Speed up Windows RT with a simple registry edit

http://gizmodo.com/5975689/eliminate-touchscreen-lag-from-the-surface-with-this-tiny-hack

Samsung Series 7 ultra – refresh

Samsung Series 7 Ultra has been refreshed with 8hr battery, up to 16gb ram, 4g connectivity, discrete AMD Radeon gfx card and 256gb ssd. I know what i'm going to get when it comes out.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/01/samsung-series-7-ultra/

Matt

Windows 8 Professional Upgrade cost to be $40US

Am not sure what the AUD price will be, however this is pretty competitively priced and pretty groovy in that you can upgrade from any version of Windows XP and up. (hardware supporting)

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/02/upgrade-to-windows-8-pro-for-39-99.aspx

Microsoft Windows 8 Surface ‘Tablet’ announced

Microsoft have just announced the release of their forthcoming ‘Surface’ tablet in ARM and X86 forms.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/microsoft-major-announcement-livelog/

Looks pretty groovy.

Cydia Apps I use on my ‘Jail Broken’ iPad

• cydelete - Allows Cydia apps to be deleted, via wiggle mode, like any other app ★★★★★
• dospad - run dos applications on your iPad ★★
• mame4all – M.A.M.E game emulator - just need to load some roms ★★★★★
• quake 3 arena HD - quake for the iPad - comes with freeware .pak file, but can load full files ★★
• truprint (Paid App) - print to almost any network attached print ★★★★★
• activator - allows multiple gestures to be set to active features ★★
• folderenhancer (paid app) - allows unlimited items in a folder and folders within folders ★★★★★
• dreamboard (Custom themes) ★★★★
• sprintomize 2 (customise springboard) ★★★★
• SBSettings (customise springboard) ★★★★
• Winterboard (customise springboard and theming) ★★
• VLC Media Player - plays almost anything ★★★★★ (but i use GoodPlayer instead - from app store)
• Display Recorder (Paid App) - Allows recording of iPad sessions and remote access to iPad desktop ★★★★★
• xbackup - backup Cydia apps ★★★
• installous 4 - alternate installer to Cydia. ★★
• cydia (Installed as a part of the 'Jail Break') ★★★★★
• ifile (Paid App) - gives full access to the IOS file system ★★★★★
• BTStack - alternate blue tooth stack ★
• fullscreen for safari (alt source) - allows safari to be toggled full screen ★★★★★
• AirBlue Sharing (Paid App) - alternate Bluetooth stack. also adds fuctionality to pair with any device and file transfer. ★★★
• SplitMail - shows emails window and preview window when in portrait mode. ★★★★★
• OpenSSH - gives a nice SSH terminal ★★★
• FullForce (iPhone apps get scaled to full screen automatically – See RetinaPad!) ★★
• Barrell (Paid App) - themed effects for icons on the springboard ★★★
• KillBackGround - allows you to kill selected or all background apps ★★★★
• Wififofum - Wi-Fi sniffing and detection ★★★★
• UserAgent Faker - sends different user agents in browser ★★★★
• Gridlock (Paid app) - allows icons to be place anywhere on screen ★★★
• IntelliScreenX (iPhone app) - news, email, alerts, weather, feeds on desktop or lock-screen ★★★
• multiiconmover - allows multiple icons to be moved at once. ★★★★★
• RetinaPad (Paid App) - allows iPhone apps to be full-screened on iPad. excellent rendition and better than ‘fullforce’. ★★★★★
• OneByOne Safari – allows specific deletes of Safari and Search history instead of all at once. ★★★★

 

☆★

Windows 8 RC ‘To Go’. For real!?

So, as you all now know, there is a new Windows 8 release now available called ‘Release Preview’. I installed this on Friday night (1st June) and it is all running nicely. I also installed the ‘Release Candidate’ for Visual Studio 2012 ‘Ultimate’, however i will give my thoughts on that product another time.

On the surface, not a lot seems to have changed. Things are a little smother and snappier, there’s a few more items in the Windows Store and there’s a few breaking changes in the development API’s. Overall though, nothing standout. Unfortunately, the Windows ‘Personal Workspace Creator’ (pwcreator.exe) is still not there. 8(

PWCreator.exe is the wizard that will create a Windows 8 ‘To Go’ install on a compatible USB drive/stick.

I’ve been keen to try this functionality out, for real, for some time now. Unfortunately i just haven’t had the right hardware to do it. There are work arounds to this that approximate Windows 8 To Go features (see past posts), however i am not sure if this is really the same thing. Anyway, i now have some hardware that i think should really do it justice and I’m keen to try it out. The rest of this post is about how i got it working and my thoughts on the result.

Hardware requirements are pretty stringent, so i thought i would go all out. Recently I purchased a 250Gb SSD off Amazon, that i put in a nice 3rd party USB 3.0 external case, and thought this should be a good match. Here’s what I did.

1. Installed a VM for Windows 8 RP Update:(can also use Consumer Preview)
2. Copied over the PWCreator.exe (64bit) and associated files (you will need to get this from the developer preview)
3. Enabled the VM (VMPlayer) to see the USB drive
4. Update: Mount the ISO for Win8 Release Preview and copy the install.wim file from the sources directory to a location on your windows 8 vm.
5. Ran the PWCreator.exe wizard, selected the drive and said ‘go’!
6. Update: You may need to add a source location to point to the directory where you copied the install.wim file.
7. Followed my nose to create and select partitions on the drive

Now, this is pretty much all that is needed, however it took a number of hours to complete. I think this is because of the size of my SSD?. Anyway, i came back this morning and it was all completed and i was able to attach the drive and boot up off it. Update: I ran this again, using the same USB drive, but on a different computer and it only took 45 minutes to complete. Perhaps my other PC was a lot slower or had an issue.

After booting up on this image and running through the initial Windows 8 setup, i now have a really nice Windows 8 ‘Release Preview’ image, which seems to all work fine. This includes a ‘bitlocked’ drive that cannot be accessed when i try to mount the drive from a different OS. I’m not sure if this is what a Windows 8 To Go image will look like, and won’t until Windows 8 ships, however it looks pretty darned close to it. Update: I disconnected the drive by accident whilst running and upon the next reboot i got a nice little warning message to be careful about doing that. The interesting thing is the warning message mentioned my ‘Windows 8 To Go’ setup!

Awesome!

Windows 8 (To Go) bootable USB. “Putting it all together”

** Note / Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee any aspects of this post or damages you may do to your system from following any details, therein. These are simply my observations and what I have worked out to get Windows 8 running reasonably well off a USB drive in what i hope is a ‘similar’ way to the experience you will have with Windows 8 ‘to go’. If you want the ‘real’ experience, then you will need to wait for Windows 8 to ship and ensure that you purchase a supported USB drive!

On with the show..

Windows 8 has a great new feature called “Windows 8 To Go”. This allows you to install a fully functional copy of Windows 8 onto a USB drive and then boot it up on any x86 device. This is fantastic as it is not tied to running on a specific machine, is ‘bitlocked’ so the drive contents are secure and essentially, it allows you to run your personal or corporate Windows 8 image on any hardware you want. Whilst this sounds awesome to try out, there are quite a few gotchas currently.

• The ‘Personal Workspace Creator’ utility (PWC.exe) for creating one of these USB bootable drives is not in the latest version of Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It was in a previous version (Developer preview) but has now, currently, been excluded from the Win8 CP image. (I did find the PWC.exe out in the wild and it does ‘seem’ to run on Windows 8 CP though)
• The requirements for the USB stick that you can use are very strict. In fact, currently, there are only two USB drives available that are certified to work with Windows 8 To Go. *AND* The PWC.exe utility will check for these requirements and not run if these are not met. See my previous post on the two certified sticks available. The two USB bootable drives certified for Windows 8 to Go
• There have been some articles about using the Windows AIK toolkit utility, ‘imagex.exe’, to create USB bootable images. http://tweaks.com/windows/52279/how-to-create-a-windows-to-go-usb-drive/ Whilst these ‘seem’ to work ok, the resultant installed version of windows 8 is slightly crippled. This is because the ‘removable drive’ bit is set to being on on almost all USB drives. Windows 8 detects this and then locks out functionality around running Windows Update, The Windows Store and Setting up Windows to use a Live ID to logon. Not ideal!

So what can be done?

I found an excellent post by Bennett Adelson on how to get around this http://bennettadelson.wordpress.com/tag/windows-8-to-go/. In summary, you create a ‘Virtual Disk’ of type ‘Fixed’ on the USB drive and then edit the boot info of the USB to load the VHD. You then install Windows 8, using the ‘imagex.exe’ process that others have used and the result is you have Windows 8 booting off a USB key and fully functional!

There are some very important points here:

• Follow Bennett’s instructions to the letter!
• Make sure you do this on a pre-installed copy of Windows 8 running on your machine or in a virtual machine.
• This could take a couple of hours to complete, depending upon the size and speed of your USB.
• The result of this process is not the ‘true’ Windows 8 To Go install. Things like having a ‘BitLocked’ USB drive are not present. I haven’t found anything else yet, however i wouldn’t be surprised if there were other missing features.
• If you install Windows 8 on a non-certified USB drive, then the performance of Windows 8 is not what it should/could be. If you want to try Win8 out, then great, but don’t use the performance of a non-certified drive as a benchmark for how it is designed to run.
• Running Windows 8, or any other operating system, off a USB will degrade the performance of your USB key. USB key performance degrades over time, based on the number of read/writes. Running an OS off of a USB key results in a lot of read/writes which will speed up this process. *Be warned!*
• I am running this off a reasonably fast Patriot USB key and find performance to be reasonably good under the circumstances. If your USB is slower then it may not be as feasible to use.
• Once you have created the VHD on the USB stick and done an ‘imagex’ of the ‘install.wim’ file, back it up to your pc. If you stuff up the install later on then it is much quicker to copy this back over than it is to recreate under diskpart and reinstall.

So then, you can now boot off the USB on a PC, but what if you want to try booting this USB on a virtual machine?

If, like me, you decide to try to boot the USB via a virtual machine, be warned that this may not work correctly or in a worst case, corrupt the USB installation of Windows.

I have only tried this out on two free products, being Oracle VirtualBox and VMWare Player, which both ‘natively’, do not support booting off a USB. (Note that other versions of VMWare support this and in fact a colleague of mine used the above process to create a USB drive and is now booting it off his MacBook with VMWare Fusion! Ahh the blasphemy of it! 8) (Let me know if you use a different virtualisation product and how it goes.)

Don’t Use Virtual Box For this! I love VirtualBox, however whilst it does not support booting off a USB, I have seen some articles that detail how to do this. Be warned, this is how I corrupted my USB installation. This may work for Linux or other OS’s, but if you do this with Win8 on a stick then be prepared to restore or recreate your *.VHD file!

It works using VMWare Player and PLOP! VMWare Player does not natively support booting off a USB, but if you mount the freeware PLOP boot loader image and boot off this, then this allows you to boot from a USB. Here are the instructions that I followed to get this working. http://en.kioskea.net/faq/7591-boot-from-your-usb-drive-under-vmware

So, you now have a shiny new version of Windows 8 Consumer Preview that is bootable off of a USB stick, either directly off your PC or under VMWare Player! I have been using it now a fair bit and am really starting to dig it. If you need some help with keyboard or mouse shortcuts then have a look at my previous post which details some tips. Getting Around Windows 8 with a Keyboard and Mouse

I am very grateful for the work done by Bennett Adelson in coming up with the bootable VHD on a stick approach for Win 8 and of course Microsoft for releasing what i think is a pretty awesome product! I haven’t come up with anything really new myself here, however putting it all together in one post may save you some time and research.

Have fun and feel free to let me know how you go!

Matt