Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog) » windows

Windows 8 News and Features

James — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:13:51 +0000

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!

Glo Backup – Announcement

Chris — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:00:16 +0000

Glo Networks are about to launch their new online backup solution. In the past we’ve used and resold solutions by some of the worlds biggest players but always found their costs and feature set clashing.

How would you like a fully managed backup for your desktop with 10GB of data for under £13 per month ?

More info later this week ….

Windows 2008 and Vista SP2

Chris — Sat, 30 May 2009 06:22:57 +0000

Windows 2008 and Vista SP2 is out and coming to a Windows Update near you soon.

There are no new features to get excited about just a huge list of security and bug fixes for the operating systems. We’ve been running the Beta and then the RC (Release Candidate) for quite some time on various PCs and servers. They’ve been stable and we have now installed the full service pack on most of our machines. No problems spotted so far so, get to it everyone.

A spreadsheet of all the included fixes can be found at this direct Microsoft link.

Vista SP1 Reliability and Performance update

Dave — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:24:32 +0000

Microsoft have released an update for Windows Vista with SP1, KB952709 is marked as a Reliability and performance update with a whole list of fixes such as -

Windows Vista SP1-based computers by reducing the number of crashes that may be caused by the Apple QuickTime thumbnail preview in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

You can find the full list of fixes Here along with the update for 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows Vista SP1

Auto USB Drive Mounting

Chris — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:30:21 +0000

For some time now we’ve had an issue at some customers sites that their servers don’t auto assign a drive letter to a USB drive when added. This is a bit of a pain as some customers use USB HDs for backups, so each time they change them we need to connect in and mount them with the right drive letter.
There is a fix –

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and DataCenter Edition do not assign drive letters to new fixed drives (USB and Firewire disks are usually ‘fixed’). This is up to the administrator because otherwise SAN (Storage Area Network) drives might be mounted accidentally.
This feature is called AutoMount and can be enabled by means of the DiskPart tool: Open a commandprompt, enter diskpart, on the DiskPart prompt enter automount to see the current state or automount enable to enable it.

Courtesy of uwe-sieber.