If you’ve used the “Create System Image” functionality available in Windows 7, you’ll be surprised to see that its missing in Windows 8. Well, it’s not actually missing, but the functionality is hidden in the Control Panel and is now called “Windows 7 File Recovery”. Once you locate it in the Control Panel, the options to “Create a system image” and “Create a system repair disc” on still in the left pane of the window. An important note … From what I have experienced, you cannot use a “Windows 7 Repair Disc” to load and recover a Windows 8 system image, so if you create a system image of your Windows 8 desktop, be sure to also create a system repair disc when it prompts you to after the system image capture.

Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy is a great utility for interrogating the Windows Phone Iso Store when developing applications. It usually if you want to check to see if files are being created correctly, and identifying what is in a file on the phone’s local store. IsoStoreSpy can pier into both the emulator and physical device. It also provides some other functionality like being able to create ringtones, but I haven’t used that. I had a brand new install of Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2012, and not a lot of old components installed. This was a fresh install, so the most recent versions of most things were already installed. When I tried to install IsoStoreSpy with the ClickOnce installation, it error’d out indicating that version 3.5 of System.Data.SqlCE needed to be installed in the GAC. For some reason it wasn’t, although I would’ve assumed that Visual Studio would’ve had that in…

With Twin Cities AT&T customers getting an added Thanksgiving gift of LTE, I decided to run a handful of tests to see what performance looked like. This was performed on a Samsung Galaxy SIII using the app from speedtest.net. The results are pretty impressive.  Almost 40Mb/s down and over 10 Mb/s upload speeds. 

Looks like today is the day when AT&T flips the switch on full-time LTE for the Twin Cities.  I noticed back in September that the State Fairgrounds was lit up and providing some nice download speeds.  Also the U of M campus and a few other northern suburbs have been enjoying that functionality as AT&T was going through testing. I can’t find an official release on AT&T’s website, but a few media outlets are reporting this too. heraldonline.com Star Tribune Pioneer Press

I was reading the article: “Will Microsoft restore Start Menu to Windows 8?” in the Tuesday edition of the USA Today newspaper.  This was an interesting headline that piqued my interest given the announcement that Microsoft Windows head, Steven Sinofsky was making a quick escape so close to the launch of Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface. You can read the article for yourself, but I’ll admit that I’m in the same camp of people who aren’t comfortable with the “justified” disappearance of the little button in the corner that got you to where you needed to go.  Tablet or no tablet, this is such a huge change, and for novices and pros alike, the learning curve is very sharp.  My home PC is running Windows 8, while my work laptops are still on Windows 7 due to some software incompatibilities.  There are lots of things that I like about Windows…