The Ramblings of Ken

The release date for Windows 10 has been announced. It is coming on July 29, 2015. The upgrade will be free for consumers that are running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. I am not going to upgrade.

This little icon appeared in my system tray yesterday:

If you look back through my previous posts you can easily see that I am a big Windows Media Center fan. Microsoft will not be including Windows Media Center in Windows 10.

From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications:

If you have Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows 8 Pro with Media Center, or Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center and you install Windows 10, Windows Media Center will be removed.

I have grown quite fond of Windows Media Center ever since I abandoned the Comcast X1 platform. It has been absolutely flawless as a DVR platform for me. With the X1 DVR I was missing recordings of my favorite sports teams for no apparent reason. Windows Media Center has not missed a single recording for me.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't upgrade to Windows 10. However, if you are a Windows Media Center fan, stay far, far away.

With the shutdown of Aereo, which I blogged about earlier, I decided that I needed to come up with a quick solution to fill my TV needs. I've never had a DVR before, but I became hooked on Aereo's DVR feature. It was very nice to be able to record NFL and MLS games and other TV shows to watch them later.

My needs aren't very big. My family hardly watches any TV. There are a couple of shows that we watch regularly, though. One of them is on ABC. We used to watch on ABC's own website, but ABC started making us wait at least a week to watch because we don't have cable TV anymore. This really is aggravating! I'm sure that this trend will only continue as people continue to "cut the cord." Thus, I decided that I needed a DVR.

First, however, I needed a working TV signal. There was a Real Salt Lake game on later in the day and I needed to watch it! I double checked Aereo and it really was dead. I needed an antenna to receive over the air TV signals. I know that installing an antenna outside will always give the best results, but I decided to see what I could do with an indoor antenna. I found that the Winegard Flatwave Razor Thin antenna was getting some good reviews. There were other antennas getting good reviews too, but I needed something I could get locally. Time was not on my side and game time was quickly approaching. I ran into town and purchased the antenna. Before going home I tried out the antenna at my grandmother's house and I was not pleased with the results. I was tempted to return it, but decided to try it at home first.

I fought with the antenna for several hours. I still don't know why I struggled so much with it. My Vizio TV kept giving me a generic "Scan Error" message as I tried to search for channels. I finally found a spot in my living room window where I could at least get it to scan enough to get signal from a few channels. After playing with it for quite some time, I found that if I unplugged the antenna from the TV before starting a scan I could get better results. I finally got a scan to complete and I had a working TV signal, but I still needed a DVR.

Thanks to my good brother-in-law, I had a digital ATSC TV tuner card lying around not being used. I decided to throw this into my Windows 8.1 machine and see what I could do. I paid the $10 for Windows Media Center and I was off and running. It was a pretty simple process except for the fact that it messed up a few channels with incorrect frequencies. I used the software that came with the TV card to scan for channels and compared with what Windows Media Center found. It was easy to correct the problems in Windows Media Center's lineup this way.

I am quite pleased with the results. To watch TV, we hit the power button on the media center remote that came with the TV card, and the computer comes out of sleep and automatically turns on the TV within a couple of seconds. It really does feel like a real TV experience without the fuss of logging in to a website to watch TV which we were experiencing before. I think we are much better off now. We might not be using Aereo if they are able to restore service to us in Utah.

I know that I could have accomplished good results with free software, like Myth TV, but I needed things to work quickly without fussing with config files and package dependencies that come with Linux distributions. I would love to experiment with Myth TV, though, when I have some free time.

Update - 1/29/2013:

This turned out to be a partitioning error.  I created a new virtual disk with a new partitioning scheme and cloned my data over to the new partitions.  That fixed the problem.

Original Post:

Something is very wrong here.  I've been trying for about six months to upgrade an old Windows Server 2003 file server to Windows Server 2008.  I have been getting a weird error message when it tries to reboot after the initial copying of files from the DVD.  The error is:

Just a while ago I figured out a problem that had been giving me fits for quite awhile! At work when I was working on someone else's computer there were times when I wanted to access files on my own work computer. I kept getting errors saying that my computer was not accessible or that access was denied. It was so weird!

I finally tracked down the culprit! It was VMware! VMware Workstation installs two other network adapters, vmnet1 and vmnet8. These are only used when you configure your virtual machines to use NAT or host-only networking. I don't use these configurations, I only use bridged networking. After disabling these adapters I now have Windows file sharing working perfectly on Vista!

It sure makes me happy when I can access the files on my work computer like I should be able to :)

(Image taken from vmware.com)

For the last several months I have been working on a solution for the company I work for to push out Windows installations quickly and effectively over the network. We used to use Microsoft's old Remote Installation Services, but that quickly became obsolete with newer computers and especially now that Windows Vista is becoming mainstream. We were forced to find something else. I installed the next generation of RIS, Windows Deployment Services. It worked well for Windows Vista installs, but you had to create an image of a Windows XP computer in a .wim format to deploy it via WDS. When attempting to deploy that image to computers with different hardware 90% of the time you would get a bluescreen when the computer attempted to boot.

Now I have moved on to Microsoft's Business Desktop Deployment 2007. It works in conjunction with WDS to automate the installation of Windows XP and Windows Vista and the deployment of applications to these installs. It really has been fun to get up and running.

I used nLite to integrate the new Serial ATA drivers that are required to be slipstreamed into the Windows source files. However, when Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released nLite became broken when using Business Desktop Deployment to install the operating system. Come to find out, I am breaking the terms of nLite's license agreement by using it at work anyway.

[code]5. nLite is free for personal use only, you cannot use it for any company or business purposes at this time.[/code]

So now I have finally been learning how to integrate drivers into my Windows source files by hand. It isn't that difficult. The instructions at this page really helped out a lot. I was able to easily get my textmode drivers to integrate into the setup routine and XP installed without any problems whatsoever.

Fun times!

(Image is copyrighted by Microsoft Corporation)

I've had Windows Vista Business 32-bit installed on my computer at work for a little over a week now. At first I hated it. It would always bring up a prompt telling you that "Windows needs your permission to continue." It turns out that Vista runs every user in a non-administrator mode and when it needs to elevate your privileges to Administrator, it lets you know what is going on. I suppose this is a good thing. Spyware and Viruses can't be installed anymore, at least not yet.

I'll quickly go over the things that I like the best about Vista:





Flip-3D

Flip-3D is a new alternative to using Alt+Tab to switch between Windows. To use it you press Win+Tab instead of Alt+Tab. It stacks up all your Windows in a cool 3D interface. You can then click on a window, use the scroll wheel on the mouse, or continue pressing Win+Tab until the window that you want comes up.








The Aero Interface

The new default theme on Windows Vista is the Aero Glass interface. Aero adds cool animations when maximizing, minimizing and switching between windows. It also gives you a nice preview of each window when you place your mouse over the taskbar button for it. Aero just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside :)





The Start Menu

The new Start Menu for Windows Vista is way cool! It no longer stretches your program folders across the screen. Instead it keeps them in place so you don't have to continue to move your mouse to the right to find a program. The new search feature at the bottom of the start menu is way awesome too! It will launch all of your programs straight from the search box! For example, if you want to start paint (as shown in the picture), simply type "paint" in the box and press enter. It rocks!




Installation and Repair Process

In Windows XP if you wanted to install the operating system on hardware that wasn't supported out of the box (i.e. RAID systems), you had to create a floppy disk with the drivers on it and then make sure to hit F6 right at the start of the Windows installation process. In Windows Vista, simply throw your drivers on a USB flash disk or CD-R and click on the Load Drivers button. It is that simple! The repair process also adds new and easy ways to fix your operating system, should something go wrong. You can use System Restore to go back to a restore point, use the automatic repair feature, or bring up a command prompt and do it all yourself. You can also load network and hard disk drivers on the fly. It is way cool!

Well, I have Windows Vista Business x64 installed on my computer at home now. So far, I am very impressed! I am tempted to delete my XP x64 partition and go Vista all the way! Good job so far, Microsoft!

(Windows Vista, Aero, and many more names used on this page are copyrighted by Microsoft. Also, the images used on this page are the property of Microsoft, yeah, even the screenshots that I made of my programs I'm sure belong to them somehow.)

Yesterday I decided to try and install DOS/Windows 3.1 on the USB drive that I got. Well, I used VMware Workstation to do it. I got it all working fine in VMware, so I decided to try and boot my computer from the USB key. It worked to boot into DOS, but Windows would freeze before loading.

Well, today Bob and I were playing with it and Bob figured out how to make it work. If you add the /d:t parameter to win.com then it will run. Apparently, Windows 3.1 can't recognize that modern computers are 386 compatible. It freezes, not knowing what to do. Anyway, it works...

We got it running on Bob's laptop... see the screenshot: