so I jumped ship to VMware Player. While it may be proprietary and closed source, it is free of charge and has been doing what was needed. A subsequent recent upgrade of a video driver on the host operating system allowed the enabling of a better graphical environment in the Windows 7 guest.
Instability
However, there were issues with stability and I lost the ability to flit from the VM window to the Linux desktop at will, with the system freezing on me and needing a reboot. Working in Windows 7 using full screen mode avoided this, yet it did feel as I was constrained to working on a Windows-only machine whenever I did so. The graphics performance was imperfect too, with screening refreshing being very blocky with some momentary scrambling whenever I opened the Start menu. Others would not have been as patient with that as I was, though there was the matter of an expensive Photoshop licence to be guarded too.
In hindsight, a bit of pruning could have helped. An example would have been driver housekeeping in the form of removing VirtualBox Guest Additions because they could have been conflicting with their VMware counterparts. For some reason, those thoughts entered my mind to make me consider another, more expensive option instead.
Considering NAS & Windows/Linux Networking
That would have taken the form of setting aside a PC for running Windows 7 and having a NAS for sharing files between it and my Linux system. In fact, I did get to exploring what a four bay QNAP TS-412 would offer me and realised that you cannot put normal desktop hard drives into devices like that. For a while, it looked as if it would be a matter of getting drives bundled with the device or acquiring enterprise grade disks to main the required continuity of operation. The final edition of PC Plus highlighted another one, though: the Western Digital Red Pro range. These are part way been desktop and enterprise classifications and have been developed in association with NAS makers too.
While looking at the NAS option certainly became an education, it has exited any sort of wish list that I have. After all, it is the cost of such a setup that gets me asking if I really need such a thing. While the purchase of a Netgear FS 605 Ethernet switch would have helped incorporate it, there has been no trouble sorting alternative uses for that device since it bumps up the number of networked devices that I can have, never a bad capability to have. As I was to find, there was a less expensive alternative that would become sufficient for my needs.
In-situ Windows 8 Upgrade
Microsoft has been making available evaluation copies of Windows 8 Enterprise that last for 90 days before expiring. One is in my hands has been running faultlessly in a VMware virtual machine for the past few weeks. That made me wonder if upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 help with my main Windows VM problems. Being a curious risk-taking type I decided to answer the question for myself using the £24.99 Windows Pro upgrade offer that Microsoft have been running for those not needing a disk up front; they need to pay £49.99 while you can get one afterwards for an extra £12.99 and £3.49 postage if you wish, a slightly cheaper option. Though there also was a time cost in that it occupied a lot of a weekend for me, it seems to have done what was needed, so it was worth the outlay.
Given the element of risk, Photoshop was deactivated to be on the safe side. That wasn't the only pre-upgrade action that was needed because the Windows 8 Pro 32-bit upgrade needs at least 16 GB before it will proceed. Of course, there was the matter of downloading the installer from the Microsoft website too. This took care of system evaluation and paying for the software, as well as the actual upgrade itself.
The installation took a few hours, with virtual machine reboots along the way. Naturally, the licence key was needed too, as well as the selection of a few options, though there weren't many of these. Being able to carry over settings from the pre-existing Windows 7 instance certainly helped with this and with making the process smoother too. No software needed reinstatement, and it doesn't feel as if the system has forgotten very much at all, a successful outcome.
Post-upgrade Actions
Just because I had a working Windows 8 instance didn't mean that there wasn't more to be done. In fact, it was the post-upgrade sorting that took up more time than the actual installation. For one thing, my digital mapping software wouldn't work without .Net Framework 3.5 and turning on the operating system feature from the Control Panel fell over at the point where it was being downloaded from the Microsoft Update website. Even removing Avira Internet Security after updating it to the latest version had no effect, and that was a finding during the Windows 8 system evaluation process. The solution was to mount the Windows 8 Enterprise ISO installation image that I had and issue the following command from a command prompt running with administrative privileges:
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /Source:d:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess
For sake of assurance regarding compatibility, Avira has been replaced with Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security. The Avira licence won't go to waste, since I have another home in mind for it. Removing Avira without crashing Windows 8 proved impossible, though, and necessitating booting Windows 8 into Safe Mode. Because of much faster startup times, that cannot be achieved with a key press at the appropriate moment because the time window is too short now. One solution is to set the Safe Boot tick box in the Boot tab of MSCONFIG (or System Configuration, as it otherwise calls itself) before the machine is restarted. While there may be others, this was the one that I used. With Avira removed, clearing the same setting and rebooting restored normal service.
Dealing with a Dual Personality
One observer has stated that Windows 8 gives you two operating systems for the price of one: the one on the Start screen and the one on the desktop. Having got to wanting to work with one at a time, I decided to make some adjustments. Adding Classic Shell got me back a Start menu, and I omitted the Windows Explorer (or File Explorer as it is known in Windows 8) and Internet Explorer components. Though Classic Shell will present a desktop like what we have been getting from Windows 7 by sweeping the Start screen out of the way for you, I found that this wasn't quick enough for my liking, so I added Skip Metro Suite to speed up things. Though the tool does more than sweeping the Start screen out of the way, I have switched off these functions. Classic Shell also has been configured, so the Start screen can be accessed with a press of the Windows key. It has updated too so that boot into the desktop should be faster now. As for me, I'll leave things as they are for now. Even the possibility of using Windows' own functionality to go directly to the traditional desktop will be left untested while things are left to settle. Tinkering can need a break.
Outcome
After all that effort, I now have a seemingly more stable Windows virtual machine running Windows 8. Flitting between it and other Linux desktop applications has not caused a system freeze so far, and that was the result that I wanted. There now is no need to consider having separate Windows and Linux PC's with a NAS for sharing files between them, so that option is well off my wish-list. There are better uses for my money.
Not everyone has had my experience, though, because I saw a report that one user failed to update a physical machine to Windows 8 and installed Ubuntu instead; they were a Linux user anyway, even if they used Fedora more than Ubuntu. It is possible to roll back from Windows 8 to the previous version of Windows because there is a windows.old directory left primarily for that purpose. However, that may not help you if you have a partially operating system that doesn't allow you to do just that. In time, I'll remove it using the Disk Clean-up utility by asking it to remove previous Windows installations or running File Explorer with administrator privileges. Somehow, the former approach sounds the safer.
What About Installing Afresh?
While there was a time when I went solely for upgrades when moving from one version of Windows to the next, the annoyance of the process got to me. If I had known that installing the upgrade twice onto a computer with a clean disk would suffice, it would have saved me a lot. Staring from Windows 95 (from the days when you got a full installation disk with a PC and not the rescue media that we get now) and moving through a sequence of successors not only was time-consuming, but it also revealed the limitations of the first in the series when it came to supporting more recent hardware. It was enough to have me buying the full retailed editions of Windows XP and Windows 7 when they were released; the latter got downloaded directly from Microsoft. While these were retail versions that you could move from one computer to another, Windows 8 will not be like that. In fact, you will need to get its System Builder edition from a reseller and that can only be used on one machine. It is the merging of the former retail and OEM product offerings.
What I have been reading is that the market for full retail versions of Windows was not a big one anyway. However, it was how I used to work as you have read above, and it does give you a fresh system. Most probably get Windows with a new PC and don't go building them from scratch like I have done for more than a decade. Maybe the System Builder version would apply to me anyway, and it appears to be intended for virtual machine use as well as on physical ones. More care will be needed with those licences by the looks of things, and I wonder what needs not to be changed so as not to invalidate a licence. After all, making a mistake might cost between £75 and £120 depending on the edition.
Final Thoughts
So far, Windows 8 is treating me well, and I have managed to bend to my will too, always a good thing to be able to say. In time, it might be that a System Builder copy could need buying yet, but I'll leave well alone for now. Though I needed new security software, the upgrade still saved me money over a hardware solution to my home computing needs and I have a backup disk on order from Microsoft too. That I have had to spend some time settling things was a means of learning new things for me but others may not be so patient and, with Windows 7 working well enough for most, you have to ask if it's only curious folk like me who are taking the plunge. Still, the dramatic change has re-energised the PC world in an era when smartphones and tablets have made so much of the running recently. That too is no bad thing because an unchanging technology is one that dies and there are times when significant changes are needed, as much as they upset some folk. For Microsoft, this looks like one of them, and it'll be interesting to see where things go from here for PC technology.