Using a Windows 8 Product Key in Windows 8.1 from a clean installation

You're probably not the only person who has an existing Windows 8 machine that for some reason or another can't be upgraded to Windows 8.1 from the Windows Store.

If you've downloaded the Windows 8.1 ISO and need to perform a clean installation, you can activate it using a Windows 8 product key.  The following instructions have been shamelessly taken from Microsoft and the "Windows Valley" website.

The prerequisites for this work are:

• A Windows 8.1 ISO (or USB flash drive with an extracted ISO on it)
• The Windows 7 USB/DVD tool (if you only have the ISO file for Windows)
• A valid Windows 8 product key

Once you have the ISO, you need to extract its contents to a USB flash drive using the Windows 7 USB/DVD tool.  Don't worry, it works for Windows 8 (and Windows 2012 as well).

Next, you need to follow the instructions provided by Windows Valley and create a file called "EI.CFG" in the Sources folder on your USB flash drive.

For the plain vanilla Windows 8.1 Professional, the file needs to contain the following text:

[EditionID]

Professional

[Channel]

Retail

[VL]

1

If your edition of Windows is not Windows 8.1 Professional (i.e. the N edition or the Windows Media Center Edition), refer to the Windows Valley link for what value to use for "EditionID".

Save this file (make sure you save it as EI.CFG not EI.CFG.TXT!) and then safely eject your USB flash drive.

You will now be able to boot off this drive and install Windows 8.1 without a product key.   Once you have installed Windows, the only way to then use a Windows 8 key is via the command line; you cannot enter a Windows 8 Product Key using the product key GUI as it will reject the key.

To get around this issue, open an Administrator command prompt, and then use the following command:

Cscript.exe %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <Your product key>

That's it, you're done!

Getting back the Command Prompt in Windows 8.1

Microsoft decided in their infinite Wisdom to change the Windows "Quick Links" menu in Windows 8.1 so that the default layout removes the shortcut to the Command Prompt, and replaced it with a link to Powershell.

The average Joe does not use Powershell, people!

Thankfully this can easily be fixed.  Just right-click the Taskbar and select Properties.  Then go to the Navigation tab and un-click Replace Command-Prompt with Windows PowerShell in the menu when I right-click the lower-left corner or press Windows key+X.

Surface Pro keyboard and Event Viewer messages

If you have a Surface Pro, you might be getting some Event 219 warnings in the System Event Log, related to a hardware device with ID VID045E&PID_079.

To clear matters up, this is the Surface Touch or Type cover driver.  If you see this warning, it may match up with you being unable to type.    As of July 2013, I still need to occasionally disconnect and reconnect my type cover, and I can only assume that if I checked the event log for events logged at that time I would find this event.

Backing up Windows Home Server 2011 to 4K sector size disks

Last week my Windows Home Server 2011 box informed me that my external USB backup hard disk was beginning to fail.  Big props to the folks at Dojo North who supply a free SMART monitoring plug-in for Windows Home Server, otherwise I would not have known the disk was on the way out.

So yesterday I purchased a Western Digital "MyBook" 3TB external hard disk to replace this external drive, and configured the Windows Home Server backup to store data on this drive from now on.   Imagine my surprise when I see this the next morning:

OK, that was unexpected.  Wonder what the problem was?  Let's have a look at the detailed error:

The request "could not be performed because of an I/O error"?  Huh?

Well let's cut to the chase.  The problem is caused by Windows Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7) not supporting disks with native 4K sector sizes  for storing of VHD files.  Don't confuse this with NTFS cluster sizes - that's totally separate and does not solve the problem.  

As we know, Windows Image Backups are VHD files, and so the backup fails.   Great.

So how do we fix this?  The only way to fix this problem in Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is to force the drive to use 512KB Emulation mode on the low level format.  This is not something you can do with Windows format tool and must be done with a manufacturer tool.  Thankfully, Western Digital provide the "WD Quick Formatter" utility which allows you to reformat the drive to 512E mode.  This removes Windows XP support, but who the hell cares.

Here's what FSUTIL says about the drive before it was reformatted using the WD tool:

 And here's what it says after the reformat:

But my drive can't be reformatted to 512E mode!

Well my friend, you are hosed and either need to buy a drive that does, or upgrade to Windows 2012 (or Windows 8).

Annoying password storage in Windows for Outlook accounts

I'm somewhat of an Information Security maverick, so I've been living the BYOD lifestyle (whilst keeping stuff secure) for the better part of 4 years.  This basically means that none of my devices are members of the corporate Active Directory Domain.

When your machine is a domain member and you login, the domain credentials are tokenised (either as NTLM tokens or Kerberos Tickets).  Any application which can make use of these - such as Outlook - just calls on the token and passes it on to the Exchange CAS servers to authenticate your session.   No need to enter your password again - Single Sign On.  Everybody's happy.

However if you're not a domain member there is no automatic creation of authentication tokens to services hosted in any AD domains, so when you launch applications which access those services you're prompted for your credentials.  No big deal - you just enter the relevant username and password and tick the "Remember my Credentials" option.  The next time you launch the application the authentication is seamless.

When you change your domain password, your applications will pop a dialog box asking you to re-enter your password because, hey, the authentication failed since the stored password is the old one.   Again you would suggest this is no big deal because you can just re-enter your password and ensure the "remember my password" option is ticked, right?

Wrong (at least for some Outlook).

For some bizarre reason, the Windows Credential store does not update the password when you enter a new one.   The login will work but the store keeps the old password and the next time you launch Outlook you get prompted for the password again.  This continues indefinitely unless you take action.

As per Microsoft's own article on this problem (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2762344), the only solution is to open the Windows Credential Manager and manually remove the stored credentials for any items with the word "Outlook" listed in them.  The next time you open Outlook and tell the popup to store the credential, the password is saved back to the credential store.

It sure would be nice if Microsoft fixed this one, because it's happening on my Windows 8 Pro machines running Office 2013, so it's not like it's something from the past.

Windows 8 app store cyber squatting

As a user of Microsoft Windows 8, I have become increasingly displeased with the lack of control over app publishing in the Windows App Store.

The app store provides hosted copies of Metro applictations, and these appear to undergo some form of vetting.  However the store also supports links (not hosting) to Desktop applications so that software developers can have the desktop versions of their applications also searchable from the App Store.

These desktop apps appear to not undergo any vetting at all.  In the last three weeks I have found three separate links in the app store to popular desktop applications which I use.  When selecting these links, I was instead taken to a 3rd party website called "getdesktopapp.com" which supposedly hosts the files.

There's a number of reasons why this is utterly ridiculous.   For one, these "applications" in the store are nothing more than Link Bait which you are highly likely to click because, well, it's from the App Store.  Second, there is no guarantee the links themselves do not contain malware because they're not even hosted by the developer!

Microsoft needs to fix this FAST and vet all Desktop application links in the App Store to confirm they actually refer to the developer, and that the links contained within do NOT contain known Malware.  For the sake of Microsoft's own reputation, cyber squatting of application names in the app store should be impossible.

Don't Calibrate the touch screen on your Windows 8 device

This is a short one, but articles are appearing that suggest people calibrate the touch screen on their Microsoft Surface Pro devices.

As an owner of a Surface Pro and an incessant tinkerer I decided to give this a shot.  Here's a tip:  DON'T DO IT!

But Why not?

The touchscreen calibration for Windows restricts the border of the touch interface to the border of the screen itself.   However as anyone with Windows 8 and a touch interface would know, the touch interface extends beyond the borders of the visible screen.

When the touch calibration page appears, it asks you to click in the corners of the screen, which effectively changes the borders of the touch interface.  It then ignores touch input from outside those borders.

After ten calibration attempts on my Surface Pro, each time resulted in one or more off-screen swipes failing.   Either swipe from bottom, top, left, or right - one or more of them would stop functioning.

I've calibrated my screen and it's a mess...what do I do?!

Just go into the calibration tool and reset the calibration data.  This will set it back to defaults.  Personally I've not had any touch accuracy errors on any Windows 8 touch device, so I personally don't think there is a need to calibrate the touch screen on Windows 8 unless you are calibrating a pen device.  If your calibration is really bad you'll need to resort to using a mouse and keyboard to fix it (you old timer!).

Special note for Surface Pro owners

If you own a Surface Pro, the pen interface uses Wacom technology and is a magnetic resonance system - it is completely unrelated to the capacitive touchscreen technology which your finger interacts with.  You can easily see this by placing your pen tip near the screen - you will see the cursor appear even when you are about half an inch away from touching the screen.

So, essentially this means that if your pen accuracy is poor, calibration of the pen can be performed with no concern or risk of affecting the touchscreen.