Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

For a little over two months now the Building Windows 8 MSDN blog has been providing an insight into the new features and improvements currently in development for Windows 8. If you have even a slight interest in an early insight into the next Windows release then the blog is the place to look.

If you don’t fancy reading through the all the posts on there then allow us here at Glo Networks to summarise a few of the features we’ve found interesting just for you.

Improved file management: File copy jobs (copy, move, rename and delete) make up a large percentage of Windows 7 command use. As such Windows 8 looks to improve these functions. There’s a new centralised copy interface (no longer one dialogue per copy job, all will appear in the same) which has new monitoring and control tools, including the ability to pause individual jobs and a real-time throughput graph.

Improved “File Name Collision”: This is the situation that arises when copying a file to a location which already contains a file with the same name. The new conflict resolution dialogue displays the files from the source on the left and the files in the destination on the right. There’s a thumbnail image for each file, as well as information (modified date, size etc.) to help you make the decision on which file to keep.

ISO and VHD Access: ISO’s (virtual DVDs) and VHD’s (virtual hard disks) are now mountable natively in Windows 8. Simply double click the file and it will appear under Computer as either a DVD drive or hard disk, allowing easy access to the contents.

Hyper-V: Formally the domain of Windows Server editions, Hyper-V will be enabled in Windows 8. Hyper-V is a machine virtualization technology that will let you run more than one operating system at the same time on the same computer. One new Hyper-V feature developed specially for Windows 8 is the ability to use a wireless connection for your virtual machines to connect to the network.

Metro: This one’s a biggy. Windows 8 will have two user interfaces (UIs) available. Firstly the Windows Desktop UI that we know and love from previous versions of Windows makes a comeback, with improvements and new features aplenty. But available alongside this, or even instead of this should you prefer, is the new ‘Metro’, app based, touch friendly, UI. If you’ve seen the UI on the Zune devices, or the new Windows Phone (both interfaces are also called Metro) then you’ll already have an idea of the look and feel of this new UI. The idea is to bring together the power user capabilities of the PC and the more casual, app centric focus of tablets into a single device, with no compromise of the capabilities of either.

This is just a small selection of what has been discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog, there’s much more information on there and it also offers a way to give your feedback (via the comments section and the forum).

We’re excited to see what other new features and improvements will be present in the new OS, and will certainly be taking part in the open beta when the time comes. Keep an eye out for our thoughts and opinions in the future!

Posted by James in Desktops and Laptops, General, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Always used FileVault on OS X as a sort of best practice rule. In Lion they’ve changed it from just securing your userspace to full disk encryption. All very nice until I wondered why my MacBook Pro wasn’t feeling ‘smooth’ or as ‘quick’ as it was. A few tests showed the SSD as running way under par!

There’s a Corsair Force 3 240Gb SSD in the machine that was running in the 400MB/s range before the I’d loaded the machine with my Apps / Data and config etc. It’s running a 2Ghz i7 in a macBook Pro from early 2011 so should be able to cope!  So I took some rough benchmarks using Disk Speed Test from the App Store.

With FileVault	Without FileVault

That’s roughly a 70% speed decrease ! Shall not be using FileVault anymore.

Disclaimer : something else might have been causing this speed funny but it certainly doesn’t look like it !

Posted by Chris in Operating Systems | 4 Comments »

In the virtualisation game VMWare are big competitors.  They’ve been selling virtual machine software since 1999 and their products are the ‘go to’ virtualisation tools for many businesses (not us at Glo). But since announcing their most recent price structure changes VMWare have experienced a huge amount of criticism from their customer base.

And we can understand why. The basic gist of the change is a cap on the RAM you can apply to your virtual machines per license. Formally licenses were required on a per processor basis alone, now, if you reach the virtual RAM cap for the number of processor’s you have licensed, you will require extra licenses to cover any additional RAM. This increase caused the change to be dubbed the ‘Memory vTax’.

When VMWare first announced this pricing change the memory allowance per license were rather low, meaning (obviously depending on the configuration of the virtual machines) some VMWare customers were looking at their licensing costs being several times what the old pricing structure would have cost. Reacting to the complaints of their customers VMWare have now raised the cap, which should keep the license costs to a more reasonable level for most customers.

Here at GloNetworks we’ve always tended towards the Microsoft Virtualization software ‘Hyper-V’ over the VMWare options, and right now we’re more confident than ever in our choice. It could be argued that WMWares virtualisation software is more ‘feature-full’ however we feel that Hyper-V’s pricing has always been more appropriate for us and our customers’ requirements. And since Microsoft have appeared to confirm they have no plans to use a similar ‘Memory Tax’ in its next Hyper-V product (Windows Server ‘8’ Hyper-V) we’re sure this will continue to be the case.

Posted by James in Applications, General, Operating Systems, Servers | 1 Comment »

After being unveiled to the public some 9 months ago Apple’s new operating system sees its release today. So congratulations expectant Apple fans: It’s a Lion! Or OSX Lion to be more precise.

As the newest edition of Apples popular OSX family of operating systems Lion has great pedigree. Previous OSX versions (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard etc.) have been very well received. But when you look at the interface changes and new features in Lion another source of inspiration is also apparent; Apples iPhone and iPad operating system iOS.

OSX Lion is available from today, from the Mac App Store, for £20.99. Unlike other OSX releases there is no hard copy available; it’s a download only purchase.

We’ve not yet had a chance to play with Lion but rest assured, once we’ve got our teeth into it we’ll report our thoughts on the new OS here on the blog.

Posted by James in Desktops and Laptops, General, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Google has got a question to ask you: What do you love?

Their newest service takes your answer and pulls results from a plethora of Google services. It then displays all the results it gets from these in boxes (1 box per service) on one results page.

While searching across the numerous services Google provides could be a handy tool, unfortunately, at the moment it feels a bit like a cheap advert for everything Google.

Some of the boxes don’t really display search results, but rather just contain automatically generated image showing an example of how your search term could be used on the specified service (for example when we tried the search term ‘God’ the Google Calendar box shows a diary with an event for today’s date called ‘Date with God’). At the moment the best use for the page is probably just to find Google services that you may not even know exist.

Although the ‘What do you love?’ site is active at both www.wdyl.com and www.google.com/whatdoyoulove/ there’s not yet been an announcement from Google regards the tool. Also there is a box on the results page that states ‘More coming soon!’. Perhaps this means that Google intends to change some things before officially announcing.

Posted by James in Cool Stuff, General | No Comments »