Wolfgang Riedmann Blog

These days, I had to upgrade several XP PCs to Windows 8.1, and since I had several W8 upgrade licences in my office, and since the migwiz tool on Windows 8.1 does not accept data from XP, I had to go through Windows 8.
Unfortunately, a fresh installed Windows 8 does not let you install Windows 8.1 upgrade from the store, you have to install first several Windows updates.
Fortunately, I found that the needed updates are only two, both near to the bottom of the update list.
KB2871389
KB2917499
So you can let search fpr updates, deselect all important updates clicking on the top checkbox near to “Name”, scroll down to thhe bottom of the list and select only these two updates. Let complete the update and reboot. Then enter the store and you can install Windows 8.1 from there.

P.S. there is a nice thing: the fresh installed Windows 8.1 has the recently published update to Windows 8.1 already integrated, so you save a lot of updates.

Today, I had a problem with a login script specially for Windows 8 users with a microsoft account.

For these, the @userid macro of kixtart returns the full microsoft account, i.e. gregakselrod@outlook.com.

Since I was interested in the part before the @, I wrote the following script part:

$len = instr( @userid, “@” )
if $len == 0
$localuser = @userid
else
$localuser = substr( @userid, 1, $len – 1 )
endif

but it does not worked – $len was 0 all the time.

It seems kixtart interprets the @ character even if quoted. This is the fixed script:

$len = instr( @userid, chr( 64 ) )
if $len == 0
$localuser = @userid
else
$localuser = substr( @userid, 1, $len – 1 )
endif

Have you ever had a problem of copying a program’s shortcut from the Program Menu to the desktop?

With Windows versions between NT and 7 absolutely no problem: open the start menu, select the item with a right mouse click and then select “Copy” from the context menu and “Paste” on the desktop.

With Windows 8 this is becoming very hard, unfortunately.

The Start Menu structure is here, but on the Start screen there is no possibility to copy the shortcut.

It is here:

c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

Unfortunately, this folder is also hidden.

And since I don’t like to fiddle every time, I have created the small utility OpenSpecialFolders that gives you a list of most special folders on the system and let you open them in a new explorer window, so copying and pasting shortcuts is a lot easier.

You can download a zip file with the exe and a few runtime DLLs here:

OpenSpecialFolders.zip

I hope this will help someone!

A customer has acquired a few Windows 8 tablet to use in a fair, and only to show pictures on them.

So the user on the tablet has to be very, very limited.

With the multiuser capability this is easy to accomplish. Simply create a new user and limit him:

– uninstalled all not needed apps from the apps screen, included the desktop app
– remove all files from the users start menu: delete all files and directories from
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
– remove all rights for this user on the folder
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
even the right to read it.
– logoff and logon the user

That’s it!

Basically, if you would save your old Windows XP machine to your new Windows 7 machine, the best thing you can do is to virtualize your old machine.

There are three cost-free virtualization solutions available:

• VMware Server or VMware player from VMware ( www.vmware.com )
• Microsoft Virtual PC from Microsoft
• Oracle VirtualBox ( www.virtualbox.org )

I have tried all three, and I’m preferring VirtualBox for this because it seems to be the solution with the smallest overhead. VMware has become very fat, and also Virtual PC seems a little bit slow.

For the conversion of a living machine, there are only two handy tools available:

• Sysinternals Disk2VHD tool creates a VHD image from a living machine (but please pay attention: there is a 127 GB limit) and can prepare it for use in MS Virtual PC ( live.sysinternals.com )
• VMware vCenter Converter Standalone from VMware creates a complete VMware virtual machine (VMDK file) ( www.vmware.com )

The easiest way is using of VMware Converter to create a virtual machine and use these in VMware Player or server.

The Microsoft way can be easy also, but when there is something that does not work you can spend several hours until the entire thing works (there are two limits: 127 GB max for the virtual disk, and as host you need a Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, no Home).

The personally preferred solution is to use VMware Converter to create a VMDK file, and use this then in VirtualBox, and this will be described more detailled here:

• before launching the conversion with VMware Converter, you need to apply the MergeIDE tool (you can find the link here )
• convert the machine saving the files to a network or USB drive
• copy the virtual machine to the host machine
• create the new virtual machine using the copied virtual machine files
• in the settings of the virtual machine, you need these settings:
  enable APIC
  

  Enable APIC in VirtualBox

  select PIIX4 als IDE controller

  

  Enable PIIX4 in VirtualBox

• After this you can try to start your machine. Unfortunately, probably you will have to re-activate Windows because of the “hardware” change.
  It is not so easy because before activating Windows over the network, you will need to make the network to work.
  If you are lucky, you have 3 days to do this, but on a Fujitsu Siemens machine (with a BIOS locked XP license) the only way to logon was a prior activation over the phone: the network can be configured only after login, but without activation a login was impossible.
• if your machine was member of a Windows domain, its will be the best to configure the network as passthrough, not as NAT, because otherwise the domain controller cannot be reached.

Links:

Howto convert from VMware to VirtualBox
VMware Download Center
Howto migrate a Windows machine to VirtualBox