Windows Software Issues

I installed Windows 8 developer release today at work. Some of my beginning perspectives is this is not for the business environment. My test environment is a dell E6500 notebook and a little tablet pc with an atom processor. Both devices seemed to load Windows 8 just fine no hick ups or errors. The initial install is quite similar to Windows 7.

The interface looks almost exactly like Windows phone 7 and it seems kind of awkward on a mouse driven PC. The start menu is gone. The tile window has become the new start menu. When you switch to any app or the desktop to get back you either have to hit the windows key, which will take you back to the tile start screen, or you have to move the mouse to the bottom left which will give you 5 options. The control panel looks different and truly does not have much practical use from a tech side, but I can see it helpful for a regular home user. It has similar options like wireless but instead of being able to configure profiles it has options to turn wifi on/off and turn on airplane mode on/off. Have no fear though, the Windows 7 control panel is still there if you scroll to the bottom of the superficial one it gives the option for “More Options”. This takes you to the desktop and opens the Windows 7/vista style control panel.

Wireless profiles took me some time to figure out because I was looking for them on the tablet and it does not seem to work as expected yet. To access the wireless profile area, you are supposed to be able to get to it from the network area on the task bar, usually depicted as a monitor or a little 5 bar wireless signal. It is no longer in network sharing area with the little manage wireless networks link. You click the little network icon on the task bar it opens a tile like window and you click the wireless network of your choice. At this point, you right click to access the properties/delete and a couple other options. On the tablet however the holding your finger down to right click did not seem to be functioning or at least my fat fingers could not get it to work.

They also seemed to have removed the ability to shutdown or I was not able to find it. To log off you click your picture on the top right hand side of the tile window. You can also switch user add users and such from this location also.

Overall, from the little bit I have been able to mess with it, it seems clean looking but blocky and not really appealing visually. Windows 7 had all of the rounded edges and was visually appealing even if it was kind of a resource hog. Windows 8 is significantly quicker from what I can tell and is visually bright/sharp but not very nice to look at due to all the squareness. For the more technical aspects of the operating system such as putting the computer on the domain manually or getting to the functions that techy types would use seems more burdensome by making you have to click significantly more times to get to commonly used control panel functions.

Anyone else want to share their experience? If so, post in the comments below.

*****DISCLAIMER: DO NOT EDIT THE REGISTRY IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING****

Problem: Flash works under the administrator accounts but as soon as a normal use logs in flash no longer works.

I have been working with some Windows 7 images this summer and this problem I found in windows 7. I am not exactly sure why it happens but after sysprep runs it removes the Users group from HKCR\MIME and some other spots in the HKCR registry. The HKCR has the USERS group listed with read access which is correct, but if you check the HKCR\MIME permissions it will most likely say something to the effect of RESTRICTED with some other accounts. Not exactly sure why this happens but if you go to the HKCR permission area and tell it to replace permissions to subfolders, it will fix the problem.

*****DISCLAIMER: DO NOT EDIT THE REGISTRY IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING****

Problem: Quicktime works fine under administrator account but not under someone in the BUILTIN\Users group. Quicktime comes up with the following in Microsoft Internet Explorer, no other error messages

I tracked this down to sysprep carrying over the location of the quicktime preferences file in the registry. In my case it was pointing to the “c:\users\administrator\appdata\locallow\Apple Computer\Quicktime\” folder.

The Registry location is

HKCU\Software\Apple Computer, Inc.\Quicktime\LocalUserPreferences

Registry value name is FolderPath. Open this value and remove the contents. Once quicktime is ran in IE again it will repopulate.

You can also use the following command to remove it for the current user who is logged in. If you set it as a batch script and put it in the start up it will remove it for all users who log onto the machine or you can skip down and manually fix it for all future users.

reg delete “HKCU\Software\Apple Computer, Inc.\quicktime\LocalUserPreferences” /va /f

Make sure you use the /f

To remove it for all future users you can follow the video which shows how to remove it from the default user profile registry.

Default User profile video

I was tasked with doing updates on servers during spring break. I work for a school district so kids are gone and I do not have much to do. I came across  a couple of our Windows server 2008 r2 servers and for some reason they would not update for the life of me. I did some searching around and come to find out someone had removed Users from being able to read the c:\ drive. The website that I found this information on is linked below for more information.

http://goo.gl/HvPyI

Some people I work with have been having issues setting default printer on computers for all users. This is a problem since default printer is a Per user setting. I was searching the internet and came across an article on technet scripting guys showing a powershell script that can be set to set default printer. Using a batch script to run the powershell script with the arguments listed in the article make it very easy to use.  I placed my command script to launch the ps1 file in all users startup folder.

http://goo.gl/iLbRW

Microsoft released service pack 1 in Feb  2011. I have loaded a couple computers with it and so far I have not seen any problems with running the current version of sysprep.

Recently I came across a problem while loading a sysprepped machine. I configured it just like all of the others I have done. One difference is when I went to test the image to make sure it works like the others coming up asking for a computer name and then adding itself to the domain and such. I would get an error when it said it was starting services. The error message is as follows.

Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration, restart the computer.

I did some searching around and found this KB981542 article on Microsofts website. I had to load it before I ran sysprep but it seemed to fix whatever the problem was.