Hello from Windows 8

Windows 8 proved very easy to install. I believe in starting from a clean slate (sorry) so I backed up my entire machine last night and this morning at 8:30 I started the upgrade by booting from a CD, deleting all the partitions from the disk and starting from scratch. I had the machine working under Windows 8 well before 9:00. Looks very good so far. One thing to be aware of (although this might just be me). We have an eduroam WiFi network at Hull which is authenticated using a self signed certificate. When you connect to it you sometimes get a message saying that the certificate is not as secure as it might be, and do you really want to do this. You just have to say OK to continue to connect.

When I first installed Windows 8 this didn’t work. The machine just refused to connect to the university WiFi. It knew that the password was correct, but it didn’t give me the option to ignore the certificate. However, once I’d connected via the wired network, and logged onto the machine with my Windows Live account it worked perfectly. It might be the case (although I’m really just guessing here) that Windows 8 insists on having a “proper” login before it will enable the option to ignore certificate errors like this. I’d love to know if you have hit this problem too, so put a comment on the end of this post if you get problems.

As for me, I’ve installed Windows Essentials and got Live Writer working (hence this post). Next it is on to Visual Studio 2012 and the other stuff.