Category: Windows

My first look at Windows Sandbox

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Earlier this week, Windows Insiders who were part of the Fast Ring, got their first glimpse of an isolated desktop environment called Windows Sandbox. Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18305 contains this new capability that will allow users to test out applications, untrusted or otherwise, without the fear of it destroying their existing their existing desktop environment. Through the magic of the Windows hypervisor (and some Windows Containers goodness), this isolated non-persistent environment looks just like a Windows 10 virtual machine with its own file system, registry, and network connectivity, but is walled off from your actual desktop protecting it

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Stupid Windows Tricks – Taskbar Labels

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I actually stumbled across this setting recently, and it reminded me of a Windows “throwback”.  It seems to simple, but I forgot that things actually used to be like this. Somewhere along the way, probably with Windows 7, Microsoft started to try to utilize the taskbar space more efficiently.  With that, you saw the use of combined taskbar icons, meaning that if you had three separate documents opened in Word, you’d see a single Word icon in the taskbar, but see that there were icons/instances “combined” underneath it and also the text label for the icon was hidden or collapsed.

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Upgrading a Dell Venue 8 Pro to Windows 10

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If you’re unable to get the automatic upgrade for Windows 10 to work with your Dell Venue 8 Pro, try using the Microsoft media creation tool to get there.  Depending on how much free space you have, an SD card may be required for the download to be stored.  The media creation tool will prompt you if you’re short on space for this operation. For my upgrade, I opted to have the media creation tool and Windows 10 setup wipe everything so I could start fresh.  Since all of my important files, pictures, etc. are sync’d online, I wasn’t concerned about the

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What to do when SkyDrive takes a faceplant

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I have a number of machines that synchronize with SkyDrive.  Last week, things went sideways and one of my machines was reporting errors and quit synchronizing.  After the next reboot (which naturally fixes most issues), the SkyDrive application would initialize, trying to start processing the changes, and then do a faceplant in the form of a crash and generating an event in the event log like this: This looks and sounds bad.  I wasn’t sure how to resolve it, but it’s actually pretty simple.  There is a catalog or index of everything that is synched and it is stored on

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Windows 8 in 3 minutes

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Quite honestly, having been in the TAP for Windows 8 and having logged a lot of time using the product, I was frustrated because I felt lost when it came to finding something or executing a task. I shy away from the “Start” screen, the screen you see after you’re logged in to Windows 8.  As with a lot of people who have used the product, I saw this screen as something only useful to those who were running a tablet, and I found myself never leaving the “Desktop”, and trying to run Windows as I always had since the

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