Category: Windows

SSD #1 installed

My two new Samsung SSDs arrived in the mail yesterday, and I set up the first one today. I used it to replace the drive in my old ThinkPad. It was pretty easy to clone the old drive to the new one, using Samsung’s software, and a BlacX dock that I had sitting around gathering dust. It took about 20 minutes to copy everything over. Replacing the drive itself wasn’t too hard; the ThinkPad is pretty easy to open up. (I expect a little more trouble with the Mac.)

The machine is definitely faster and quieter with the SSD than it was before. But it’s not an amazing difference, really. At least not that I’ve noticed so far. I’ll need to mess around with it some more and see how much snappier it feels with normal use.

I’m not sure if I’ll get around to replacing the MacBook drive before the weekend. I really want to, but I know it’s going to take some time to get it done. Definitely looking forward to it though, as I think the SSD will make a big difference with the MacBook.

So Much Microsoft News

Wow, so much nifty news coming out of Microsoft this week! Scott Hanselman has a good overview. And The Morning Brew for today has a great round-up of links to various blog posts from within Microsoft and elsewhere.

I’m definitely excited about the new Visual Studio Community version. I’ve been using VS Express at home, for my various recreational programming projects, and it’s not bad, but I’m glad that I can now use a version of VS that supports extensions, and doesn’t impose artificial barriers between desktop and web development.

Oh, and F# 4.0 looks interesting!

game nostalgia

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for old computer games recently. Particularly, Moria (the Amiga version) and the “gold box” AD&D games.

Moria was a “roguelike” game, similar to several other games that were popular back when I was in college. They all, generally speaking, had simple, ASCII graphics, and randomly-generated dungeons. I’ve been looking around for more modern roguelike games, and have found a few interesting possibilities.

Yesterday, I bought Rogue Legacy on my PS3. This game has some elements in common with the roguelikes that I’m familiar with, including randomly-generated dungeons, but it’s really a 2D side-scroller, and I think it may be a bit too frenetic for my taste. But I’ll play around with it some more. It’s fun, but I don’t think I’m going to be any good at it.

On the subject of the AD&D gold box games, I did some web searching, to see if they’d been ported to Steam or re-released on GOG or anything, but it doesn’t look like they have. I did discover, though, that some folks from SSI (the company responsible for the gold box games) have started a new company called TSI, and they’re working on a new game, in the same spirit as the old AD&D games. That could be really interesting.

And, at some point, I should get back to the Final Fantasy series. I played all the way through FF VII on my PS1. (Though I may have finished it on my PS2. I can’t remember.) And I’ve gotten a good way through FF VIII. (Probably started on my PS2 and continued on my PS3, which, yes, can still play PS1 games!) I should finish that, then try FF IX. (I do have all three of these on CD, but they’re also available on PSN now, I think.)

Windows 10

I just installed the Windows 10 preview on my laptop, in a virtual machine running under VirtualBox. I’m sure I could have done this without instructions, as there wasn’t anything tricky about it, but I used the instructions found here.

I’m trying VirtualBox for the first time. Previously, before I wiped the laptop and re-installed everything, I was using Hyper-V. I wasn’t entirely happy with it, though, as I’d had some networking issues, both on the host and on the VMs. So I decided to give VirtualBox a try. I’d rather use VMWare, since that’s what I use at work, but a new license for that is $250, and VirtualBox is free.

I don’t have much to say about Windows 10 yet. I’ll try to play around with it a bit tomorrow, or over the weekend. I do think Microsoft is back on the right track with Windows, based on the new Start menu, and some of the other enhancements they’ve made.

Ditto on VirtualBox. So far, it works fine, and hasn’t screwed up my networking, so that’s cool.

Windows 8 fresh install

After last week’s successful, but not terribly useful, Windows refresh, I decided to go ahead and just reformat my ThinkPad and do a fresh install. I had to step back to Windows 8, since I have no Windows 8.1 install media, and no 8.1 product key. So that’s a bit of a pain, but I can live with it.

So far, I’ve successfully installed Windows 8, then installed all pending Windows updates, and now I’m doing the 8.1 upgrade from the Windows Store. I started the whole process at around 10 am, and it’s just about 2 pm now, so it’s taken quite a while. But I did run out for a haircut during the Windows 8 install, and out for a walk while the updates were downloading/installing, so I could be further along if I’d stayed home.

Once the 8.1 upgrade is done, I’ll have a bunch of software to install. But I’ll finally have a clean laptop, free of all the Lenovo cruft that got pulled along when I first upgraded from Win 7 to 8. And free of various past Visual Studio installs and other dev tool installs that weren’t easily removed.

Windows 8.1 refresh shenanigans

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to do a system refresh on my Windows 8.1 laptop. This machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad that originally shipped with Windows 7. I’ve since upgraded it to 8 and 8.1. I bought the Windows 8 upgrade online from Microsoft, so I have no install media. And of course I have no install media for 8.1. This leaves me in an awkward position, where I can’t do a normal refresh, as I have a Windows 8 product key, but no media for either 8 or 8.1. This is a pretty well-documented problem, and I think it really reflects poorly on Microsoft that they’ve done nothing to address it.

There are various (slightly Rube Goldberg style) workarounds, none of which worked out for me. The one thing that did work is the solution documented here, using the “recimg” command to create a restore image on my hard drive, which can then be used for the refresh. What that article didn’t make clear, though, is that the image you create that way has all your installed programs in it. That’s clear from this support document, but I didn’t find that one until today.

So, basically, I spent three hours creating a restore image that contained all the installed apps that I wanted to get rid of via the system refresh! Then I ran the refresh, and wound up with a Windows install that was nearly identical to the one I started with. Oh well. I guess the only way to clean things up would be to do a full format and re-install. But, again, since I have no 8.1 install media, I’m not sure I could even do that. It’s enough to drive a guy straight to Ubuntu. (Which probably works pretty well on a ThinkPad. Hmm.)

The main motivation for wanting to do the refresh was that I wanted a nice clean machine for the fall, since I will probably be taking a class via Coursera, and I wanted a good fast machine to work on. Well, I can still mess around with it some more and see what I can do with it.

Visual Studio 2013

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the VS 2013 launch, but I did read a few blog posts about it yesterday, including this one. Honestly, I haven’t really done much with VS 2012 yet, other than using it to work on some Project Euler problems at home, and using it as a front-end to TFS 2012 at work. (My day-to-day programming work is mostly done in the AX IDE environment right now.) Some of the stuff they’re doing sounds interesting, but it doesn’t really apply to me right now. One of these days, I’d like to get back into some serious .NET work, possibly including some Azure stuff, and ASP.NET MVC, and maybe get a chance to mess around with stuff like Unity. I do have one new interesting side project going on right now, though, which I want to write up in more detail later.

Visual Studio 2013 and Build

I watched a little bit of today’s keynote from the Build conference on my iPhone at lunch today. I have to say that Scott Hanselman’s bit was pretty cool. I don’t know if I’ll actually have any reason to use VS 2013 for an ASP.NET project any time soon though. I’m not really doing that kind of work right now, and I’m not sure when I’m likely to get back to it. But I’ll at least have to install the thing and mess around with it on a little sample project, just to keep up with what’s going on in ASP.NET.

On a related subject, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’ve never really learned much about ASP.NET MVC. I did learn the basics at one point, quite some time ago, but I’ve never used it on a real project, and I haven’t kept up with the most recent releases. Well, I started reading a book on MVC 4 recently. I haven’t gotten very far with it, but hopefully I can get far enough to at least say that I have a clue how it works.

vs 2012 express for web

I thought I was done blogging about VS 2012 for now, but I decided to start messing around with MVC 4 this week, so now I’ve gone ahead and installed VS 2012 Express for Web. I was kind of hoping that the install wouldn’t take that long, since one would assume that most of the components would already be on my machine, from VS Express for Desktop. But no. It took more than an hour to download and install everything. And I had to update NuGet in Express for Web, even though it was already up to date in Express for Desktop. And I had to apply the RemoveAllCaps fix again too. So I’m guessing that there’s less overlap between the Desktop and Web products than I would have hoped. But that’s OK — I’ve got plenty of hard drive space on my ThinkPad!

Meanwhile, Visual Studio 2013 has been announced. That was a bit of a surprise, since I’d assumed that the next major version would be VS 2014. There’s some pretty neat stuff in VS 2013, though a lot of it likely won’t be applicable to anything I’m doing at work or at home right now.

a bit more on Visual Studio 2012

I feel a little bad about yesterday’s screed on the VS 2012 UI. (But not bad enough to delete it or anything. I still wish they hadn’t mucked with the UI so much.) So today I thought I’d try to write a more positive post about VS 2012.

First, I’d like to link to this blog post on how cool it is that Microsoft has kept so much of the functionality of the full VS product in the Express editions. I do agree with him on this, and I am glad that Microsoft is willing to release such a full-featured product for free. Having said that, though, I’d also love to see a $99 “standard” version that comes a bit closer to the $499 “pro” version. I think my biggest issue with the Express product will be lack of support for extensions. I’ve gotten quite used to DPack, for instance, so it’ll be hard to do without that.

Here’s a good article on “Simple but Interesting Features of VS2012“. Some of these features should be pretty useful. I’m glad that Microsoft is still adding little things like this to Visual Studio. It’s easy to let small, useful, features get lost in favor of grand initiatives, and I’m happy to see that someone at MS still thinks about stuff like this.

Finally, here’s a post about some really great new features in VS2012. I was pretty stoked about a few of these, until I realized that it was an April Fool’s post. (Actually, a couple of these *would* be useful, and not that hard to implement…)