Windows 8: Initial Boot Up and Configuration, Part 1

Before I get started with tonight's post, I want to share a page with you. The page is from an organization called Goodwill Community Foundation, Inc. This particular page is a free Windows 8 tutorial: Windows 8. It has some REALLY good info on it. They also have section on Windows 98, XP, and 7, as well as MS Office apps. Hmm. They skipped ME and Vista. I wonder why?

Right. Off we go. I apologize that this post is quite long, but I'm trying to catch up.

It took a little hunting to figure out how to take screen shots of my Start screen so I can show you what I'm talking about on some of these items. Snipping Tool works in Desktop, but not the tiles Start screen. For that I had to use the Print Screen (FN + PRTSC on my laptop) button and paste the image into Paint. Bear in mind I've already done some personalizing, so my Start screen and Desktop look different than yours will at initial boot up.

During initial boot-up, I opted to use my Hotmail account as my username. You don’t have to, but I decided to. You can do this with any of the "Hotmail", “Live”, "MSN", or “Outlook” family of email accounts. The initial boot-up and configuration took maybe 15 minutes at the most. Because I entered my Hotmail email address and password, Windows logged me in as it was booting. Once Windows started, the Start Screen connected to my Hotmail account, pulled my contacts, calendar, emails, etc. If you don't have one of these email addresses, you have the option to create one during this process, or you can create whatever username you want as a local username. You'll also have the option to set a login password. or login without a password.

Windows 8 identified all Wi-Fi networks within range and I was able to easily and quickly join ours - all I had to do was select our network and enter the encryption password. Word of advice: ALWAYS encrypt your Wi-Fi networks, preferably with something strong(er) like WPA-2. Don't use WEP because any 2-bit hacker can crack your encryption key.

Here's a screen capture of the Start screen (already personalized to some degree; I'll cover that in another post soon.):

Once I figured out how to get to the Desktop, I added the key icons / shortcuts that will allow me to hit the most important stuff:

• Right-click on your desktop and choose "Personalize".
• Click the "Change Desktop Icons" link.
• Check these boxes: Computer, User’s Files, Network, Recycle Bin, and Control Panel.
• Click Apply.

This is also where you can select any of the digital images you may have to set them as your Desktop background, set your screen saver and power options, etc.:

One things that's glaringly omitted from Windows 8 is the Start Menu. I've read about this for a year and I decided to install Classic Shell right away so that I'd have a Windows 7-ish Start menu. It's free and pretty versatile.
 

 

On the Control Panel, I selected "View by: Small Icons". I prefer this view because I can see the icons for the major Control Panel applets.

When I double-clicked “Computer” on the Desktop to open “File Explorer”, I clicked on "Options", then "View" and chose the following options:

• Show the status bar.
• Always show menus.
• Display the full path.
• I unchecked the options to hide empty drives and hide file extensions.
• I left the option selected to show hidden files because I'm still importing stuff from the HDD from my old laptop. I'll deselect this later to minimize the risk of accidentally deleting something important.

New PCs are notorious for "bloatware" (aka "crapware") - apps that are installed by the manufacturer. Most PC manufacturers put these 3rd party apps in their OEM OSs because they're paid to do so. It keeps our costs down some. One of the first things most of us do when we get a new PC is remove that garbage. To do that, I downloaded and installed the latest version of CCleaner from Piriform. In case you're not familiar with it, CCleaner is a cleanup utility that allows you to remove old restore points, find and fix Registry errors, uninstall software, and cleanup other garbage like Internet browsing history, Windows Update temp files, etc. I also downloaded and installed CCleaner Enhancer from Singular Labs to add more options to CCleaner. CAUTION: Be very careful so you don't remove anything critical to your PC's operation. Defraggler is a defragmentation tool from Piriform that's better than the one built into Windows. Nowadays, though, defragging your system isn't as critical as it used to be to keep your system up-to-speed. CAUTION: Don't defrag solid state drives (SSD).

I uninstalled the MS Office 2013 trial and installed my licensed version of MS Office 2010 Professional Plus. If you don't have a licensed productivity suite, try Apache OpenOffice. It's free and the later versions are fully compatible with MS Office. You can open and edit Office files, and you can even select the option to save your files in MS Office formats.

I uninstalled the trial versions of Norton Internet Security Suite, Norton on-line back-up, and some other Norton service (I forgot what it was). I enabled and updated Windows Defender (f.n.a. MS Security Essentials, f.n.a. Windows Defender). It’s a pretty decent anti-malware suite and it's fully integrated with the Windows OS and Windows Firewall. I used it as Microsoft Security Essentials a few years ago and never had a malware infection.

I installed the Amazon Kindle app for Windows 8 and was disappointed that it only pulls from the cloud and doesn't recognize the e-books I imported from my old HDD. I have a first-generation Kindle with “collections” to sort my e-books and the Windows 8 app doesn't recognize that. Instead it lists all the Kindle e-books on our account from the cloud with no sorting. We have three active Kindles in our home, so, it can make for some confusion if the app pulls from the entire collection on the cloud. I uninstalled the Windows 8 app and installed Kindle for PC for Windows 7. It works perfectly. I sees the e-books locally on my laptop, and it allows me to synch with my Kindle so I can read on either device and not lose my place.

The Netflix app that comes pre-installed doesn't recognize the new feature of Netflix that allows multiple lists under the same account - it only sees the main watch list. Lately I've been watching Netflix streaming movies in my browser so I can access my personalized watch list. You can do this in Internet Explorer or Chrome, your choice, but I'm not sure about Firefox (I'm not a real fan of FF, even though I have to use it at work).

Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player are gone from Windows 8. I used WMC on my Windows 7 laptop to watch DVDs, TV and Netflix, and I used WMP to listen to MP3s and CDs. There are Windows 8 apps called “Music”, “Videos”, etc., in place of WMC and WMP. To get WMC and WMP, you have to install an add-in called “Windows 8 Media Center Pack” that includes both . . . if you first pay for the Windows 8 Pro Pack ($99.99) . . . then pay for the Windows 8 Media Center Pack ($9.99). I have a free MSDN license for Windows 8 Pro, so I entered that to install the additional features, and then paid for the Media Center Pack. It was pretty straightforward to import my MP3 library to WMP and set-up my TV tuner in WMC. I had to run through the TV tuner set-up in WMC twice - the first time it set it up as a digital tuner and showed channels that I didn't have access to. Once I installed it again, everything was fine.

Let me back up a moment. In order to install the Windows 8 Pro Pack, I followed the directions from this page: Get more from Windows 8. I went to the Control Panel, selected "Add features to Windows 8" and followed the directions. You can enter a code if you already have one, or you can select the option to pay by credit card. Once that was installed, I followed the same process to install the Windows 8 Media Center Pack, with the exception that I had to pay for it.

I like the iHeartRadio app. It's free and I can listen to my local radio stations, plus a couple from Ohio that air Indians, Browns, and Buckeyes games. I even found a station that plays all 80s music. You can sign up for a free iHeartRadio account even if you don't have Windows 8. And, how's this for awesome? I learned how to create a custom station with music from one of my all-time favorite bands: the Michael Stanley Band from Cleveland. The odd thing about this is that it mixes MSB music in with other similar bands from the 80's, like Loverboy, Eddie Money, etc. *shrug* I guess that's okay. I like them, too.

One of the major issues I had was uninstalling the WildTangent games app. I navigated to the Control Panel, selected Programs and Features, and uninstalled the WindTangent app. Unfortunately it left behind a lot of residual shortcuts on the Start screen and in the Start Menu. It took me a while to determine that the only way to remove them was to edit the Registry. I had to open the Registry and search for all entries for "WindTangent". I deleted or edited them as appropriate and the tiles eventually disappeared. DO NOT muck with your PC's Registry unless you have a pretty good idea what you're doing. I do it at work on a regular basis and still get twitchy nervous every time. Accidentally editing or deleting the wrong entry can "brick" your computer and it'll be a pain to recover.

I guess that about it for now. I'll cover some of the other configuration topics in a later post. As soon as I finish configuring the system the way I want, I'll start focusing on day-to-day issues (like your printer driver issue, Jamie.)

As usual, please feel free to leave comments. Most of all, please let me know if I'm giving you worthwhile information.