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#206597 - 2013-01-27 11:01 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: BradV]
Robdutoit Offline
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The question I ask when I upgrading, is what can the new OS version do, that the current version cannot. As a network technician, I find Windows 7 ridiculously trouble free to image compared to Windows XP. And there are a number of other advantages, hence the reason to upgrade. With Windows 8, having read this forum and just general reviews on the Internet, I think I will give windows 8 a miss. It feels like a beta version of the product. In most businesses, a touch screen is just not doable, so I don't see the point of Microsoft's insistence on designing W8 to be optimal in touch screen mode.
glenn Barnas points about visual ability is a very important as many older people will have the same issue - can't see anything. its been interesting reading, but I will give Windows 8 a miss. The only major advantage of W8 over windows 7 is the ability to natively use virtual servers, but as neither myself nor any of my clients require this feature, I won't lose sleep over it. The only other thing I like is the boot time, but its not enough to make me upgrade to w8

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#206598 - 2013-01-28 06:41 AM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Robdutoit]
ShaneEP Moderator Offline
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Anybody know if there are any easy roll-back options if I was to upgrade my personal pc from Win 7 to 8...and then hate it? I've been curious to work with it a little, and was thinking of upgrading before the upgrade price goes up this week.
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#206599 - 2013-01-28 02:38 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: ShaneEP]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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If you have an external drive large enough, you can snapshot your boot and system volumes booting with WinPE and running the imageX command. It's the Microsoft tool to capture and deploy disk images for Sysprep, but I've used it to do what you're after.

I have a premade ISO you can pull down using the terminal server - it's in the WinPE folder of the Dev share. Under 200MB, so should be quick. The ISO has some additional scripts (BAT and KIX) to make things easier to use. PM me if you have questions.

Glenn
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#206602 - 2013-01-28 09:33 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Robdutoit Offline
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The nicest thing about windows 7 (and I have done this more than once), is that you can copy the contents of the Win 7 DVD onto a usb hard drive and replace the install.wim file in the sources directory with the install.wim file that you create after imaging your computer as Glenn suggested. Obviously you need to make your usb hard drive bootable. If you decide that you want to go back to windows 7, just plug in the usb hard drive and boot off it and start installing windows.
Bear in mind, before you can capture the image, you need to sysprep it, otherwise you cannot capture it. Or at least ways this issue occurs if you are booting from a windows deployment server. I have not booted the computer without a WDS server to capture the image, as I have never needed to do that. But I assume that your computer being at home, does not have a windows WDS server to boot off.
Otherwise just use an imaging program to image your computer onto your usb hard drive, if you find the microsoft way too difficult for whatever reason. Again, good idea to sysprep it first, even though you are not doing multiple cloning.
Hope that helps.

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#206604 - 2013-01-28 10:21 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Robdutoit]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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I've never needed to sysprep to make a recovery image. Just use the tools, booted from WinPE, to snap an image of the two partitions on the boot drive to a file share or USB disk.

I've had systems with intermittently bad HDDs.. was able to snap the image to a server, replace the HDD, create the partitions and push the images back to the new HDD. Total time less than 30 minutes.

Glenn
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#206605 - 2013-01-28 10:34 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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I just use Clonezilla (free). I made a backup of my Win 7 back when I was testing Win 8 Release Preview. I was back up and running in like 10 minutes after using the Preview version for a day or so.

Curious. Has anyone else run into issues with the UAC always being on even when the slider is all the way to the bottom?

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#206618 - 2013-02-02 03:50 AM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Allen]
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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Just use a virtual box period. I don't care for Microsoft's virtual but this Oracle (Sun) version is free

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Then install Windows 8 and give it a spin

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#206630 - 2013-02-04 08:53 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: NTDOC]
ShaneEP Moderator Offline
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Well, instead of upgrading my laptop to Win8, I just purchased a new Win8 tablet lol.

Went with this one...
http://www.dell.com/us/p/latitude-10-tablet/pd?oc=fncwq01h&model_id=latitude-10-tablet

Should get it in a couple weeks.

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#206631 - 2013-02-04 08:57 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: ShaneEP]
ShaneEP Moderator Offline
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I'll be giving the screen a real workout while I attempt to use it for note taking in school. Hope Windows 8 is more enjoyable on a tablet, than it seems to be on PCs. Will report back my experiences with it after I get it for a while.
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#206646 - 2013-02-07 12:14 AM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Robdutoit]
NTDOC Administrator Offline
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Stardock software - Start8

Version 1.11 update available now!

New in this update:
• Advanced configuration options provided by Start8Tweak.exe in the application directory.
• Added email category to search results.
• Added support for Modern UI app closing to return to the desktop.
• Additional enhancement details can be found here:

http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/history.asp

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#206658 - 2013-02-08 06:18 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: NTDOC]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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Glenn, have you done any testing with your script that schedules app installations, on Win 8? Just curious if running these exes through the Scheduler bypasses the UAC prompts.
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#206659 - 2013-02-08 09:17 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Allen]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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Do you mean the utility that does detection and scheduling requests during logon? If so, then no - but I could. I'm about to build a Win-8 VM or two this weekend for additional testing now that we're on VM 5.1. Can you give me a simple test plan (software to install, UAC setting changes, if any, etc.) I can give it a whirl.

Glenn
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#206660 - 2013-02-08 10:00 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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Yes, I think that is the utility you have mentioned in the past.

Well, I like to do silent installations, and Adobe Flash would be the smallest and easiest I would think.

To install silently it is "FlasherInstallerName.exe -install"

As for UAC, I generally turn it off. Probably not a suggested configuration, but I find it gets in the way too often. However, in Win8, sliding the UAC bar to off, does not completely disable it. I would be interested in knowing if the scheduled tasks runs the installer silently, and completes successfully, with the UAC on the recommended setting, and with the UAC at the bottom setting.

Thanks.

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#206664 - 2013-02-09 02:42 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Allen]
Lonkero Administrator Offline
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so we still doing app installs in a logonscript are we? ;\)
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#206671 - 2013-02-09 05:00 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Lonkero]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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Nope (and you should know better than to suggest that I'd consider installs via login script!!!) The login script doesn't do the install, it performs a detection to determine if some admin task is required. It sends a request to a server if the detection fails and a remote server performs the update using admin credentials. The user environment never gets elevated permissions, and the update/install happens in near real-time with the user login, but in a separate session.

Ideally, a GPO would be used, but sometimes you don't want to build an MSI package for some minimal task.

Glenn
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#206672 - 2013-02-09 05:05 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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I think lonk was directing that comment at me
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#206675 - 2013-02-09 07:03 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Allen]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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Yeah, but you aren't installing via login, you're detecting so you can push it after login, right? That is what you asked me to test..

G
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#206678 - 2013-02-11 03:32 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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I was hoping you would have better results with scheduler than I had with the login script. I occasionally will push out an update via the login script and with Win 8, have not had much luck. If your results are positive, I will look into a solution similar to yours.
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#206679 - 2013-02-11 10:21 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Allen]
Glenn Barnas Administrator Offline
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I have had no time this weekend -
- It was my primary patch weekend and the WSUS database filled up, took a few hours to resolve and baby-sit, then manually patch 8 servers.
- The VoIP system started acting up right after going live and moving off of the POTS based lines and onto SIP trunks.. response times from the ITSP increased about 20 ms, just enough to result in abandoned calls.. several hours of troubleshooting that! \:\(
- 10" of snow on Fri into Sat, resulting in 2 days of shoveling here and at my mom's.

So... I'll probably not have time to build a set of Win-8 VMs until later this week.
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#206680 - 2013-02-11 11:55 PM Re: The Joy of Windows 8 [Re: Glenn Barnas]
Allen Administrator Online   shocked
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No worries.
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