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Windows 10 is released and I have actually installed it on my production laptop

Aug 052015

Ok, Windows 10 came out the 29th of July, and of course I had reserved it to get the free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and thought I could wait for my download until god knows whenever MS would get to it, but I have never been one to be patient. My laptop is a Dell M6400 Core 2 Duo with 16GB of ram and a 700Gb SSD and a 1TB regular HD and was manufactured in Late 2008. So I set off to grab the ISO from MS and then proceed to install it. Which actually went quite flawlessly. I just set it and left the house, when I came back home it was sitting at the log in screen. I logged in with my Windows 7 user and password and then after a few long minutes of it “Setting things up” it went to my desktop, which pretty much looked the same as it did in Windows 7. I then linked my MS account and then started to look around a bit. I made sure the essentials worked, since I am a developer included Visual Studio 2015 and SQL Server, which actually needed a change to the permissions in the service screen since my MS user had no right to launch that service.
I then thought I had read something about multiple monitors having task bar support, and low and behold it did, of course I had bought “Actual Multiple Monitors” a while back to make up for this shortcoming, so I needed to shut it off since it didn’t work as good as it should anyway with Windows 10. Then I went to toolbar properties, and at the bottom was an area called “Multiple Displays”, I placed a check in Show taskbar on all displays and changed the other two settings to match what I liked and it is so much nicer having the toolbars being built in to the OS!
Then I started to mess with actually trying to work, which requires me to connect via VPN using NCP secure entry client (version 9), which of course seemed like it worked until I tried to connect to a server, it seemed like it was working but the settings were off. I rebooted, but still noticed the same issues. I then reinstalled NCP and BAM it connected and I was able to connect to a server with no problem, so it seems NCP Version 9 works with Windows 10 as long as you reinstall, which I guess makes sense.
Next thing I noticed, Windows 10 was complaining that I had no Virus Protection installed. We have an IT company that manages that using Kaseya and Kaspersky, it seems Kaspersky had been sitting on their hands while Windows 10 was going through beta, instead of actually using the preview to create a new AV program for Windows 10, so now my OS is running without an AV, which I guess would have been nice to know. It seems kaspersky will take up to 60 days to create a working version for Windows 10, that is just crap! So I installed Qihoo 360 Total Security, not the greatest but for free it isn’t bad, and it works for Windows 10 and the free version can do scheduled tests, although I may go back to AVG free if I can do a scheduled scan. At least until kaspersky gets it together.
All in all I really like Windows 10 and am starting to get used to the new stuff with it, like quick access and some other things like Metro Apps etc. Hopefully this is a little warning to those that are in a development position or that relies on Kaspersky, think wisely if you want to or even if you can upgrade to Windows 10. And by the way, Windows 10 runs just wonderfully on this laptop, although it is beefy enough to run it anyway. I have noticed that Groove music causes a Runtime Broker process to ramp up the CPU and it keeps doing it after Groove Music has closed down, so it may be a good idea to use some other app to play music for now.

Create a Shortcut on your Windows 10 Desktop to launch a Metro Style App

Windows 10 No Responses »

Aug 052015

Windows 10 is great, I have been running it for quite a while, starting with built 10040 or so while still an beta testing insider. I noticed a shortcoming this morning, how can you place a shortcut on the desktop to launch a Microsoft Store app, say for instance Word Mobile or Excel Mobile. I had pinned these apps to the start menu, but what if I wanted to have a way to get to office without actually pinning them to the start menu and then clicking start and then clicking the item? Pinning to the taskbar is not a viable option since they would take so much space there, so I wanted to pin them to the desktop. Well, I tried the way that was mentioned for Windows 8.1, but that didn’t work so well, I couldn’t get it to work, but I did find a way that worked for me.
It starts by creating a shortcut on the desktop, so right click the desktop and click New….Shortcut. In the target give it the following target “%windir%\explorer.exe shell:::{4234d49b-0245-4df3-b780-3893943456e1}” without the quotes of course, click next, then give it any name you want like “Metro Apps”. This creates a windows explorer view of all of the installed metro apps on your laptop/tablet. The next step is really quite easy, right click and drag the shortcut of Word to the desktop and let it go, then click create shortcut. Voila, you have a shortcut to a metro app on your desktop, which works like any other shortcut to any other desktop app you may have. You can even create a folder and place shortcuts in it so you could have a folder for Office and have the shortcuts to all of them in there.

Hope that helps some people out there.

Another issue with Windows Mobile 10 on my HTC One M8

HTC One M8, Windows 10, Windows Phones No Responses »

Jun 162015

I just wanted to post quickly about an issue I have had both times I have tried to use Internet Connection Sharing on my M8. Both times it has caused me to need to hard reset my phone, which of course loses all of my settings for the most part. Although it does reinstall my apps and games, I do lose my game progress and login stuff. I am not 100% sure it will happen to all HTC One M8s but just thought I would warn any users. Be prepared with a backup if you can. What it does is makes it so when I try to share connection it complains it cannot share the connection because there are no cellular data connections, but I have streamed music right before trying to share the connection.After that apps start to act very weird and I lose cellular data, so I reboot and after that basically the start screen becomes useless, I can scroll and go to all apps but no apps will actually fire off and no settings will fire off either. After a hard reset it starts to work ok again, but I think I will wait for a new build to see if it helps.

Hope that helps someone,
Later

More Windows 10 Mobile, or is it Windows Phone 10, issues

HTC One M8, Windows 10, Windows Phones No Responses »

Jun 042015

Ok, I woke up a bit late this morning and wasn’t real sure why, then I remembered I didn’t hear my alarm on my phone go off. I check my phone and turn it on, it was plugged in all night, and it comes on but nothing I click fires off, I can swipe right to get to my apps and left to get back to start screen, and that is it….gotta love betas. I tried everything holding power button for long periods of time, both with screen on and off, nothing, nothing at all helped, even tried it while plugging it in. Nothing worked, so I start to search for what my options are since I cannot remove the battery on my HTC One M8, and find a post that tells me to press and hold both the power and the volume down button for they said 5-10 seconds but I think it probably took me 20 seconds, but low and behold it rebooted right back up and started working fine again. The weird thing though, my phone was plugged in all night but only made it to 49% battery, so at some point the charging of the phone actually stopped. This is the second time I have had my phone lock up tight and the only way back to a usable phone was to do this procedure. Just sharing in case others have similar issues and need to find it as well, this works on Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 as well by the way.
Later

Trouble with changing name servers on my domain

Web Development No Responses »

Jun 012015

I just thought I would share the issue I have been having over the past week, I have a domain host and a separate web host. I parked my domain, hometownnerd.com, on my web host’s domain so that I could start having my paid host provide my files instead of relying on my server, which is terribly under powered in both memory and CPU. Which in case you do not know what parking means, it is when you want to provide your files on more than one domain, say you have a domain name from your webhost called hometownnerd.zz.mu, which is not a domain you like, you can park your main domain hometownnerd.com on it and both of the domains will start to server the same sets of files with the only difference being the URL. So after parking my domain name I then needed to change the domain servers to my web hosts nameservers so that my site could be resolved, but I kept getting an error telling me to make sure the nameservers are set up and working correctly. I started to send requests for support to my web host and they just kept saying change my nameservers, but there is no real way to test to make sure the nameservers are doing their job so you need to assume it is working. I tried for a week to understand what was going on with my web host, thinking it was their fault. Today, over a week later, I send an email to my domain host asking about the error, within 1 hour they had told me the issue was their form to submit the changes was not working correctly and they set my nameservers manually for me. Live and learn, just wish there was a way to do a test to verify the nameserver would serve my domain name. I can test it when I have my domain name being served from my house, but on the web I guess there is no such check.

Later

A website to Make Live Tiles for your website

Smartphones, Windows 10, Windows 8 Tablet No Responses »

May 282015

Just stumbled on this website today, which may come in handy for people that are wanting to help those people with Windows 8 or Windows 10 as well as Windows Phone. This site will help you to create the ability for your site to make a live tile on those devices. That way if a person wants to pin your site to their Start Screen then it will use the icon you set and will also do some live tile stuff making use of your rss feed. It may not be a widely used feature but some of your visitors may appreciate you adding it. You could even use this to make a home page or a jump page for yourself and make one of these tiles and pin it to your phone’s start screen and have a pseudo home page using an icon of your choosing. You just need to set the icon you want and the title and maybe the rss feed and then download the zip file and extract it and upload to the folder your site is in and add the code to your webpage and that is it.
http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com/en

I have also installed Windows 10 on my HTC One M8

Smartphones, Windows 10 No Responses »

May 282015

Ok, I have taken the plunge and installed Windows 10 on my M8, it definitely feels more like a beta than it does for my tablet or laptop. There are some issues with how things look and there are some really slow spots in it as well, seems like mainly when trying to go back to the Start screen and when resuming from an app. I have also noticed that apps and windows seem to stay open after you click the back button, so after a few minutes of using it you could have loads of windows open that you would need to press and hold the back button to close them. The mail app is getting very close to what is on the tablet and laptop, swipe to delete etc. It also seems like the settings area is much better looking than it used to be in WP8.1, although it seemed to look more like a phone settings before. I do not think it is for the feint of heart to install this on your main phone, but it is nice to use it for the most part. There is a setting for having more buttons visible, but I could not get it to take setting it back to do not show more tiles. Another thing about this version, what are they going to call it? It seemed like it would be Windows Phone 10 since that was just the continuation of names through WP7 and WP8, then it seemed like it would be Windows 10 since it was all the same code base, now it seems like it may be Windows 10 Mobile, resurrecting the Windows Mobile from the Windows Mobile 6 days.
One thing I did notice was after the installation happened I saw an update for WP8.1 in my phone updates and could not get it to go away, until I went back in the Windows Insider app and set the setting back to Fast Track, which I had set before so I could get the update in the first place. Once I did that the WP8.1 update disappeared and I have been seeing Windows 10 updates showing up. Speaking of updates, it seems one thing they have not finished yet is a way to force a restart if you happen to miss the window telling you about the restart, I have seen it a couple of times and sometimes it shows up in the update area as a button, but if something goes wrong there is no way to force the restart, and I do not think holding the power button is a legit way to restart.

An issue I had this weekend with Windows 10 TP on my Dell Venue 8 Pro

Software, Windows 10, Windows 8 Tablet No Responses »

May 042015

I have been running Windows 10 Tech Preview for quite a while now on my Dell Venue 8 Pro and I still love it and use it daily. Granted, I do not do many wildly demanding tasks but I do use it to listen to Pandora and to read ebooks and some other simple stuff and I am really digging it. This weekend, though, I had an issue which I guess started after an update was applied and a reboot occurred, my tablet booted to the login screen, after I logged in it went to just a black screen, I actually made it start up in recovery one time and had it drop back to an earlier build and it booted right up, then I guess the updates came in again and the following morning it was back to the black screen. This time I could not get recovery mode started no matter what I tried. I did have an external keyboard, non-bluetooth, hooked up and could get it to start task manager. No matter what I tried the programs I tried to fire off did not fire up, like cmd or control or even msconfig, everything just did not show up…..explorer wouldn’t even start up. So I figured I would use my backup to go back to an old build, as soon as I plugged in the USB drive while at the task manager the programs I tried to start actually started to fire up. Then the tablet rebooted, I guess to try to fire off the Backup Recovery app, my tablet has been booting fine ever since. I have no idea why it actually worked, but thought I would share my experiences just in case someone else had issues like this. I am on the fast track for getting updates which is probably part of my issue, but it is just my tablet and it is not mission critical.

EDIT (5/5/2015): Ok, seems that this issue has happened again, but task manager could at least fire up control panel, I had 3 updates that were installed and one of them was KB3061162, which I could not find any info on. I uninstalled it just to see and my tablet booted right up as it should have, weird, but hey it is a Beta…preview…or whatever it is now. Still do not think it is bad enough to go back to Windows 8.1.

Later

Issue with SQL Server and utilizing Linked Servers

Application Development, Software, SQL Server, Web Development No Responses »

May 042015

I just wanted to pass along some information I just figured out accidentally. We utilize SQL Server at my work to house a rather large amount of data over about 4 SQL Servers, 3 were Virtual and 1 was an actual physical server. This weekend we moved the physical server to a virtual one and most everything just worked out of the box. When we tried to use some of the advanced features that required linked servers those features worked for some and not others, it seemed when we tried to use the newly made virtual server to a schema on itself it failed. We tried everything to make it work and since it was not working, we assumed we would need to change 100s of lines of code to remove the server part from the connection string when it was referencing the same server. We even tried creating a new linked server on this server to connect to itself, which of course failed due to it being the same server. All of the servers were SQL 2008s.

What did actually work was using a box that was VPN’d in which is running SQL 2008R2 to create a linked server on that same server, by starting SMSS on the VPN’d box and connecting to the server in question and going down to Server Objects then to Linked Servers and right clicking and adding linked server, and using the Server in question’s name in the server to connect to box and going through the security stuff and pressing Ok. Now when we want to use the linked box features they work as they always have when it was a separate physical box.

Hope that helps someone else out there that may face the same issue.

Later

Visual List App that I have finally completed for Windows Phone 8

Application Development, Smartphones No Responses »

Apr 152015

I finally finished my app, Visual List, my first attempt at a real app, it uses the camera and quite a few other complicated processes to make it do what I wanted. I just hope some people can use it, hopefully it will generate a little income for me, although I doubt it. A website for the app is here VisualList. I created this app since I noticed a missing genre of apps for Windows Phones, lists of things that were based on pictures. This app helps you to keep a handle on all of the things that you may like or want or need to keep track of in a visual way. Maybe you like a certain Medicine and want to remember it on sight, or maybe you want to create a Christmas list for you or someone else and use pictures to do it, or maybe you like a certain cologne or perfume and it would really help to see an image of the bottle when you are shopping just to be sure. This app is for you, it allows you to have lists of items so you can keep them somewhat organized, and it allows you to take down some information for the items, like maybe where it was bought or colors or whatever else you may want to keep track of about it. I have also built a zoom feature if you click the picture on the details section. I have also made it so you can pin each of the lists to your start screen, be careful of your fill color when you pin some colors do not work well on the start screen, like white or black background, since I use your background color as the icon color. It also has a search function so you can search all of that information. I have also made it so you can customize the lists by changing the color of the text or the fill color or the border color, as well as if you want square or rounded corners. I have spent a good deal of time making this and if you notice some issues or some things you may want changed, let me know. I will try to make changes as they are found and needed.

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