Hi,
After doing an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 to 8, I was keen to check out the inbuilt ISO support. An ISO file is a single file which contains the image of a CD or DVD (or even a Blu-ray), similar in a way to a ZIP or RAR file. An ISO can be burnt back onto optical media, but more conveniently it can be mounted so the operating system presents it as a seperate drive, without actually needing any actual optical media.

Windows 8 has the option of mounting an ISO file natively. All you do is right click an ISO, choose ‘Mount’ and you’ll see an extra drive (often E:\ is your first available) with the ISO contents. This is great, but I was missing the option completely after my upgrade!

I discovered that this was because I had Daemon Tools installed, which in Windows 7 gives you the same functionality, but doesn’t work after upgrading. To fix this, and get Windows 8 to do it you’ll need to reassociate .ISO files to Windows Explorer.

Search for the phrase ‘File Association’ and choose the option ‘Change the file type associated with a file extension’

Once in this program, find the .ISO extension and click ‘Change program’. You should just be able to choose ‘Windows Explorer’ from this point, but if not, click on ‘More options’ then ‘Look for another app on this PC’ – then from the ‘Open With…’ dialog, locate and open the file  ‘C:\Windows\explorer.exe’

Once this is done, the .iso option will actually disappear from the list of file extension associations. Go back to Windows Explorer, right click on the ISO file and you’ll now have your Mount and Burn Disk Image options!

Hi,
Using the inbuilt PDF reader in Windows 8 is great, basic and easy to use. But what about printing the document? This one didn’t jump out at me when investigating, so figured it was worth sharing.

Right clicking to bring up the bottom menu gives you options like ‘Save as’ and ‘ More > Info’ but there’s no print option!

There’s a couple of default ways to print from all Windows 8 modern UI-style apps (you can’t use the word Metro anymore – http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/2/3215039/microsoft-metro-name-dispute-developers ).

The quickest for a keyboard shortcut lover is Ctrl-P. This brings up the print menu from the right hand side, and lets you choose which installed printer to print to.

For the touchy-feely type, bring up the charms menu by either swiping from the right hand side, or with a mouse, move your pointer to the right top or bottom corner, and move the pointer towards the middle. From the charms menu, select ‘Devices’ and you’ll be able to choose your printer there.

I think Microsoft could have made this a bit clearer for printing, but at the same time they are trying to get everyone to follow a certain method for doing similar things – if you want to do something to any connected device such as a printer or a second screen, do it via the devices area. Windows 7 already was doing this with the Devices and Printers area in the control panel, so this is just the next step.

Good luck!

Hi,
This one was a bit more painful than expected. Windows 8 WILL work on a MacBook Air, but there’s a few hurdles to get over.

Firstly, you can do the standard method of going into OSX and using the inbuilt Boot Camp option. You’ll have to burn a copy of your ISO and use an external CD/DVD drive (Ironic for a MBA, but also I was running Snow Leopard so this may be fixed in Lion or Mountain Lion) and follow the bouncing ball.

At the other end, you’ve got Windows 8 installed, except if you try to then install the Boot Camp tools you’ll get the lovely message “Boot Camp requires that your computer is running Windows 7”.

You’ll have to break out the free Microsoft tool Orca (available here http://www.technipages.com/download-orca-msi-editor.html) and make one small change. Thanks to this page http://www.sellsbrothers.com/posts/Details/12708 for advising on what that is:

Open the BootCamp64.msi file from your WindowsSupport\Drivers\Apple folder created from OSX and under the LaunchCondition entry, go to where it says VersionNT=601 and change it to 602 (or just right click and drop row to remove the check completely). Now you’ll be able to run setup.exe without getting the annoying error.

That’ll install Boot Camp, which you can then update from inside the app for a newer version without issue.

Next, you may have noticed that if you’re using the trackpad that right click doesn’t work. You can enable that in the Boot Camp software under the Boot Camp Control Panel, and ticking the Two Fingers > Secondary Click option.

The last annoyance for me was that the network dongle didn’t work either. I found the correct driver under WindowsSupport\Drivers\Asix – installing that made it instantly work.

Good luck and enjoy Windows 8!

Hi,
Windows 8 RTM is now out, so everyone who cares is installing it on every device they can find (or is this just me?). Anyway, after doing this to a few PC’s I wanted to browse to a Windows 8 PC’s UNC path using the inbuilt $ share for each drive.

Don’t know what an inbuilt Admin share is exactly? Do some reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_share

So, if you’re trying to map or browse to a file share such as \\homepc\c$ you should get ‘Access Denied’, even when using administrator credentials.

A fix to this is to add the following setting to the registry on the Windows 8 PC you’re trying to connect to (I had to reboot to make it work afterward):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mi
crosoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Add a new DWORD (32-bit) called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set it to 1 

While working this out, I did a bit of trial and error with my accounts. Windows 8 lets you use a Microsoft Live ID account over the top of your administrator local account (not the inbuilt administrator). A bunch more info on that from Microsoft blogs here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/privacyimperative/archive/2011/09/28/signing-in-to-windows-8-with-a-windows-live-id-privacy-and-security.aspx

With this, I discovered that once you’ve put your Microsoft Live ID in, it sits on top of your administrator account, and actually changes the password to match your Microsoft Live ID. You can use the combination of the username for the administrator account, and your Microsoft Live ID password to prove this. The old password for the administrator account won’t work. The other interesting thing about this setup is that even if you’re logged onto the PC with your Microsoft Live ID, you can’t change the password of the administrator account it’s on top of via Computer Management > Local Users and Groups. I assume this is because it will break the relationship between the Microsoft Live ID and the administrator account, but anyone who knows more about this please fill me in.

In summary, a registry entry will enable the admin $ shares again and you can either use the combination of “Microsoft Live ID Username\Microsoft Live ID Password” or “Local Administrator Username\Microsoft Live ID Password” because both passwords are now the same. Keep this in mind if you’ve got a poor strength password!