The Official Windows 8 User Thread

[lkailburn]

Just upgraded my work desktop as well which was also running KAS AV 2012. From the time I did my work laptop on the 26th to now, KAS has already configured a nice upgrade utility which automatically upgrades you to 2013. It was a manually process on the 26th.
In case anyone cared

-Luke

 

[cmdrdredd]

Downloaded yesterday, tried in place upgrade. Not so good results. Some of my Steam games wouldn't even start. Some would. After much screwing around I uninstalled Steam and all my games so I could move the steam folder back to my OS drive. Reinstalled Steam and Borderlands2 and Deus Ex, B2 didn't work before, Deus Ex did. Still the same. So I did a clean install and am now re-downloading my stuff. No steam yet, trying to get everything else in place first. 8 is kind of a pain to find stuff in but I'm getting there. One thing I haven't figured out yet is if you click on settings or even the built in PDF reader, I do like the built in, just hope it's not a security problem, the apps you used just keep running. Haven't figured out how to exit except to kill them in task manager. Ran into a problem enabling SLI in the control panel, I couldn't until I disabled a few running apps. ?

Steam seems to work fine for me, all my games seem fine. SLI didn't work right for me at first either. I ended up installing Nvidia drivers over the top and then everything worked. Odd...must have been an issue when the drivers transferred over to Windows 8. Are you talking about dragging the metro apps' window from the top down to the bottom? That's the equivalent of pressing the big red X on the desktop.

Why can't i pin some programs to the start menu ,Or even find the programs......... like i have ventrilo ,The startmenu doesn't see where ventrilo is but its still on my desktop. Also i have steam on a seperate drive any way for the start menu to see that as well?

You can pin the folder to the start menu or create a shortcut and pin that. Just right click on it and you should have the option.

 

[abaez]

How do you uninstall/disable the native win8 flash? Anyone? Can't find anything on this.

 

[cmdrdredd]

How do you uninstall/disable the native win8 flash? Anyone? Can't find anything on this.

I don't think you can. So someone like me who uses Chrome which has it's own flash support, is stuck with something there that doesn't need to be.

Adobe's PDF on the subject says the following. Basically it's embedded into IE10

Adobe® Flash® Player ships as part of Windows 8, and is used by Modern IE and Modern IE in Desktop Mode. This
distribution mechanism has the following administrative implications:
• Flash Player is updated through Windows Update.
• Because it ships as part of the browser, you can't uninstall Flash Player, although you can disable it on user
computers.
• If you already have a Flash Player update mechanism (for example, using SMS, or CAB files), it will no longer work
in Windows 8.
• If your users have Windows 7, the Windows 8 upgrade install updates Flash Player, and maintains existing user
data (shared objects)

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

I found some other small annoyances: even though Start8 can disable all the hot corners, if your cursor goes to the top of the screen you still get the hand gesture for closing an app. When you're browsing, for example, this can become annoying because even though you're selecting a tab it does nothing. Another thing is that when you want to select an internet connection on the taskbar a stupid Metro menu pops from the left.

AFAIK there is no way to resolve these two.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'm not seeing the gesture you refer to at the top of my browser. I'm using Chrome, does that make a difference? The metro style bar to the right of the screen does pop up when I click my LAN connection on the task bar. If you right click it however you get the contextual menu with advanced options.

Does the metro bar that pops up change depending on the type of connection? I'm on Ethernet but say if I was on wifi would the information and options displayed be different?

 

[abaez]

Adobe® Flash® Player ships as part of Windows 8, and is used by Modern IE and Modern IE in Desktop Mode. This
distribution mechanism has the following administrative implications:
• Flash Player is updated through Windows Update.
• Because it ships as part of the browser, you can't uninstall Flash Player, although you can disable it on user
computers.
• If you already have a Flash Player update mechanism (for example, using SMS, or CAB files), it will no longer work
in Windows 8.
• If your users have Windows 7, the Windows 8 upgrade install updates Flash Player, and maintains existing user
data (shared objects)

How can you do this?

 

[cmdrdredd]

How can you do this?

Open IE and click the gear to enter settings. Click on manage add-ons. You will see an option for "Shockwave Flash Object". Disable that.

 

[goodfella44]

Anyone know a way in the metro/start screen where it defaults to all apps/tiles shown? I like the look of having the smaller icons instead of right clicking and click all apps to see them.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

I'm not seeing the gesture you refer to at the top of my browser. I'm using Chrome, does that make a difference? The metro style bar to the right of the screen does pop up when I click my LAN connection on the task bar. If you right click it however you get the contextual menu with advanced options.

Does the metro bar that pops up change depending on the type of connection? I'm on Ethernet but say if I was on wifi would the information and options displayed be different?

The problem with the gesture on the top of the screen happens when the app is not running full screen. Oh well.

The Metro bar for internet connections sucks. I wish it'd be like in Windows 7.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I don't see what sucks about it. It offers you your various wifi connection options so what else is missing? Granted there's no obvious options visible but as I don't use wifi on my windows 8 install I'm a bit lost as to what else there could be.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

I can find it in file explorer and pin it to desktop task bar. But i dont see it under programs to pin it to the metro start menu.

I'm guessing then that Ventrillo is a portable app. Windows looks in the Start Menu folder to get lists of available apps and Ventrillo hasn't added an entry. Type 'shell:common start menu' (remove common to access your local menu folder) and place a link for Ventrillo somewhere.

 

[olds]

How do I scan a file for a virus? Before, you right clicked and selected scan.

 

[Quantos]

Well, I plan on giving W8 a try on my desktop later today. I'll probably dual boot it for now, just in case! It's working pretty well so far on my laptop. The main fear I have for my desktop is the fact that I have a dual monitor setup. I've heard of some people disliking the way that's handled in W8.

I don't think I'll install a start menu replacement for now; I'd like to see if I can get the start screen the way I'd like it to work. Basically that would be with as few interactions with metro apps as possible. Let's see how that goes!

 

[lkailburn]

Just did my 3rd computer, the living room PC. This time did a clean install on bare HDD, using the 'upgrade' DVD I had created earlier.
A couple things on this one:
-this mobo has an onboard realtek wifi, which 8 did not have drivers for. (ugh aren't we past this yet?). so I went out and grabbed 64bit 7 drivers which worked fine.
-under activation it just says product id: not available so I'm not entirely sure if it's properly activated or not.

-Luke

 

[abaez]

It's not. Try this: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2279344

 

[lkailburn]

Thanks. Now shows as activated

 

[olds]

...

Not comfortable not being able to right click and scan a file. So I disabled Defender and installed AVG...

That was in the Preview version. I now have the full version.

I still want to be able to scan single, downloaded files and found this:
http://www.guidingtech.com/14276/add-scan-with-windows-defender-8-context-menu

They lost me here:
"Step 5: Now create a new sub key under WindowsDefender and modify the data of the default DWORD to “C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe” -scan -scantype 3 -SignatureUpdate -file %1."

DWORD? I am not seeing that.
Anyone try this and get it to work?

 

[njdevilsfan87]

This still works... and the search is faster.

No it isn't. I have Win8 on my VM farm and it takes longer to hover my mouse over the right portion of the screen and wait for the menu to pop up and search something through it than it does to click start and search something on my Win7 gaming machine (both OS on SSDs). The search times feel pretty much identical, but Win7 is just more convenient to actually make the search.

It feels like it could be a great OS, but right now I can't get over start screen being the mandatory start button. The start screen should have just been an additional button (optional) in the task bar.

I don't regularly use the VM farm since all it does it just run VMs within Workstation 9 without much interference from me, so I can leave it. But Win8 is absolutely not being installed on my gaming machine for the time being.

 

[ViRGE]

That was in the Preview version. I now have the full version.

I still want to be able to scan single, downloaded files and found this:
http://www.guidingtech.com/14276/add-scan-with-windows-defender-8-context-menu

They lost me here:
"Step 5: Now create a new sub key under WindowsDefender and modify the data of the default DWORD to “C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe” -scan -scantype 3 -SignatureUpdate -file %1."

DWORD? I am not seeing that.
Anyone try this and get it to work?

When you create the Subkey an empty DWORD should be created by default. If not, create a new DWORD (right-click - > new -> DWORD).

 

[olds]

When you create the Subkey an empty DWORD should be created by default. If not, create a new DWORD (right-click - > new -> DWORD).

They don't say what to name the sub key. Does it make a difference?

 

[rsutoratosu]

I dont know if I'm using this pos right so far.

When I open an attachment ie picture or pdf, from a web browser, IE 10. It loads the picture in full screen, I hit escape, it goes to the photo wizard, does not bring me back to ie, when I alt f4 to close the photo wizard, it brings me back to the metro menu, so i gotta hit like 50 things to get back to the ie window.. wtf

 

[cmdrdredd]

No it isn't. I have Win8 on my VM farm and it takes longer to hover my mouse over the right portion of the screen and wait for the menu to pop up and search something through it than it does to click start and search something on my Win7 gaming machine (both OS on SSDs). The search times feel pretty much identical, but Win7 is just more convenient to actually make the search.

It feels like it could be a great OS, but right now I can't get over start screen being the mandatory start button. The start screen should have just been an additional button (optional) in the task bar.

I don't regularly use the VM farm since all it does it just run VMs within Workstation 9 without much interference from me, so I can leave it. But Win8 is absolutely not being installed on my gaming machine for the time being.

Windows+C key is faster

 

[ViRGE]

They don't say what to name the sub key. Does it make a difference?

The whole thing is poorly phrased by them. You're creating a new DWORD, which they stupidly call a subkey.

In fact, just take the following code, dump it into a .reg file, and execute that.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\WindowsDefender]
"MUIVerb"="Scan With Windows Defender"
"Icon"="%ProgramFiles%\\Windows Defender\\EppManifest.dll"
@=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\folder\shell\WindowsDefender\Command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Windows Defender\\MpCmdRun.exe\" -scan -scantype 3 -SignatureUpdate -file %1"

 

[olds]

Thanks ViRGE.
Couldn't get it to work. I went to the bottom of the page to leave a comment and it seems, it doesn't work for anyone...