Fredskronk.se

So, as many others I decided to take Windows 8 Developers Preview for a spin. Only problem is that I now have to install windows 7 again.

It’s not that Windows 8 is bad. I didn’t get any chance to try it out really. If it wasn’t for the fact that I am so picky about how my system should work I might have kept it and installed some programs and actually used it. I remember running the RC of Windows 7 for a few month being rather happy with it.

First of all the installation was really quick. It just took a few minutes to get It all set up and to get to the welcome screen and from there to the new home screen.

The home screen is just like it would be on a Windows phone or, by that matter, an iPhone. Click on one of the large icons and you’ll get into the full screen app showing the weather, you twitter, Facebook or whatever.

Now, the only problem is that it doesn’t. Microsoft has decided that those apps should only run on screens with a minimum resolution of 1023 by 700-something (sorry don’t remember and my netbook is already installing win7). This is actually quite stupid as most of the netbooks out there has a 1024×600 resolution and so does my eee pc 1000H.

When I try to start any of those apps nothing happens. There is a little hack out there that can fix this problem but it doesn’t fix the problem but rather downscales your image so that the desired resolution fits on your screen. Let me tell you that it looks awful! But, for testing purpose it’ll have to do.

I started to mess about with the apps. Launched twitter, tried to logon to Facebook (never worked) and checked the weather. After that I decided to load my real user and all my documents, in other words: Time to hook it to my domain.

This also worked right away. Re start the computer and login in as the local admin user to make my domain account an administrator. I know that this is not really how you should run Windows but that is how I do it anyway. It all worked perfectly and I then proceeded to log in as my normal account from the domain. No problem there either.

The problem came after I’ve logged in. The only thing I got was a black screen and the curser. Nothing else. I waited, and waited, and, well you get it. No success. Hard reboot and log in as the local admin, same result. I could do a CTR+ALT+DEL to reboot and try again. Same result, obviously. Trying the same thing twice expecting different results is the first sign of madness.

So I re-installed the entire thing and got it to work up till the point of doing the resolution hack and having the machine joined to the domain. This time I did it differently. I joined the domain first and then applied the hack in the registry. Unfortunately it gave the same result. The display hack and a domain is not a matched made in heaven. It just doesn’t seem to be working.

For me Windows 8 is rather useless if I can’t use the few included apps and the other few that is available for download on the web (app store not working jet). Just having the desktop is just like running windows 7 so that’s why I’m reverting back to it.