Diagnostic Program Review: Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant

For this assignment I reviewed Microsoft's Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant. This is a quick and simply tool to see if a system and associated programs and files will be compatibly with Windows 8. The utility can be found at: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8

The diagnostic program is very easy to use and straightforward. After installing and opening the program, you are greeted with this screen:

After a short moment the following screen pops up showing the number of apps are compatible and how many items need to be reviewed.

 Next I clicked on "See Compatibility Details" which brought up the screen below:

After reviewing the compatibility details, I closed the window and clicked next. The screen below shows that Windows 8 was compatible with the school computer that I ran this on. The screen also has a quick link to purchase the upgrade.

In summary, the program is quick and easy to use. Running the utility ensures that the system you are looking at upgrading is compatible with the new system.

Chapter 13 Utility Review: Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool

One of the utilities discussed in Chapter 13 (page 570) was a tool by Microsoft to create a bootable USB flash drive. This bootable USB comes in handy when you are installing on a system without a physical drive such as a netbook or other portable computer. The tool is extremely simple to use and makes creating bootable USB drives or DVD's very easy.

Instruction on downloading and using the tool can be found at:
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msus/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool/

Steps to use the tool:

1. Click the Windows START button, and click WINDOWS 7 USB/DVD DOWNLOAD TOOL in the ALL PROGRAMS list to open the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.
2. In the SOURCE FILE box, type the name and path of your Windows 7 ISO file, or click BROWSE and select the file from the OPEN dialog box. Click NEXT.
3. Select USB DEVICE to create a copy on a USB flash drive or select DVD disk to create a copy on a DVD disk.
4. If you are copying the file to a USB flash drive, select your USB device in the drop-down list and click BEGIN COPYING. If you are copying the file up to a DVD, click BEGIN BURNING.

A screenshot of the utility is shown below:

CIST 1130 05/28/2013

Today I installed Windows 8 in the VMBox virtual environment. We began looking at the differences in Windows 8. We looked briefly at the different command prompts that could be brought up in Windows 8.

I looked further into the issue we saw last week where four of the machines were only showing 80GB of HD space. After seeing that the serial numbers of the HD's were different on these machines, I searched google for the serial number. I found that the drives were indeed only 80GB drives.

I had to reinstall Windows 7 on one machine due to a previous student installing ontop of the current install and had not first wiped the drive. I installed Virtual PC, Virtual PC XP Mode, and VMBox on all the remaining eleven machines. I One machine was not set up with the proper naming structure that was given by the instructor. I changed the computer name and password, and set up the guest account. I made sure all the remaining machines had the guest account set up and had the proper naming structure.

One machine was set asside as if it was not working. I hooked it up to diagnose. It appeared to be missing a hard drive. I was unable to verify this due to the computer cases being locked and we did not have a key.

CIST 1130 05/23/2013

Today we continued to install Windows 7 on the rest of the machines as we did last Tuesday. Three of the machines appared to have an issue with the hard drives. We began diagnosing the issue with the cmd and diskpart comands. We will explore these issues in more detail in the following class. 

We began installing Windows Virtuel PC and Windows XP Mode on a few of the machines. I had downloaded Virtual PC and Windows SP1 to my USB drive from home to help speed up our process today. Downloaded and installed Windows XP Mode as well as VBox.

I also reviewed Mr. Garber's instruction to create a bootable USB drive that was posted on the online class portal, Angel.

CIST 1130 05/21/2013

Tuesday May 21, 2013

Today we reinstalled Windows 7 on multiple machines. We booted from the DVD drive to get to the Windows Installation screen. Using the Custom (Advanced) option, we deleted two current partitions to create one new partition for our fresh install.  After two reboots Windows was up and running. We set up up new admin user names with passwords. Naming of the computers were as follows:

User-name: student-0X
Computer Name: computer-0X
Workgroup: A-245
Password: guest-0X

Once we had our admin profile set up, we set up a guest profile that did not require a password by going to the control panel > Users > Guest > and then clicking "Turn On." This profile will be used by other students in other classes without us having to worry about them changing any settings on our admin profiles. We rebooted to ensure both profiles were working as intended.

We spent the last few minutes of class updating windows and installing Windows 7 SP1.

About Me

Currently attend Lanier Tech to obtain a degree computer science. Expected graduation: Fall 2014.