Sorry about the outage of the site the past day and a half. We had some server issues, and had to move to a new host (large amount of traffic killed the server!). This should scale a bit better and I am looking for a dedicated server to host the site on if traffic continues to be this high. Now that I am on a new server, I will be taking the time to increase the library of knowledge base entries as well as more frequent news postings.

If there are any problems or issues that you notice, please let me know using the Contact link above, or email me directly at dharper@mstechpages.com.

Thank you for your continued support and patronage.

Microsoft has redone the GUI for the defrag program. Many people were dissatisfied with the lack of information from the Vista/7 GUI, so the new one is a bit more involved, but still very simple. You can analyze the drive before “optimizing” it, and it tells you the status of the process as well.

Windows 8 has a friendlier blue screen of death. It may not be too informative, but it tells you that something is wrong and a basic thing to search for to fix the problem. Not bad.

Ed Bott has posted a fairly in depth look at Windows 8 developer build that was announced this morning at BUILD. I would write an article on it, but it would be based on all second hand information from videos and other articles. I plan on downloading the dev build tonight and thoroughly going through it and sharing the secrets I find with all of you. I’m definitely excited about this new OS!

The new OS has more than its share of rough edges, and the new “modern shell” is disorienting—at least initially. And Windows boss Steven Sinofsky took great pains to stress that this is not a launch but rather the initial availability of the platform for developers. Still, after a few hours of increasingly addictive hands-on experience, I am convinced that this new release will indeed be a very big deal.

Windows 8 has been said to boot fast, but until now it’s been a Microsoft story. Now, Tom Warren from WinRumors has proven it to be very true. I am very impressed. Remember, this is a developer preview and not a beta or final product. It should become even faster by the time Windows 8 is released, not only because of more efficient programming, but because of new hardware between now and then.

Steven Sinofsky has announced that tonight at 8PM PDT Microsoft will release a developers preview of Windows 8. I can imagine that the response will be great, so download speeds may not be the best. But, I can assure you I will be downloading it starting at 8:00:01 PDT, along with many others. I can’t wait to give it a whirl!

EDIT: Download Link Here – It is now available for download.

Upgrade from Windows 7 installation is not supported for pre-release code; only clean installs are supported. Reminder: this is a developer preview release and is not meant for production. It is not a beta release. We will be updating the release with various quality updates and drivers over the coming weeks/months just to exercise our overall update and telemetry mechanisms.

Windows 8 is set to be shown to the world today at BUILD, Microsoft’s new event. You can watch the keynote live at BuildWindows.com. Apparently, there has already been a few breaking of the NDA’s there, so some news may already be out there.

BUILD is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. Learn how to work with the all new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world.