Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

To find the new Windows Update, tap Winkey+I from anywhere in Windows 8 to bring up the Settings pane. Then, choose the Change PC Settings link at the bottom of the screen. This will launch the new, full-screen PC Settings interface, a Metro-style control panel experience. In the left pane, choose Windows Update from the bottom of the list and you’ll see a display similar to that shown in Figure 2-19.

Figure 2-19:The new Windows Update

Now, click Check for updates now to manually check for new updates. Download and install any updates and reboot as required. Repeat this process until Windows 8 is completely up to date.

Once that’s done, you use a legacy Windows desktop tool called Device Manager, which is the easiest and most detailed way to ensure that all of your hardware is properly configured with drivers. As always, there are a number of ways to access the Device Manager, but the quickest (as is so often the case) is to use Start Search: Type Winkey+Q to bring up Search and then type device man .In the right pane, select Settings, and then select Device Manager from the results list on the left.

This time, something interesting happens: The classic Windows desktop—that familiar environment from Windows 7 and previous Windows versions—appears and the old-school Device Manager window opens (see Figure 2-20).

Figure 2-20:Device Manager tells you at a glance which hardware devices are connected and properly configured for your PC.

If any of the entries, or nodes, in the Device Manager tree view are open, displaying a device with a small yellow exclamation point, or bang , then you’re going to need to install some drivers. If not, you’re in luck—truly, truly in luck—and you can jump ahead to the next section: Your PC is magically completely up to date.

For the rest of us poor slobs, there are a few options for rectifying this situation.

• Automatically:Right-click the unsupported device and choose Update Driver Software. Windows will search the Internet (that is, Microsoft Update, the cloud-hosted service behind Windows Update) and the local system, including any setup disks, to find the appropriate driver. In our experience this method almost never works, but it’s worth trying.

• Manually, with an executable setup disk or download:Many drivers come in self-contained executables whereby you run a setup routine just as you would for an application program. If possible, be sure to use a Windows 8- or 7–compatible setup application or, if really pressed, one designed for Windows Vista.

In the latter case, you will want to visit your PC maker’s support website and search for the drivers that are specific for your system. Most of them will be fairly obvious, but in some cases you’ll run into devices in Device Manager that are listed with dummy or unhelpful names like “unsupported device,” “SM Bus,” or similar. Our advice is to start with chipset drivers, because these low-level, multi-device drivers often clear up any missing, or banged, devices.

Note, too, that Windows 8 will sometimes assign a default graphics driver and not use an up-to-date, optimized driver. You will know this is the case if Windows isn’t using the full resolution of your display. Right-click the Windows desktop and choose Screen resolution to check. If you can’t select the appropriate resolution, you’ll need to update the graphics driver too, even if it’s not banged out in Device Manager.

With Windows 8 and older Windows versions, it was generally important to install a security solution, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, before continuing on to other applications. But Windows 8 includes the functionality from Security Essentials as part of the Windows Defender solution, so this is no longer necessary. If you prefer a third-party security solution for some reason, however, you should install that first.

Next, install your core applications one at a time and reboot if necessary after each install as requested. This process can often take a long time and is mind-numbingly boring, but you should have to do it only once.

After your key applications are installed, it’s time to restore any data that you might have backed up from your previous Windows install. How you do this will vary depending on how you backed up that data, but we use the Microsoft SkyDrive application to sync key documents, photos, and other folders between the web and our Windows PCs. So installing SkyDrive (available from skydrive.com) copies the documents, photos, and other critical files over automatically.

While the preceding parts of this chapter document the most common Setup scenarios, sometimes you need a bit more advanced or unusual configuration. Here, we’ll examine some of the more common ways in which you can install Windows 8 in such configurations.

Since the actual process of installing Windows 8 in each case resembles the procedure detailed previously, here we’ll just focus on the specific differences of which you need to be aware.

While most users will want just a single version of Windows installed on their PC, some power users or others will require two (or more) installs of Windows, which sit side by side on the PC’s hard disk in separate partitions. When you boot the PC in such a configuration, you’re presented with a menu listing the various OS choices, and you pick one and boot into the appropriate OS version.

Such a configuration is often called a dual-boot configuration, though of course it’s possible to install three or more OSes, assuming you have the disk space. (Maybe multi-boot is a better term.) But however many versions of Windows you wish to install, the basic advice is simple: Install them in order of age, from oldest to newest. If you want to dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows 8, for example, install Windows 7 first and then Windows 8.

Why is this, you ask? Each Windows version comes with an updated version of the Windows boot loader, which includes both the menu that users will see and the underlying code that selects which OS to boot. The Windows 7 boot loader is not familiar with Windows 8. But the version for Windows 8 is very much familiar with Windows 7, and with older Windows versions. So install that last.

Assuming you have a Windows 7 install up and running already, you must use a media-based Setup to install Windows 8 after booting the PC from that disc or USB flash drive. That is, you cannot use the web-based installer.

Before you do that, however, there is one absolutely critical task you must perform: You must make room for the new Windows 8 install. This can occur on its own disk, so if you have one sitting in the PC waiting to go, you’re all set. But if you have just one hard disk, as in a typical laptop, you’ll need to segregate it into separate partitions, segments of the disk that work and act like individual hard disks. And to do this, you must use a fairly complex and well-hidden tool called Disk Management.

To find this tool from Windows 7, use Start Menu Search: Open the Start Menu, type disk part, and hit Enter. The Disk Management utility, shown in Figure 2-21, will open.