[Article] How fast is the eMMC storage on the Asus Transformer Book T100 BayTrail tablet

Couple of weeks back I was ranting about how slow the eMMC storage on these Windows 8 tablets and that was the main cause of lag in them. You really need to have a proper SSD based storage on these tablets to really harness the power of the OS.

A week ago I bought my new Tablet and unfortunately it still came with eMMC storage. But I was hoping that it would be faster than the storage in the previous generation tablets. Today I ran Crystal Disk Mark to confirm it. Here are the results.

Asus Transformer Book T100

 

[Article] BSODs can corrupt your Windows installation and run System File Check to fix them

Most people who h e been using Windows operating system in their PCs have experienced at least one blue screen. Once that happened, you can do none other than press the reset button. Because of that, people started calling it Blue Screen of Death (a.k.a BSOD). In the early days, a blue screen could come up even by running software that acted erroneously. But nowadays, you hardly see them and almost always it is the 3rd party drivers that can give you a BSOD.

 

That, is only if you are not an overclocker.  BSOD is the most common way of identifying instability when you are overclocking your CPU. You might get a BSOD while booting Windows up, or idling on the desktop, light loads or when stress testing heavily. If you are getting BSODs while stress testing heavily, at least you can be happy that you are almost there. If you are getting BSODs while loading Windows, then you are a long way away from your stable settings.

 

BSODs can be a minor hassle. But it can corrupt Windows which might make is completely unbootable. Or, the BSODs that you get afterwards can be actually caused by the corruption. Fortunately, there is a way to check if the Windows system files are corrupted or not. Up to Windows 7, there was this small utility called System File Checker, which is launched from the command prompt (in admin mode.) But in Windows 8, there is another "better" way to do it. The System File Checker is still there, but people say that there are times that you might not be able to fix all issues with it.

 

I'll list them both for you.

 

System File Checker method.

 

Run the following command from command prompt that was launched as Admin.

sfc /SCANNOW

It will show you the following screen and run for few minutes. If it finds errors, it will try to auto repait them and it will tell you where the log is saved so that you can check what was wrong and if it was successfully fixed or not.

 

 

The new method.

 

Again, run the following command in a command prompt launched as Admin.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth

You will see the following screen and just like SFC, it will run for few minutes checking if there are any issues. It will automatically correct the files.

 

 

I suggest that you run these system file checks if you ever get any BSODs. I’d actually run both of them.

 

[Article] Monitoring PC remotely using TeamViewer

When you overclock your CPU, you need to test it for a long time. It is very ineffective if you do it when you are at home. You miss the chance to use it for something useful. You might be able to watch a movie or listen to music or browse the internet while the stress tests are running in the background, but if might crash and that would drive you nuts.

Hence, I stress test overnight while I am sleeping. But that is not a long time. 6hrs or so at best. The best time to run stress tests is when you are at work. But the issue there is, if the PC crashes while testing, the PC will restart and sit there not doing any useful work - wasting power as well as time. If you could either turn the PC off or change a small setting rerun the stress test, it would be great.

That's where TeamViewer comes in. I installed TeamViewer in my PC and iPhone and I can monitor the current state via the mobile app. But you should enable "Automatically Restart" option in an event of a crash, otherwise it will be stuck at the blue screen. (But this is the default setting, so if you haven't changed anything it should work as we want.) But there is one problem. I have an iPhone 4S and it doesn't support LTE. So it is pretty slow. You can monitor somehow, but shutting it down or changing a setting and restarting the stress test are hard work. Sometimes it works quickly depending on where I am and how congested the network is.

No thanks to the quality of SoftBank's 3G network, most of the times the only thing that you can do with the iPhone app is shutting the PC down. Now that I am using Intel XTU as the stress test, I can do everything from one software, thus it is easier than having to run AISuite III and Prime95 at the same time. However, it is still a tedious thing to do with the small screen and the crappy connection. Windows 8 isn't helping me either. You know how many steps shutting down requires, right? So I created a shutdown shortcut and added it to the Start Screen so that I can quickly shut the PC down. Luckily, I haven't had to use it yet. (i.e. XTU not HandBrake didn't crash)

Most of these apps have a web console and I searched if TeamViewer had one too as it would be faster than using the iPhone. It seems the web console only allows you to join web meetings. You cannot connect to your PC from a web interface. The issue is that I cannot install any software on these common PCs (the ones that has internet connectivity) so I cannot run TeamViewer application. Luckily, there is an official portable version! I downloaded it and tried it out. It worked flawlessly. Now I don't have to use the phone to do the monitoring. Of course I cannot do it all the time because this is not my work PC. I can check the status from phone and if there is something wrong, I can log into a common PC and do the big stuff from the Windows application.

Right now I am running the H.264 transcoding tests to see if the CPU is stable. (So far so good!) I am monitoring the status through TeamViewer. Pretty cool.

[Article] Windows 8 does not need Lucid Virtu software for QuickSync with a dedicated GPU installed?

Edit:

You don’t need to read the whole post. QuickSync doesn’t work even in Windows 8 “out of the box”. But if you follow these instructions, you will be able to get it to work without needing Virtu MVP. I tested it in Handbrake Nightly, and it worked like a charm. Got over 150fps in 1080p content. In fact, on my new Haswell CPU, the quality seems much better than when I tested it on my old SandyBridge CPU.

 

I have been searching for the best Z87 motherboard to base my decision of whether to upgrade to Haswell or not. I really like the features (software features) offered with the Asus motherboards: leaning towards Z87 Pro or MVI Hero. I was listing up the advantages of getting a new Asus Z87 board and one thing caught my eye: QuickSync.

 

I thought every board would come with free Lucid Virtu MVP license but it seems that's not the case (MSI boards come with it though). So how do you get QuickSync working with Haswell CPUs when a dedicated graphics card is installed? I asked around and Googled and came across one interesting piece of information. They say that Windows 8 doesn't need it for QuickSync because it allows you to load multiple graphics drivers side by side. Apparently Windows 7 still needs something like Lucid Virtu. Remember though you have to have the iGPU enabled in the UEFI and  Intel drivers installed.

 

I still haven't been able to verify this because I only got to know about this on the way to work. I know the first thing i need to do when I go home. But if this is true, I have been a  complete fool all this time. Since there is no Windows 8 supported Lucid Virtu (non-MVP) available, I thought I couldn't use QuickSync anymore. Only the MVP edition supports Windows 8. But my motherboard doesn't have a license to that; only to the non-MVP edition.

 

But doesn't matter. It's better that I don't have to install an additional software layer there. I'll check this out as soon as I go home and update the post. Until then, you are welcome to try it out and post in the comments.

Edit:

So I went home and tried this trick. I enabled the iGPU in UEFI and came to desktop. I downloaded the QuickSync enabled beta version of Handbrake (I didn’t know it was out) and I chose the Intel QuickSync video codec as shown below.

[Article] Sent the Latitude 10 Essentials tablet for repair/replacement

Finally Dell arranged the tablet to be picked for repair/replacement. A person from Sagawa courier service came to our place yesterday (Saturday, the 27th of July) and took it away. He brought all the necessary packaging with him. Really there shouldn’t be any need for all that because I gave it to him wrapped in a air bubble wrapping. Hey, the screen’s suppose to be built using Gorilla Glass. If Dell is afraid that it would be damaged easier, how can we believe their claims that it is durable?

I of course had to take off the anti-glare shield I had on it. You cannot apply it again, so I threw it away. There goes $10 or whatever price I paid for it. Anyways, it looked nice and bright after I removed the shield. Clean too, because there were air bubbles between the shield and the screen. I don’t have the patience required for these stuff.

They say it will take 7 to 10 days to return it. I guess that’s the way it is. If I bought an iPad, I could simply go to an Apple Store and exchange it to a brand new iPad within few minutes. However, if I asked them to come and pick it up, it would take about a week for the whole thing. In that case, Dell’s service isn’t that bad.

I just hope they will be able to reproduce the screen issue. The screen starts to work at times. But if you turn it off (just the screen) and let it rest for a while, it won’t work again. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how things go in the next week.

[Guide] Windows Explorer troubles in Windows 8 and a possible fix

In the last few days, I had been using Windows 8 predominantly on my work PC. It's easier to use the same OS at home and at work. It was pretty good at the beginning, but starting yesterday, it got really sluggish and acting up.

I had to fix some bugs in the cloud printing application. We have a tool for testing it. We have to load up different settings files for different test scenarios and whenever I selected the test scenarios written in the form of XML, it would take about 5 seconds to actually show it up in the GUI. Usually there is no such delay. The tool is written in Win32.

 

When testing the performance through the testing tool, the actual rendering would finish quickly, but it would take another 10 seconds or so to output the rendered PRN file. Again, usually there is no such delay.

 

Another issue was that when I did some file/folder operation such as creating, renaming, moving files and folders, Windows Explorer wouldn’t reflect the result of that operation on the UI. I have to press F5 key to refresh Windows Explorer and only then it would be reflected on the UI.

 

Something definitely was acting up. It seems that all these things were related. Windows Explorer could be the culprit. The easiest thing for me to do was to create another user account and see if I could reproduce the same issues. I couldn’t. I didn’t think all those mishaps was because my user profile was corrupted. But it seemed that was the case.

 

So I followed the same thing that I did on my Windows 7 installation few days ago. It worked fine for Windows 8 as well. Now all is back to where it should be. No lags or Explorer issues.

 

Bad Windows! BAD!

 

[Review] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review–part 3: the performance, the camera and battery life

This is the part 3 of the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review. This one is about the performance, the camera and battery life.

Note: If you missed the part 1 and 2, click on the following links to read them.

Part 1: Ease of holding the tablet and look & feel

Part 2: Usability

OK, let’s get on with this section then.

Performance

If you want to find out how measurably fast the tablet is, read this review. I will not go into those tests. I will only talk about how I feel, together with Windows 8.

1) CPU

I am a guy that loves fast computers. This tablet definitely isn't fast. That’s mostly due to the Atom Clovertrail 1.8GHz dual core/hyper threaded CPU in there. The specs wise, it doesn’t seem slow, but Clovertrail is an in-order executed CPU, which makes it slow compared to Core series CPUs.  But I knew that before I bought it.

There was no choice, to be honest. ARM doesn't support full version of Windows 8 and Intel Core series CPUs have terrible battery life, need active cooling and all that adds weight. So we all have to put up with the slowness of the Atom chips. Hopefully Baytrail will fix it.

2) Storage

Anyways, the CPU doesn't seem to be the only thing that is slow in this tablet. The storage medium is eMMC which is solid state alright, but doesn't have the raw speed of an SSD. It's pretty slow, just like a USB flash drive.

3) The OS itself

But Windows 8 modern apps are slow to launch anyways. The video app for example takes about 5 seconds to load a video for the first time. The Windows Store is terrible. It is slow and needs a lot of user interactions to get the smallest thing done.

4) Wi-Fi

Downloads are not so fast. Wi-Fi browsing performance is comparable to my iPhone 4S, sometimes even slower. I was expecting more. The current generation devices have better Wi-Fi performance than iPhone 4S.

The Camera

The camera on a tablet doesn’t make much sense and people taking photos with a tablet look like idiots. But nevertheless, some people would like to see how the camera performs. I captured a video and took some photos with it.

Photos:

		Photos from Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Video:

Battery life

I haven't measure the battery life accurately but according to the proper reviews, the battery seems to hold for about 8-10hrs. That's good and you should not expect nothing less from a CPU this slow. In other words, you won't have to worry about the battery life.

Next: bundled bloat ware, Windows 8.1 compatibility, recovery and firmware updates

[Review] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review–part 2: Usability

This is the part 2 of the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review. This one is about usability.

Note: If you missed the part 1, click on the following link to read it.

Part 1: Ease of holding the tablet and look & feel.

OK, let’s get on with this section then.

1) Media streaming from the PC

One of the use cases for this tablet was media streaming from the desktop. While there are hiccups like the video player being too slow to launch videos and sometime you lose the network connection to the video file if you had it paused for a long time, the streaming experience is great. You don't get black bars on HD content like you do in iPad. You don’t need a 3rd party software to manage the streams. And the playback is smooth. Funny how the MacBook Air 2011 model that I have screams when you watch a video. No fans here. All that’s said, the sound quality of the speakers sadly ruins the experience.

2) Desktop experience

This has nothing to do with the tablet. It is all Windows 8'a fault. The desktop apps aren't easy to use. It is not because the controls are not big enough for the touch (at 1366x768, they are large enough), but because they are not optimized for touch. Only the bundled apps have full support for stuff like finger scrolling and zooming.

If you increase the DPI, things get larger and it becomes easier to use. You can also change the default view setting to “Large Icons” instead of “Details”. But the issue with that is, this setting gets synced with your desktop as well! That, I don’t need.

I tried adding a photo on Windows Live Writer for a blog post I was writing and I had to waste like 2 minutes just to grab the holders to crop the photo. Google Chrome is horrible and actually too slow for this tablet. Media Player Classic, which is the video player I use on the desktop also doesn't work well with touch. Office apps are OK, but typing is difficult with the virtual keyboard, especially because of the larger size of the tablet. Virtual keyboard has no issues on a mobile phone though. So, you see, the desktop experience hasn't been that great. The only reason I go into the desktop is to access the files stored on the desktop PC. Otherwise I hardly use the desktop apps. I probably should have went with WinRT then!!!

3) Metro experience

Metro runs pretty well on a tablet. Maybe because of the cheap eMMC storage, the apps take a bit of time to load. But after that it is mostly the CPU, which is also slow.

Windows 8 needs more official apps from the major app makers like Facebook and Google. Twitter now has an official client but it is very feature limited. Sure, most people will argue that those are just web apps, and they are right, but you really need touch optimized apps because the web apps are mostly made for the mouse.

4) Reading books

Now, Microsoft doesn't have their own bookstore so you either have to download PDF files or use a service like Kindle to get books in. Sure, you can easily open the PDF files stored in your desktop PC as well. Even though the screen doesn't have a high pixel density as the iPad, once you are immersed in the book ,or anything that you are reading for that matter, you won't notice the pixels. Sure, if you compare it with a iPad side by side, you will notice the difference. But to tell the truth, the low resolution has not bothered me, not even once, during the last four months. It's the glare that ruins things and I have dealt with it. Maybe if you read for many hours, your eyes will get tired soon.

5) Music/podcast listening experience

This is downright bad, because of the crappy speakers. I prefer to listen to them on my iPhone.

6) Browsing experience

Metro version of IE10 (now IE11 in Windows 8.1 Preview) is great actually. Better than mobile Safari. There are times that it becomes slow. But nothing is perfect. Sure, you cannot have add-ons and it will never get add-ons. Most of the issues are related to Windows 8 and some of them are being fixed in 8.1. I'll be writing a separate article about that.

Next: the performance, the camera and battery life

[Guide] Getting into Android Development–speeding up the emulator on Intel platform using Intel HAXM

Introduction

We guys in Japan are finally going to do some development for Android platform. First thing’s first. We need to setup the development environment.

I referred to the official development tutorial provided by Google. This means, I will be using Eclipse as the IDE. I downloaded and installed the Android SDK integrated version from Google. Here’s where you can download it from. LINK.

Since I don’t know anything about developing from Android platform, I started from the Building Your First App section. I did the coding for the Hello World app. Then it was time to run it. For that, I first had to create a Virtual Device because I don’t have an Android device with me.

The Crappy Emulator

There are a lot of restrictions. I first selected the Nexus4 device which comes with 2GB RAM, but the emulator doesn’t work if you specify more than 768MB RAM.

So I set it to 768MB RAM, and started the emulator. It took a whole 60 seconds to just load the OS. Fine. But the UI was even worse. It was so slow respond.

Would “Use Host GPU” option fix it?

I read somewhere that if you check “Use Host GPU” option, the UI becomes snappier. So I went into the Android Virtual Device I created before and did that. But that didn’t do any good.

Enabling Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator

So I searched the internet and found out that if you use Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator, you can make it snappier. This is how you enable it.

Launching Android SDK Manager

First you have to open Android SDK Manager. There is an icon for it at the root of the Android SDK you downloaded. But for some reason it would not launch for me. But there is a fix.

• Close the Eclipse IDE if you have it open.
• Open \sdk\tools\android.bat in a text editor. (Notepad for example)
• Search for “set java_exe=”
• There, enter the path where java.exe is installed. If you installed JRE to the default location, it would be at C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\java.exe. Put the path within quotation marks.
• Now it should look like this.

set java_exe=”C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\java.exe”

• Now save the android.bat file, and double click it to open Android SDK Manager.

 

Installing Intel x86 packages

In Android SDK Manager, select the following two options and click on Install Packages. It should be straightforward after that.

Now launch Android Development Environment (or Eclipse) and check the properties of your Android Virtual Device (or add a new one).

You will see that you can now select Intel Atom as the CPU.

However, if you try to launch the emulator after selecting Intel Atom as the CPU, it will still work as crappy as before. You will notice that there is an error shown in the console.

emulator: Failed to open the HAX device!
HAX is not working and emulator runs in emulation mode
emulator: Open HAX device failed

Installing Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager

Looks like there is still work to do. Now we have to install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager. (HAXM).

Go to \sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and run IntelHaxm.exe to install Install HAXM.

However, for this to succeed, you have to have a CPU that supports Intel VT-x. You can check if your CPU supports VT-x using Intel Processor Identification Utility. Remember even if your CPU supports it, it might be disabled in BIOS/UEFI. So check there as well, and enable it.

Enjoy the speed

Now you are ready for action.

Open the Android Development Environment and in there go and add a new Virtual Device. For some reason, updating the existing Virtual Device didn’t work for me. From there, select Intel Atom as the CPU and rest of the settings as you please. I checked “Use GPU Host” option as well.

After that I launched the emulator. Woah! The difference was night and day. The emulator fully starts within 10 seconds. The UI is fluid, just as running inside the real hardware.

Now it is time to develop. :)

[Article] Refresh feature of Windows 8

Refresh is a new feature Windows 8 brought to the table. It allows you to revert your Windows installation to a fresh and clean state without losing any data. Of course, you will lose all the applications that your had installed before Refreshing, so hopefully you will have those setup files still in the hard disk. If not, you can use this method to install most commonly used apps easily. Windows Store Apps will be automatically downloaded and installed however. A file with all the applications that got removed will be saved on your desktop.

How do you Refresh your OS? There are two ways. First way is doing it from Windows itself. The second is doing is using your install media. (DVD or USB stick). But by default, you have to insert the install media for the Refresh to work. (Click here for a tutorial on how to make a bootable USB stick from a Windows 8 ISO file)

 

Doing it from Windows

 

This is how you do it from Windows. Refresh can be accessed from PC Settings -> General -> Refresh your PC without affecting your files. You will be asked to insert the install media and reboot.

 

 

Now, if you don't have a disc or USB stick that you had burned or prepared before, it will be a slight setback. But if you have the Windows 8 ISO file on your hard drive, you can actually use it as the source. You can find out how to do that by referring to this article.

 

Doing it from install media (DVD or USB stick)

 

If you cannot boot into Windows, you will have to use a bootable install media to Refresh your installation. 

 

 

However, if you can somehow manage to enter the recovery environment (repeatedly smashing F8 key just before Windows starts to boot), you can do it easily from there as well.

 

Things to do after a Refresh

 

There is one important thing that you need to do after a Refresh. The Windows Recovery Environment will leave behind the old Windows installation in a folder called Windows.Old. This folder will be in C drive and it is a huge folder. You cannot delete it the normal way. You have to do it via Disk Cleanup.

Windows 8 got deactivated (error code: 0xC004F074 and then 0xC004C4AA)

I got a Windows 8 activation problem yesterday. All of a sudden, the Windows Action Center was telling me that Windows is not activated and I should do it soon. When I checked the system properties, it was telling me that the activation will be expired on 19th of July. I was like “what the hell”! That’s in a month. And I have a legit copy of Windows 8.

I tried few things, but I got the same error message every time. When I checked Microsoft help page, it seemed that the serial number I was using is not valid for the edition of Windows I had installed. I have a key for Windows 8 Pro edition as well as Media Center edition. I was supposed to have installed  the Media Center edition because I used that key, but apparently I had forgotten to update the Pro edition to Media Center edition. I did, and upon restart, Windows was completely deactivated!  When I tried to activate, it didn't let me. This time I got a different error code (0xC004C4AA).

Updating Windows 8 on office PC

At work, usually there are two PCs for each engineer. One is for development and the other one for documentation. Naturally, the document PC is an old PC that is running Windows XP. But I have an Athlon X2 4400 based PC as my document PC. Couple of weeks ago, I installed Windows 8 on it.

I work inside a lab which doesn’t have internet connectivity. We have, however, a secured connection to our client (I would not disclose who this is) and through this we can even use Windows Update. But they haven’t still updated whatever they are doing to support Windows 8. So, Windows Update doesn’t work with Windows 8.

But nothing is lost. We have common PCs at work that can be used to access the internet. I went to one of them and downloaded the tool called WSUS Offline Update. You don’t have to install that tool. Extract the zip file you download, and just run UpdateGenerator.exe.

This is the main screen of WSUS Offline Update.

I selected Windows 8 from the options and also specified it to create an ISO file. After that it was seamless. It went and fetch all the necessary updates and created an ISO file for me.

How much host writes does Windows 8 Fast Start feature use?

Windows 8 has a cool feature called Fast Start. When you enable it from Power Options dialog, it uses the hiberfile.sys to save part of the running state when you shutdown. So when you boot into Windows, it loads that part it saved to the hiberfile.sys directly to memory, instead of doing the full blown loading process. Like you expected, shutting down takes some time because it has to save whatever it needs to the disk before switching the power off.

At first, I thought this Fast Start feature saved only a small amount of information to the disk. But it turns out, it saves a considerable amount of information to the disk. I checked this by monitoring the amount of host writes to my SSD.

Previously I monitored the amount of host writes as at 27th of March to be 0.8GB. Then today (7th of May) I measured it to be 1TB. That’s roughly 200GB (it could be more or less depending on how Samsung Magician software rounds it off) in a span of 40 days. During that time, I only installed Octave and VMware Player to the SSD. It would have totaled to about 500MB. Maybe give another 10GB for temp files, browser cache, mail cache, Windows updates, driver updates and few other not-so-important things. Surely, it all wouldn’t take up 10GB. That’s all. The rest of it has to be those writes related to the Fast Start feature. So it’s roughly 5GB/day.

And I don’t even turn off my PC that often. On weekdays, I would do it twice. On weekends, only once. Restarts don’t count because then it does not save the state. So in total, it would come to about 70 shutdowns. OK, call it 100. Doesn’t matter how much it saves per shutdown. What matters is how much it saves per day. In total, that’s about 5GB per day. That’s a lot!!! That’s a lot of SSD wear and tear.

So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to disable Fast Start and monitor for month and see how things progress. Since I haven’t done a properly controlled test, you can always argue these results are not valid. But it’s for your SSD’s own safety. Disable Fast Start if you value your SSD. Heck, you are only saving a couple of seconds of boot time. You can always use Standby. :)

Now you can buy Microsoft Surface RT directly from the Japanese Microsoft Store

Surface Pro was announced more than 2 months ago but Japan only recently got the Surface RT model which was released more than 6 months ago. At least now you can buy the Surface RT directly from Microsoft’s Japanese Store. The prices start from JPY49,800 for the 32GB model (57,800 with touch cover) and JPY57,800 for the 64GB model (JPY65,800 with touch cover).

Amazon Japan was selling them for a high price – like JPY60,000 range even when the USD was about JPY80. Even the Expansys.jp website is selling them (the 32GB model) for JPY62,000 (with the touch cover) and they only offer like 3 month warranty. Duh!

No thanks to the new Japanese government, the currency has been devaluing ever since and it has dropped by a whopping 20%. Now the JPY sells for 1USD = 100JPY. Sucks! If Microsoft made the Surface RT available in Japan before this devaluation, the price would have been around JPY40,000. More people would have bought it I guess. I still wouldn’t, because especially back then, there weren’t many apps. The situation hasn’t changed a lot, but at least there are legacy apps if you really want to get something done. In my case, playback of MKV and FLV. The built-in XBOX Video app doesn’t support those, surprisingly, popular formats.

Creative X-Fi Titanium audio card went missing in action

I wake up early in the morning to play Crysis 3 before my wife woke up and what do I get? There is no audio. The audio icon in the system tray is crossed out which indicates either the mute button has been pressed or the device is not available. It was the latter.

I rebooted. No go. Dammit!

Then I uninstalled the drivers of my Creative X-Fi Titanium (PCI-E) audio card, cleaned up the remaining clutter using Driver Sweeper and reinstalled the latest PAX drivers. No go! Device Manager wouldn't show that a card even exist. Weird.

Then I removed the audio card from the PC. Rebooted into Windows to clear out any erroneous statues in OS/software/drivers. (No idea if this would make a difference, but I did so anyway. ) Then I plugged back the card and rebooted into Windows. Before installing the driver, I checked device manager and there was the audio card, with an exclamation mark. I didn't worry about it too much at that point and reinstalled the drivers. When I came back to Windows, the audio card was nowhere to be found. :/

Will Microsoft bring back the start menu in Windows Blue/8.1? Hope not!

They shouldn't and I don't think they will either. But they'll probably let you boot directly into the desktop, if you are on a PC. Instead of bringing back the Start Menu, they will try to make the Start Screen more usable and that's the way to go. Who knows, there definitely should be people who prefer the Metro interface even on the desktop. A PC should be without restrictions and they should not restrict people to Start Menu. People should have a choice. If you want restrictions, go buy an iPad or an iPhone or even a Mac.

We already know that Microsoft is adding smaller tiles and improving search in Windows Blue. That's how they are fixing the deficiencies that are present in the current design. There maybe other tweaks coming too. I certainly hope so. We really want to see what Microsoft has been doing during the past year.

How about adding folder support? Like what you get in iOS? That would allow most people to reduce the amount of scrolling required to find what they need. Not every app supports live tile view and some don't need that. There is no reason why you cannot group them in folders. But they will have to do something about tiles that have live views when grouped in folders. Maybe disable live tile view for those apps or do something innovative. I would prefer the latter.

Also it would be great if we could assign custom icons to apps on the Start Screen. This would be beneficial for legacy apps that ruin the looks and feel of the Start Screen. Quarter sized titles will fix this to a certain degree but most icons will still look out of place.

Latest leaked build shows that there is a new app launch animation coming. While I don't mind these stuff because it shows how fluid the UI is, I would also like to be able to disable animations completely - just like you can disable animations on the desktop.

A lot of cool stuff are coming and people only care about the Start Menu. Shows how much people don't like change.

The Windows 8 tablet experience - web browsing

Browsing and watching videos are the two most important things that I do with the tablet. If either of these experiences are sour, the entire tablet experience become sour for me.

 

Google Chrome

I was planning to use Google Chrome when I received the tablet, because that way I could get the full browsing experience that a full blown desktop browser offers. I could integrate LastPass, sync my bookmarks and settings with my desktop PC, block ads (the screen is not large enough to allow ads on a tablet, even though I'm not against advertising) and integrate Internet Download Manager to download flash video off the streaming sites.

But those plans got irradiated the second I found out how pathetic the Google Chrome's UI was as a touch UI. The interface is very slow as well. (I have noted on PCs too, if you have a fast PC the UI feels fluid, but if you are using an ancient PC from the Pentium4 days, the UI performance starts to crawl.) You cannot zoom with two fingers without using the f-word. The Metro version is no better. Metro version is pretty much the same thing as the desktop version, only made to run under the Metro environment. Nothing's done to improve the touch experience.

 

What about Firefox? They have a Metro version too right?

Then I checked Firefox Nightly build that comes with a Metro version alongside the desktop version. It wasn't that great either. There definitely were some attempt to improve the touch experience, but the UI wasn't smooth -or responsive- enough. And the UI acted erroneously most of the times. For example, when I set focus to the address bar, the virtual keyboard wouldn't come up. Also it is currently lacking a lot of features. Add-ons are not supported yet. Until they start supporting add-ons there is no way I can recommend Firefox over IE10.

But since Firefox is at least on the right track-on the UI perspective at least, I will continuously monitor how their Metro version of the browser evolves. Who knows, I might end up ditching Chrome on the desktop and completely switch to Firefox, if Mozilla gets their Metro version of the browser right, because I want uniformity between the devices I use.

 

Windows 8 Ultra Fast Boot on ASRock Z68 Extreme4

Remember few days ago I posted about ASRock releasing a beta UEFI for my aging Z68 Extreme4 motherboard that allowed me to enable Ultra Fast Boot? When I enabled that option in UEFI, the first problem I had was with my graphics card. I got an error saying that the Graphics Card's firmware didn't support GOP (). I asked for a supported firmware from Palit, the manufacturer of my Jetstream GTX670. They were very supportive and provided me with the necessary firmware. The firmware flashing went without any odd event, and that error message about the graphics card not supporting Ultra Fast Boot did not appear. Instead, every time it would go straight into UEFI when I enabled Ultra Fast Boot. UEFI would automatically change that option from Ultra Fast Boot to Fast Boot.

After a little bit of browsing the Internet, I managed to find out that for this Ultra Fast Boot to work, I needed to have Windows 8 installed in UEFI. I had no idea what that meant then, but one thing was certain. The boot drive had to be formatted in GPT. The old way is formatting the drive as MBR. When you format your drive as GPT, you have to have UEFI supported motherboard if you want to boot from that drive. Sure, my ASRock Z68 Extreme4 is UEFI supported. So I won't have a problem.

[Unboxing] DELL Latitude 10 Essentials 64GB Unboxing

Few days ago I received my brand new DELL Latitude 10 Essentials tablet running Windows 8 32bit. DELL Japan took a long time to ship it, just because I asked for the English OS to be installed on it. But thanks to @DellCares twitter account, I managed to pull the ETA forward by a few days. Original ETA was 10th of March, then it shifted to 12th of March, but in the end it arrived on the 8th. (Although I had to attend a party after work, and I didn't get to play with it much on the 8th.)

I'm still getting accustomed to using a Windows 8 tablet, so the review shall wait another few days. It's not that I don't know how to use Windows, but I have to mostly use Metro apps on the tablet thanks to the touch unfriendly desktop environment. I don’t use Metro apps on the desktop at all. Also, things that I expected to work without much hassle, turned out to be problematic. For example, I was hoping to use Google Chrome (Metro) as the main web browser but the interface is very slow on Clovertrail and not that touch friendly compared to IE.

Ok, back to main topic.

This is what it all came in.

The box itself is not aesthetically pleasing like the iPad's or the Surface's packaging, but who cares, right? This is a cheap tablet, so they had to cut costs from every single area they could.

So what was in the box? Not much.

・The tablet itself, covered in a clothe like cover
・The power brick. That's one ugly power brick if you ask me! It doesn't attach magnetically. You have to plug it into the dock connector in the bottom of the tablet.
・A software CD. How the heck am I supposed to install it? Am I supposed to download an external CD/DVD drive now? They should have bundled them in a small flash drive. Flash drives are dirt cheap these days anyways. Or, not provide a CD at all!
・User manual

That's all. It's minimalistic, but not as luxurious looking as an iPad's or Surface's package.

Wait! I know what you are thinking. Where's the inner case that I was supposed to get free of charge? It's arriving separately, and it's taking another few days. I guess they are making one just for me!!! Funny.

Edit: The Dell Latitude 10 Essentials review is out. Check it out here.

My DELL Latitude 10 Essentials is here!!!

Few days ago I pulled the trigger on my first tablet purchase. Even though the default tablet of choice is the iPad, I had a few requirements which the iPad (specifically the iOS) was incapable of. One of the the ability to access any file on the main PC without needing a man in the middle - in the case of the iPad, the man in the middle is iTunes which, we all know, is a horrible app on the Windows platform. Android cannot do it either. The obvious choice was a Windows 8 tablet. WinRT? No thanks. I didn't want to be bogged down by lack of metro apps. So Windows 8 it was.

There weren't many options available. I had to choose one from the grand list of 3. The Asus Vivo Tab Smart, the DELL Latitude Essentials and the Acer Iconia W510. After referring many material on the Internet, I decided to go with the DELL Latitude 10 Essentials. I had the option to choose English language version of the OS, so I went with it. But I had no idea that this simple change would add an extra week or so to the ETA. I ordered the tablet on the 27th of February but the ETA was 10th of March.

Luckily I had @DellCares as a twitter contact and I was able to pull the date of delivery a bit earlier than originally predicted. They were very helpful and regularly communicated with me over twitter. So I received the tablet on 8th of March - that was yesterday. I was at work so my wife had received the delivery. And then there was a meeting and a get together at work and I didn't have my time to play with the tablet yesterday. I played with it a little - not long enough to be comfortable using the tablet. Not to mention I had an exam in the next morning on one of free online courses that I am following on Coursera. I didn't have to do it today, but I just wanted it finished ASAP.

After using the tablet for a little while, I must say that, using Windows 8 on a tablet is not very easy – at least the non-touch friendly UI. There is a lot to learn as well even though using Windows on the desktop is a walk in the park. The biggest problem I'm having is that I'm so used to the keyboard shortcuts on my desktop and sometimes I cannot remember how to do things the old fashioned way. There is no Windows key that you can use in conjunction with other keys to do certain tasks. Getting the tablet ready the way I want is a much difficult task than I originally expected.