Technology Tales

Quickly changing between virtual desktops in Windows 10

One of the benefits of running Linux is the availability of virtual desktops, and installing VirtuaWin was the only way to get the same functionality on Windows before the launch of Windows 10. For reasons known to Microsoft, they decided against the same sort of implementation as seen in Linux or UNIX. Instead, they put the virtual desktop functionality a click away and rather hides it from most users unless they know what clicking on the Task View button allows. The approach also made switching between desktops slower with a mouse. However, there are keyboard shortcuts that address this once multiple virtual desktops exist.

Using WIN + CTRL + LEFT or WIN + CTRL + RIGHT does this easily once you have mastered the action. Depending on your keyboard setup, WIN is the Windows, Super or Command key while CTRL is the Control key. Then, LEFT is the left arrow key and RIGHT is the right arrow key. For machines with smaller screens where multitasking causes clutter, virtual desktops are a godsend for organising how you work, and having quick key combinations for switching between them adds to their utility.

Pondering travel device consolidation using an Apple iPad Pro 12.9"

It was a change of job in 2010 that got me interested in using devices with internet connectivity on the go. Until then, the attraction of smartphones had not been strong, but I got myself a Blackberry on a pay as you go contract, but the entry device was painfully slow, and the connectivity was 2G. It was a very sluggish start.

It was supplemented by an Asus Eee PC that I connected to the internet using broadband dongles and a Wi-Fi hub. This cumbersome arrangement did not work well on short journeys, and the variability of mobile network reception even meant that longer journeys were not all that successful either. Usage in hotels and guest houses though went better and that has meant that the miniature laptop came with me on many a journey.

In time, I moved away from broadband dongles to using smartphones as Wi-Fi hubs and that largely is how I work with laptops and tablets away from home unless there is hotel Wi-Fi available. Even trips overseas have seen me operate in much the same manner.

One feature is that we seem to carry quite a number of different gadgets with us at a time, which can cause inconvenience when going through airport security since they want to screen each device separately. When you are carrying a laptop, a tablet, a phone and a camera, it does take time to organise yourself, and you can meet impatient staff, as I found recently when returning from Oslo. Since checking in whatever you can as hold luggage helps to get around at least some of the nuisance, it also might be time for the use of better machinery to cut down on having to screen everything separately.

When you come away after an embarrassing episode, as I once did, the attractions of consolidating devices start to become plain. In fact, most probably could get with having just their phone. It is when you take activities like photography more seriously than the gadget count increases. After all, the main reason a laptop comes on trips beyond Britain and Ireland at all is to back up photos from my camera in case an SD card fails.

Parking that thought for a while, let's go back to March this year, when temptation overcame what should have been a period of personal restraint. The result was that a 32 GB 12.9" Apple iPad Pro came into my possession along with an Apple Pencil and a Logitech CREATE Backlit Keyboard Case. It should have done so, but the size of the screen did not strike me until I got it home from the Apple Store. That was one of the main attractions because maps can be shown with a greater field of view in a variety of apps, a big selling point for a hiker with a liking for maps, who wants more than what is on offer from Apple, Google or even Bing. The precision of the Pencil is another boon that makes surfing the website so much easier, and the solid connection between the case and the iPad means that keyboard usage is less fiddly than it would if it used Bluetooth. Having tried them with the BBC iPlayer app, I can confirm that the sound from the speakers is better than any other mobile device that I have used.

Already, it has come with me on trips around England and Scotland. These weekend trips saw me leave the Asus Eee PC stay at home when it normally might have come with me, and taking just a single device along with a camera or two had its uses too. While the screen is large for reading on a train, I find that it works just as well so long as you have enough space. Otherwise, combining use of a suite of apps with recourse to the web does much of the information seeking needed while on a trip away, which meant that I was not found wanting. Battery life is good too, which helps.

Those trips allowed for a little light hotel room blog post editing too and the iPad Pro did what was needed, though the ergonomics of reaching for the screen with the Pencil meant that my arm was held aloft more than was ideal. Another thing that raised questions in my mind is the appearance of word suggestions at the bottom of the screen as if this were a mobile phone, given that I wondered if these were more of a hindrance than a help given that I just fancied typing and not pointing at the screen to complete words. Though copying and pasting works too, I have found the screen-based version a little clunky. Thus, I must see if the keyboard one works just as well, though the keyboard set up is typical of a Mac and that affects word selection. You need to use the OPTION key in the keyboard shortcut that you use for this and not COMMAND or CONTROL as you might do on a PC.

Even with these eccentricities, I was left wondering if it had any utility when it came to backing up photos from digital cameras, and there is an SD card adapter that makes this possible. A failure of foresight on my part meant that the 32 GB capacity now is an obvious limitation, but I think I might have hit on a possible solution that does not need to upload to an iCloud account. It involves clearing off the photos onto a 128 GB Transcend JetDrive Go 300 so they do not clog up the iPad Pro's storage. That the device has both Lightning and USB connectivity means that you can plug it into a laptop or desktop PC afterwards too. If that were to work as I would hope, then the laptop/tablet combination that I have been using for all overseas trips could be replaced to allow a weight reduction as well as cutting the hassle at airport security.

Trips to Ireland still may see my sticking with a tried and tested combination though because I often have needed to do some printing while over there. While I have been able to print a test document from an iPad Mini on my home network-connected printer, not every model supports this and that for NFC or Air Print is not universal either. If this were not an obstacle, apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote could have their uses for business-related work and there are web-based offerings from Google, Microsoft and others too.

In conclusion, I have found that my iPad Pro does so much of what I need on a trip away that retiring the laptop/tablet combination for most of these is not as outrageous as it once would have seemed. In some ways, iOS has a way to go yet, before it could take over from macOS, yet it remains in development so it will be interesting to see what happens next. All the while, hybrid devices running Windows 10 are becoming more pervasive, so that might provide Apple with the encouragement that it needs.

Dealing with an "Your insider preview build settings need attention" message in Windows 10 Settings

Having now upgraded all my Windows 10 machines to the Anniversary Update edition without much in the way of upheaval, I came across the following message on one of them:

Your insider preview build settings need attention. Go to Windows Insider Programme to fix this.

It appeared on the Update screen of the Settings application, and I believe that I may have triggered it by letting foolish curiosity take me to the Windows Insider Programme screen. Returning there offered no way of resolving the issue, so I had to try the registry editing tip that I discovered elsewhere on the web. Naturally, the creation of a System Restore Point before proceeding with changes to the Windows Registry is advised.

Typing REGEDIT into Cortana brings up a clickable link to the Registry Editor. Having clicked on this, I then clicked on the Yes button on the ensuing dialogue box that Windows 10 throws up every time you make a system change, such as installing new software. With the Registry Editor opened, I made my way to the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsSelfHost\UI\Strings

Once there, I deleted every entry that mentioned "Insider" or "Windows Insider" to leave only two afterwards: "(Default)", "UnknownErrorDialogValues". That resolved the issue, and I now intend to stay away from the Windows Insider Programme screen in Settings so that the message never appears again.

Resolving Windows Update Error 0x80244019 on Windows 10

In 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

Now 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

While 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.

Initial impressions of Windows 10

Being 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.

Changing file timestamps using Windows PowerShell

Recently, a timestamp got changed on an otherwise unaltered file on me and I needed to change it back. Luckily, I found an answer on the web that used PowerShell to do what I needed, and I am recording it here for future reference. The possible commands are below:

$(Get-Item temp.txt).creationtime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")
$(Get-Item temp.txt).lastwritetime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")
$(Get-Item temp.txt).lastaccesstime=$(Get-Date "27/10/2014 04:20 pm")

The first of these did not interest me, since I wanted to leave the file creation date as it was. The last write and access times were another matter because these needed altering. The Get-Item commandlet brings up the file, so its properties can be set. Here, these include creationtime, lastwritetime and lastaccesstime. The Get-Date commandlet reads in the provided date and time for use in the timestamp assignment. While PowerShell itself is case-insensitive, I have opted to show the camel case that is produced when you are tabbing through command options for the sake of clarity.

The Get-Item and Get-Date have aliases of gi and gd, respectively, and the Get-Alias commandlet will show you a full list while Get-Command (gcm) gives you a list of commandlets. Issuing the following gets you a formatted list that is sent to a text file:

gcm | Format-List > temp2.txt

There is some online help, but it is not quite as helpful as it ought to be, so I have popped over to Microsoft Learn whenever I needed extra enlightenment. Here is a command that pops the full thing into a text file:

Get-Help Format-List -full > temp3.txt

In fact, getting a book might be the best way to find your way around PowerShell because of all its commandlets and available objects.

For now, other commands that I have found useful include the following:

Get-Service | Format-List
New-Item -Name test.txt -ItemType "file"

The first of these gets you a list of services, while the second creates a new blank text file for you, and it can create new folders for you too. Other useful commandlets are below:

Get-Location (gl)
Set-Location (sl)
Copy-Item
Remove-Item
Move-Item
Rename-Item

The first of the above is like the cwd or pwd commands that you may have seen elsewhere, in that the current directory location is given. Then, the second will change your directory location for you. After that, there are commandlets for copying, deleting, moving and renaming files. These also have aliases, so users of the legacy Windows command line or a UNIX or Linux shell can use something that is familiar to them.

Little fixes like the one with which I started this piece are all good to know, but it is in scripting that PowerShell really is said to show its uses. Having seen the usefulness of such things in the world on Linux and UNIX, I cannot disagree with that, and PowerShell has its own IDE too. That may be just as well, given how much there is to learn. That especially is the case when you might need to issue the following command in a PowerShell session opened using the Run as Administrator option just to get the execution as you need it:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Issuing Get-ExecutionPolicy will show you if this is needed when the response is: Restricted. A response of RemoteSigned shows you that all is in order, though you need to check that any script you then run has no nasty payload in there, which is why execution is restrictive in the first place. This sort of thing is yet another lesson to be learnt with PowerShell.

A reappraisal of Windows 8 and 8.1 licensing

With 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

Last 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.