Friday, October 25, 2013

More Windows 8.1

There were a couple of annoying things that came up in Windows 8.1.  I had to switch from my old "local" login to my xbox/hotmail Microsoft account, which I didn't want to do.  I found out later that I could have avoided this by disconnecting the Internet during the Windows 8.1 install -- word to the wise.

Also, I had to re-do the registry hack to add the Copy to Folder and Move to Folder options when right-clicking a file.  I had this before, but it got zapped during the "upgrade" to Windows 8.1.

So now I've had Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 for awhile.  It seems to me no better, and in some respects worse, than Windows 7.  Let's hope that in the post-Ballmer era, a new direction is found for Windows.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Extending our WiFi network

We have a fairly big house, and one corner of it was not getting WiFi from our Apple Airport Time Capsule.  I bought an Airport Extreme to extend it.  I was expecting a nightmare of configuration debugging to follow. I figured I would probably have to set it up as a separate Wifi.  But not so!  I hooked up the Airport extreme and went back to Shelly's iMac.  There was a dialog box asking me if I wanted to extend our existing network.  I said Yes and that was it!  The network was extended seamlessly to the far corner of the house.  Hats off to Apple for this one.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Windows 8.1

I downloaded Windows 8.1 from Microsoft.com.  Install over Windows 8 went smoothly.  I then needed to redo three customizations that I had on Windows 8.  I used regedit to set PaintDesktopVersion to 1 so that you see the exact Windows version in the lower right corner.  Then I re-installed 8GadgetPack and got my gadgets back.  Then I installed the latest version of StartIsBack to get the start button back.  Windows 8.1 doesn't really restore it - just a button that goes to the Metro interface.  StartIsBack setup also nicely sets Windows to boot to the desktop.  So now all is well.  Seems pretty much the same as Windows 8.