Windows 8 Release Preview on Lenovo X220 Tablet

I installed the Windows 8 release preview the day it released on my Lenovo X220 tablet via a boot from VHD option, with Windows 7 still as my primary OS. I’ve been using Windows 8 Release Preview since the release and here are a couple of thoughts.

Since this(boot from VHD) is as close to a clean install as possible I’ve had almost everything working quite well.

SPEED: I haven’t done any formal tests but everything appears to be very fast. It’s amazing since the previous releases were quite fast as well.

Pen and Touch: Pen and touch works beautifully.

Additionally, it also recognized my 5+ year old HP OfficeJet 6318 printer.

Drivers: I did have to install a couple of Lenovo drivers for the following: (Grab the Lenovo Windows 8 Beta drivers)

1. Buttons on the x220 – basically enabled me to use the buttons for auto-rotate.
2. Chipset Drivers
3. Intel AMT 7.1 drivers

My suggestion would be to install each of these drivers one step at a time, as during one of the earlier builds the Beta drivers had not worked correctly.

ISSUES:

1. I’ve issues with Bluetooth not recognizing my Plantronics headset.

2. I still have one unknown device on the machine which Windows 8 is unable to detect, this is sad considering that the Lenovo X220 is one of the devices they are testing Windows 8 against.

3. I find the logging in with the fingerprint reader to be quite clunky on Windows 8. The experience on Windows 7 was far superior, from a completely shut machine you get the OS to startup with a swipe.

Lenovo releases Windows 8 Beta drivers

Lenovo has released Windows 8 Beta drivers, which is a godsend for people like me who’re testing it out on the Lenovo X220 Tablet and various other lenovo machines. Grab them at http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=HT072084

A Big Thank you to the Team at Lenovo

Enjoy!

Windows 8 How To Series

Windows 8 How-To Posts

Windows 8 How To: 1. Switch Between Metro UI and Desktop Mode
Windows 8 How To: 2. Switch Between Apps or Snap Apps
Windows 8 How To: 3. How to Power Off Your Device
Windows 8 How To: 4. Show and Access the Control Panel
Windows 8 How To: 5. Show and Access Administrative Tools
Windows 8 How To: 6. Show All Apps
Windows 8 How To: 7. Switch Between Windows Accounts and Local Accounts
Windows 8 How To: 8. Set up a Picture Password
Windows 8 How To: 9. Set Up a Printer
Windows 8 How To: 10. Customize Metro UI – App Tiles and Groups
Windows 8 How To: 11. Install Language Packs for Multilingual Support
Windows 8 How To: 12. Show and Use “Run” Command
Windows 8 How To: 13. Show and Use cmd Prompt (DOS Mode)
Windows 8 How To: 14. Show and Use PowerShell
Windows 8 How To: 15. Show and Use Desktop Applications
Windows 8 How To: 16. Install .NET 3.5 and Windows Live Essentials
Windows 8 How To: 17. Add New Tab or New InPrivate Tab in Metro Style IE Browser
Windows 8 How To: 18. Configure WiFi Connection and Airplane Mode
Windows 8 How To: 19. Show Hidden Files, Folders and Drives
Windows 8 How To: 20. How to Start Windows 8 in Safe Mode
Windows 8 How To: 21. Install and Uninstall Metro Style Apps
Windows 8 How To: 22. Enable or Disable Sharing Between PCs Using HomeGroup
Windows 8 How To: 23. Find and Use Windows Help and Support
Windows 8 How To: 24. Show and Configure Free Anti-Virus App (Windows Defender)
Windows 8 How To: 25. Show and Enable Split Touch Keyboard (On-Screen)
Windows 8 How To: 26. Set up Remote Desktop Connection
Windows 8 How To: 27. Backup your Files Using File History
Windows 8 How To: 28. Restore Files Using File History
Windows 8 How To: 29. Restore System to a Previous State Using Restore Point
Windows 8 How To: 30. Restore your Device using Refresh and Reset

 

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zxue/archive/2012/03/07/windows-8-consumer-preview-power-user-howto-series.aspx

Windows 8 Keyboard Shortcuts

 

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-48-metablogapi/4667.Keyboard_2D00_shortcuts_2D00_for_2D00_Windows_2D00_8_5F00_5756566F.png

Solving Touch Issues: Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Lenovo x220 tablet

It appears that a lot of people have upgraded their Lenovo x220 tablets from Windows 7 to the Windows 8 consumer Preview and have found their touch interactions or pen inputs are not working correctly. Here’s are possible solutions.

Firstly, I hope and pray that you’ve done this installation on a spare machine and not your everyday machine and the following is just a suggestion which seems logical to me, so take the advise with a pinch of salt and do this at your own risk, don’t blame me if things mess up further, wish you the best of luck.

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Go to add/remove programs and uninstall the Wacom ISD tablet driver and then restart the windows 8 consumer preview. Logically Windows should then re-install the appropriate drivers.

 

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You can try two other approaches,

1. Try an update for each touch device driver or

2. Remove touch device drivers

 

1. Try and update each touch device driver, by going to each of the devices in your device manager highlighted in the second image below(scroll down), both the red and yellow box, and update the drivers by right clicking and choosing update driver software.

2. Remove the earlier WACOM drivers which are installed on your x220t.

Go to Device manager and remove the following devices which are in the red outlined box below. Next examine each of the HID

Then click on each of the HID devices in the yellow box. If you see any which has a WACOM driver installed against it, remove it.

Once you’ve done the above, re-start your machine and pray Windows 8 Consumer Preview should logically automatically download and install new touch drivers.

Let me know how this works for you. Best of luck.

Lenovo x220t drivers on Windows 8 Consumer Preview

By default not all the Lenovo drivers are loaded by the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. So you might need to manually load some of the drivers. For e.g. I wanted the Tablet buttons to be enabled, so I manually installed the Thinkpad Tablet Button Drivers(On most x220t there will be a directory called called SQTOOLS. Locate the TBBTN which is located under Drivers. SWTOOLS\DRIVERS\TBBTN) That got the Thinkpad x220 Tablet buttons working for me. So I could now manually rotate the screen or lock or power down if needed.

The other thing which I did was go to the device manager (Press Win key + W and type Device manager).

Choose the Other devices and select each device which shows up there, and choose “Update Driver Software…)

Then ask it “Browse my computer…” to locate the drivers, and point it to the SWTOOLS\DRIVERS directory. Do this for each device and Windows 8 should be able to load the appropriate drivers.

Then do a reboot…

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Lenovo X220: Boot from VHD

Ok, finally I’ve got this figured out. I’ve tried using Virtual Box 4, VMware Player and both have been unsatisfactory as I couldn’t use the full power of my Lenovo x220 tablet and Windows 8 consumer preview.

Finally I tried out what Scott Hansselman suggests in his blog post out here 
(http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToGuideToInstallingAndBootingWindows8ConsumerPreviewOffAVHDVirtualHardDisk.aspx)

Now following the above instructions resulted in my running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a virtual machine but with full fidelity, i.e. my Tablet touch screen works, and most importantly my WACOM pen works as well. So if both multi touch and pen support are important for you on your Lenovo x220 tablet, dive right into Scott’s instructions.

One caveat, when going thru Scott’s steps, as outlined in his post, he says in step 2 while loading Windows 8 Consumer Preview to shift to the command prompt and then use Diskpart to load the vhd which one has created earlier. However, what I want to point out here is that while doing this, you might not be able to locate the drive where the vhd is. For e.g. even though I created the VHD on the C drive on my pc, when you go to the command prompt you need to kind of switch between various drive letters to figure out which your original drive is where the Virtual Machine is, and then load it using DiskPart. That was the one place I was a little stumped but my friend Raj Chaudhuri helped me out on this one. So finally I have Windows 8 Consumer Preview loaded completely with full touch and pen support working on my Lenovo Thinkpad x220t tablet.

The best part of booting via VHD is the performance, it is just outstanding.

Additionally, once I loaded up Windows 8 Consumer Preview using the above method, after setup, windows update downloaded updated drivers for the display making the experience so much better.

Btw I’m typing this entire blog post via my Windows 8 Consumer Preview machine using Live Writer which I installed(btw Live Writer required the .net framework 3.5). But absolutely needed Windows Live Writer on my Windows 8 Consumer PC as I’m loving writing about my Windows 8 experience thru Windows 8. Hope this helps. Do share your experience.

Btw one quick shortcut for those who’re doing screen captures within the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, if you press the Windows key + PrtSc to capture any screen, Windows 8 automatically captures and stores the image in your Pictures folder. Isn’t that just super cool. Totally loving it.

One more thing for the Lenovo x220 users, I’ve noticed that the function keys don’t really work by default except the one for the brightness of the display, i.e. Fn+Home and Fn+End this brightens and dims the display.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Lenovo x220t with VMWare Player

I had earlier installed Windows 8 Developer Preview on my machine. So this time around installing the Windows 8 consumer preview was easier.

You can download the necessary files from http://preview.windows.com/

Specifically here you can get the setup program: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download

And the ISO is available here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

The VMWare player mentioned that an upgrade was available to VMWare Workstation which is a paid product, I didn’t choose to install it and it then provided the option to upgrade the player to the latest VMWare Player 4.0.2 build-591240.

Once I did the above, I loaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO into VMWare and the install process was pretty much a breeze.

I first ran the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup on the host machine to just check the compatibility of my system. I was quite surprised that Microsoft Security Essentials was not compatible.

Next I ran the setup within the VM. It asked for the product key… which I’d got from the setup wizard. Entered it.

Then it asked me if I wanted to keep my personal files. I chose yes.

Next it told that this might take a while… 🙂 so I waited patiently… as I’m installing within a VM and I’m doing an upgrade from the Developer Preview…

After installation it started configuring Windows Updates

Now the strange picture, any guesses what it is?

Settings came next, I chose to customize the settings…

Finally logged into the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Finally the Metro UI, pure awesomeness…

After this I ran windows update, and it downloaded a few updates.

However, I needed to install the VMWare Additions, this ensured that the display took the full screen, I had to do a re-boot, and then could use Windows 8 consumer preview in full screen. Note: you need to have 1366×768 to experience the snap view correctly.

Multi-touch worked perfectly, no need for any calibrations. The only issue is the support for the Wacom pen, I need to figure this one out.

I’m also going to try installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a separate partition. Hopefully that will resolve the pen issue, as the Lenovo x220t is one of the devices which the Windows team is using to test.

Some things I noticed, which were wonderful was the performance of Windows 8, it just totally rocks. Also I found this release to be far superior in terms of keyboard + touch navigation.

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in a VM with Virtual Box and VMware player

I’ve been trying to get Windows 8 Developer Preview installed on my Lenovo x220 tablet.

Virtual Box – 4.1.6-8413-Win

First, I tried my hand with the latest virtual box, what was interesting was that they have an option to create a VM for Windows 8. Unfortunately, after more than 4 tries the installation of Windows 8 failed and, I moved on to VMware player.

The issue with Virtual Box at least the latest release was that during installation windows 8 Developer preview would be stuck at different points in expanding the installation files. One time I even got to 98% and then stalled, other times it got stalled at 3% and one time at 11%. You can imagine how frustrating this was. Once it even gave a warning no. and cancelled installation, the issue was supposedly low disk space, which is insane considering that I had provided 50Gb for the virtual hard disk and I had another 100Gb free on my HDD. Well finally gave it up. I’m guessing this is an issue with the latest release of the software, as I’ve previously seen installations on the earlier versions succeeding.

VMware player – 4.0.1-528992

Here I had to choose the OS as Windows 7 while creating the virtual hard disk. I followed the instructions out here http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2899-vmware-player-install-windows-8-developer-preview.html and the install process on VMware player was easy and fast.

Finally I have Windows 8 Developer Preview loaded on my Lenovo X220 tablet.

Microsoft Analytics for Twitter – Powered by PowerPivot for Excel

Microsoft just released a tool which enables you to you to analyse Twitter data from within Excel.  You can search up to 5 items and it populates the workbook with information on Topics, People, Tone, and lists all the tweets that are brought back. What is amazing is that they’ve included the source code too.

Tone Edit

Most online analytics tool kind of hide from you how they’re judging sentiment of tweets. However, here you’re provided with a Tone Dictionary which you can edit.

Slice and Dice data the way you want

Since it’s PowerPivot and Excel goodness you can easily slice and dice the data the way you want to view it. The details tab lets you dive in.

The People Tab

It shows you who is speaking positively or negatively about the search items and also tells you who is helping you spread the word by tweeting and re-tweeting your message.

 

 

 

 

You have the Source

Finally the key bits of code used to create the Excel workbook are also included.

A big thumbs up to the team for delivering this.