> Weather – Get free GRIB files via email from online services
That sounds great
With regards to Windows, I’ve always found it to feel very half-assed when it comes to network configuration, from the venerable TCP/IP setup dialogs in the GUI and the awful command line tools if you need to do things without the GUI. Bluetooth is one thing, but WPA2 “enterprise” under Windows is still awful. Even Linux gets it right (and Linux is not famed for having a particularly complete GUI when it comes to configuring stuff), getting the Windows WPA2 enterprise supplicant to work under XP was a 19 step process, it’s something like a 25 step process under Windows 7. No other device requires this – it just works with iOS, Android, Mac OSX and Linux devices, but with Windows it’s a long drawn out and unintuitive process.
That the Bluetooth stuff in Windows is hit and miss therefore doesn’t really surprise me.
That is all true 
Windows, like it or not, has captured a huge chunk of the “computer to do a job” market. Probably 95-98% of the corporate scene. I think M$ have done what a lot of people have done (Nokia for example, in their arrogant heyday) and assumed that anybody wanting to use these corporate features will have a sysadmin person who preconfigures all 5000 PCs in the company.
The problem is for individuals who buy a “computer” to run specific non-mainstream apps. If I wanted a computer which is just wonderful, I would buy a Mac for home, and an Ipad for travelling. But the Mac won’t run most of the software I need to run at home or at work (PCB design, CAD, etc) and same for the Ipad for flying. There are certainly loads of “flying” apps which one can populate an Ipad with but I don’t want most of them. I also don’t want to pay the subscription costs of some of them…
I am also less than keen on WIFI in the cockpit. If anything is going to interfere with avionics, it will be WIFI. Not bluetooth.
I spoke to the Deep Freeze people. It seems to do just what it says, £30, but you can’t exclude any directories from the restore. Only whole drives. So the only way to save data which is not to get wiped at the next boot-up is to write it on e.g. an SD card, or a different HD partition (a different drive letter).
Peter, an image backup in Windows 8 is possible, and there are several methods to do so with Microsoft’s own tools. One is built into Windows and can be run directly from a running system: go to Control Panel > File History > System Image Backup (that’s for 8.1, it’s called slightly differently in 8.0). Another, more flexible method, is described here. Yet another one, still more flexible and allowing you to exclude directories, involves booting into the command line and running DISM – this is the one I use.
Yes – I know. I did that backup. Actually I did both a file backup and an image backup.
The file backup is useless for any system files (because they are locked by the O/S and cannot be restored other than via some process that runs before bootup) and the data files can be backed up in any other way anyway.
The image backup cannot be restored unless you have the image recovery boot CD (same process as with Trueimage etc) and it looks like I forgot to make that CD at the time, and now I can’t make it due to the above mentioned error. So the image backup, currently 55GB, or any later one I do, are useless until I either solve that error, or get my hands on a restore CD made on another Lenovo tablet (I have asked around).
But practically I can buy the latest Trueimage for $30 and that will be it. I have used TI for a decade now and it is brilliant for getting out of these sh*t situations. It backs up direct to a network drive and can restore direct from it.
The second method you link to is great and is basically Trueimage, but slightly more convoluted and you can’t exclude individual files. Also how do you restore to a computer which doesn’t boot?
Peter, the third method creates a WIM image, which contains an entire drive by default, but you can set up an exclusion list if you want. I prefer WIM to all third-party formats because you can natively mount a WIM file on any Windows 7 or 8 machine as a virtual hard disk and manually copy individual files if you need them. If the computer doesn’t boot, you just boot into a command prompt mode from a Windows distribution on a USB stick (or an external DVD, if you want to be old-fashioned) and run DISM from there to restore your system disk. The distribution you boot from doesn’t have to be the same version as the system being restored.
By the way, when you boot into the command prompt mode, your system files aren’t locked and you can back them up to your heart’s content.
P.S. If I remember correctly, you can use a Windows distribution in lieu of a recovery boot CD, too.
How would you create a windows O/S on a USB stick – or on a CD for that matter? This tablet did not come with any DVDs. I guess I could buy a Win8 retail (or OEM) install DVD and use that, but it isn’t exactly cheap. I think that is the issue here – I cannot create the recovery boot media in the first place.
If anything is going to interfere with avionics, it will be WIFI. Not bluetooth.
Can you elaborate?
I cannot see anything close to 2.4GHz in a normal GA cockpit. And since both WLAN and BT use the same frequency band, why should WLAN be significantly more critical? Yes, WLAN has a higher transmit power, but only by 10dB or so.
I think you can still download a trial DVD for free from Microsoft; also, since you already have a computer with preinstalled Windows but no distribution media, you should be able to order a disk for a symbolic price through tech support. Finally, you can get the media from many other sources ;-) As I already mentioned, you don’t even need the same version. You certainly don’t have to buy a retail version because you already have a license key.
To create a bootable Windows distribution on a USB stick, look here.
To create a recovery USB stick, look here.
But the Mac won’t run most of the software I need to run at home or at work (PCB design, CAD, etc)
I run Xilinx ISE and various PCB/schematic tools on my Mac :-) (Actually it’s sort of cheating, they run on a Linux virtual machine on my Mac, but ssh -X virtualmachine means those apps aren’t stuck in the virtual machine’s framebuffer and appear as another window on the OSX desktop instead). Virtualbox runs really well on the Mac, too.
I don’t do FPGA/PCB stuff for a living though, IIRC you do it professionally so you’re probably running something high end like Protel rather than gEDA’s gschem/pcb. If I did I’d probably still go the virtual machine route to run Windows-only tools.
