Tripredacus

Its not just that, but its a confusing subject and reason I can only point to is old business practices that do not keep up with the times. I worked with a company to do a migration from Windows NT 4 to Windows XP. The project lasted over 1 year and that actual "migration" period took about 6 months. There was a ton of testing with all their applications, particularly the database apps and the legacy terminal systems that were still in use. The worst part was that the company had put off the migration (and even the testing) until about 1 year from Windows NT support expiring. It was such a pain and no pro-active testing or development was done when XP came out and everything had to wait for some reason. After the entire painful process was completed, everything was better and back to business. Well guess what, XP is running out of time and that same company is dragging their feet on going up to Windows 7. They are making the same mistakes they made nearly 10 years prior. Why does this happen? I think the same reasons you point out in your Linux argument.

This is Microsoft biggest mistake because Start menu and Flip3D were so succesfully designed, functional, and outstanding that other systems were not even close. Removing them was like throwing to the garbage a piece of art. Both Start and Flip were used and loved by many users, Microsoft should bring them back with SP 1: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdeveloperpreviewgeneral/thread/693f1deb-8bc3-4408-af67-f9a94a800b64/ I wonder how much Flip 3D was actually used. I never used it (on purpose) and I think MS got that idea from Ubuntu anyways.

And the files that are missing in the "source" will appear, materializing from thin air? Well lets put it this way. I can do an install with a System Reserved partition (where the boot files are located), then capture just the OS partition, redploy it as single partition and it will boot. Have there been any documented cases of where NOT using BCDBoot.exe on a single partition disk causes Windows not to boot? From my experiences, BCDBoot.exe is only needed when you have multiple partitions with bootable OSes. @OP, you don't mention what made this image. Is it Imagex, DISM or something else? You also don't mention what OS the image is of, and if you are deploying to MBR or GPT disks. There are some conflicting documentation as to how to run BCDBoot.exe. Some may say run it from the WinPE ramdisk (x:\windows\system32\bcdboot.exe) but I have seen other documentation saying to run it from the deployed OS path (e:\windows\system32\bcdboot.exe) which I've never gotten to work. You could alternatively copy it from the deployed OS to the ramdisk... or just keep it in your WinPE image. I've also run into problems with the C: being take up already when booting into PE for imaging (except Windows 8) which I solve by using a diskpart script. It basically takes whatever is assigned to C: and changes it to something else that isn't taken. This way there is no problem with your deployed OS being installed to a partition assigned with C:\.

You only need to use BCDBoot.exe if your HDD has more than one partition. If it is a single OS partition, you don't need it.

Tested with Windows 8 Core RTM with KB2756872. No problems encountered. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2756872

Everyone is entitled to their opinions about it. Some have come in to this thread and defend Windows 8, but what we don't have happening is OS battles. There is no arguments about someone liking or not liking it, and we'd like to keep it that way. Besides, you can just come along to read the links, it is a good way of keeping up to date on what people are saying. Anyways, its a popular topic. If anything tho, I'd rather the people of Neowin not be referred to as "fanboy site" or whatever. We don't need to be talking like that here.

Remember my Sega Saturn comparison? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/why-windows-just-cant-win/

Its likely hard-coded into a file someplace. Are those 15 seconds really a big deal for you?

The poll wasn't working. Yes. That is why this topic was created.

The program is under on-going development. I would expect that if a patch does come out that breaks the program, Tihiy (the author) will release an updated version that works.

All discussion about this topic should be posted in the following thread:

My thinkpad T400 has no left win-key at all。 Well that being the case, the "dream" solution to the key is to make it user configurable. I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Oh concerning the key combination, I wouldn't think you'd want to use the Right Win key, because I've seen keyboards that do not have that key, just the Context Menu on the right. And then of course the regular Windows key on the left side.

Well, I can't go into details but Microsoft already has these rules for OEMs. The problem is that no software maker is following them. And there is a rule about not installing anything that adds a Start Menu back, replaces the Start Screen or including any program that can access the Store, display Metro style apps, etc. This partly relates to my previous post about ODMs not fully embracing the new "rules" regarding Windows 8. So to put it bluntly, Toshiba CANNOT ship a system as an OEM that includes a Start Menu replacer. If this product is allowed to be released, what you will be seeing is a full-on revolt by OEMs and ODMs against Microsoft.

You have erased/replaced the previous poll question, but the link between the topic and the data still exists. So the forum sees both questions and generates an error. I'd recommend you create a separate poll in the Poll section and provide a link to it from your first post and delete the poll on this topic completely.

Why not just use the existing winre.wim, and configure the CustomTool to launch your program?

The IP Address needs to be in CIDR Format, as per [TechNet] I can't seem to find an online converter for an IPv6 address to CIDR format, just the other way... or IPv4.

Restart is the default setting. Setting it manually to Restart is really a waste of time. There does not appear to be any Unattend setting that lets you specify a time interval, although there is an option to use Shutdown instead.

Games for Windows 8 are Metro style apps from what I understand. Do you specifically mean those, or games from previous versions of Windows which is described in that link?

Welcome to the MSFN!

I'm fairly certain that the original $200 price would have Microsoft be in the red for at least a year or two before recouping profits from the app store. They would definately be selling the Surface at a loss to begin with, similar to how Verizon began installing FiOS to customers for free. The idea is to get the product out there, wow people by the price and then recoup the losses later with something else. Microsoft was in high hopes for Windows 8 when that figure first came out. Since then to now, we know that customers aren't sold on Windows 8 yet. Intel spoke out about it, game companies spoke out about it, app developers spoke out about it (and the new Visual Studio) and those complainers about the missing Start Menu. And we have seen a recent article that the amount of apps available on the Store itself is still pretty paltry. I can say "from the inside" that Windows 8 also brings a lot of changes and requirements not previously seen in Windows releases. There is a lot of push back by ODMs, resulting in a low participation rate from them leading to certain compatibility issues. See, Microsoft has been banking on the Metro Style Apps, the paid ones. Profit sharing between the developers/publishers, Microsoft and OEMs, all with purchases or microtransactions. But we have seen from all the negative hype about it (just look at this thread) likely directly led to the lackluster selection of apps in the store. This means that the initial forcast of App purchases is probably greatly reduced by now.... and that the Surface product price HAD to change, since I bet (I have no confirmation on this, just a hunch) that the cheap Surface price was set because they could offset the losses based on App Store revenue.

Are you using en-US locale for everything or some other combination?

Your software should create burn logs and you should have no problem copying them off to a network share. There have been some attempts to enable RDP on WinPE, I don't know how successful those have gone. You may want to look at DaRT which is designed for this type of purpose. Maybe with a DaRT WinPE you can still run your burn program. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/products-and-technologies/mdop/dart.aspx

Welcome to the MSFN!

I never said that. If he reports bug, he does it in Ex7forW8 thread. I see just empty menu; that's okay. Ok this is good news for those users then. For the record, here is the thread in question: