Windows 8 Dev build

That will arrive with Windows 8.1. Here's a screenshot from my Start Screen (preview version of 8.1) where I've set some of the tiles to new "small" size:

Yup, I'm quite looking forward to 8.1. Just another couple months to go as I don't usually mess around with preview builds anymore.

Regards,
SB
 
Yeah, the 8.1 preview brings in some nice and much-needed additional features for the metro interface. Some examples include customizing the titles of the tile "sections" (where Miksu above has Dev as the title of that section in the screen capture), smaller tiles and larger tiles (only certain apps support the biggest tile size), and a new swipe-up gesture for getting to "all apps" versus having to swipe up and then click a button for the same.

Really, 8.1 on a desktop system fixes all little complaints I had about it on that platform. My only remaining issue is a sleep problem on my Intel DX79SI board, which worked in Win7 but somehow locks the box in Win8. There's a much newer version of firmware out for my board that I haven't pulled down yet, and among other things, it mentions support enhancements for Win8 which I assume will help to rectify the sleep issue.

I've also had sleep issues ... tended to crash during the night. I'm not sure if it is related to SSD drive or something else. They mostly have gone away, but still occasionally seem to happen. Haven't looked into it in too much detail yet though.
 
I did the firmware upgrade on my board last night, and it's absolutely better, but it hasn't been long enough for me to declare it fixed. Before this point, I couldn't even put the box to sleep at all: it would simply lock solid after the screen turns off.

Now I can put it to sleep, wake it up, let it fall to sleep on its own, wake it up... I have SSD drives in the system, but they're connected to a HighPoint 2720SGL RAID controller.
 
Nice info thanks but it still doesnt go far enuf
I would like to customize it any way I want
eg as many tiles/widgets/icons as I desire
It seems as if MS are doing the apple way (we know better than the user)
True I could use linux, but I prefer windows over linux & apple
 
Nice info thanks but it still doesnt go far enuf
I would like to customize it any way I want
eg as many tiles/widgets/icons as I desire

I'm not sure what you mean; the number of tiles / icons you can put on that screen is not limited (eh, to my knowledge anyway.) What do you find missing?
 
That's certainly a weird bug. This is an underclocked Haswell:

 
Seems to mostly affect underclocks in terms of making the system "appear" faster. Wonder if an overclock screws it up in a different way? It also seems to be very specific to bus overclocks rather than multiplier driven.

I'm not sure this jives with my own experience, as I run my 3930k at stock multiplier but with a 1.25x bclk modifier. Windows isn't able to "see" my overclock, so it always assumes I'm doing 3.6Ghz instead of the actual 4.5Ghz. At this moment, I'm not getting any clock skew, but maybe I'm not paying enough attention either.

I'll go home tonight and see if I can make it screw up, and report back.
 
I spent some time messing with my 3930k, and could not replicate this issue -- with one caveat...

First, the things I tried:
  • Stock everything. No issues.
  • Stock multipliers and bClk, modified memory multiplier. No issues.
  • Stock multipliers with 125MHz bClk. No issues.
  • Stock bClk with 45x multiplier. No issues.
  • 38x multiplier with 125Mhz bClk No issues
Now, every single one of these clock changes were made in the UEFI instead of from within Windows. I loaded up the Intel Extreme Tuning thingy and started messing with it from inside Windows. I could change CPU multipliers on the fly, but bClk and memory multipliers were not allowed by the app unless I rebooted.

So, here's my presumption: Blazcowicz may have it right, in that it might be related to modifying the bClk from within Windows where it starts to cause skew. Not sure why it wouldn't happen on AMD platforms, maybe because of something done with how the HTT clock generator isn't tracked by the CPU the same way? Or by the OS? Or by the chipset driver?

Who knows. But the bClk overclock by itself isn't enough to whack out Windows 8, it's gotta be something more interactive than that.
 
Perhaps LGA 2011 is immune to it (and 1366, and 1156), 1155 is where Intel hacked funny limitations in and 1150 "limited, but less limited in specific circumstances"
The bug would have got in - in specific circumstances - because of messing with it.

Now that I think about it my VIA C7 + VX900 chipset (which sits unused for now) had clock skew, no idea if it was because of a slight o/c (but it uses the pentium 4/core2 duo FSB). I'll resuscitate it for a server but that is an annoying issue, at worst I'll sync the clock regularly with a time server on the internet.
 
just got a new pc, (slowest haswell) with win 8
OK its got 8GB, yet rarely uses more than 2gb.

My question how to make it use more memory like apple OSX
eg in chrome or ie explorer I close a tab (and the HD starts up for half a second, WTF for), the same with other programs eg photoshop CS3 (which has now stopped working since I tried to install ie6, which didnt work well, even uninstalling PS and reinstalling PS it still crashes on load), notepad++ etc.
Q/ how to force windows to use the memory for caching and not the HD
 
It is being used. If you go into Task Manager - Performance tab. Then look at the memory useage, you'll see XX GB Available which is just slightly more than XX GB Cached in most cases.

That means Windows is using all free memory available for caching things in memory but it is still available for other programs to use if needed.

Regards,
SB
 
I remember finding a checkbox in windows 2003 and perhaps XP, simply in control panel / system / advanced / ya, I promise it's really system and advanced /
It asks whether memory should first be used for programs (default) or cache. Also a checkbox that asks whether CPU time should go to programs (default) or services. Maybe reversed default on a server.

Of course the relevant back-end stuff was rewritten but maybe the same UI lingers there at the same place.
I remember I clicked the thing but it didn't really do anything for me LOL.
This was with XP with no antivirus, no spyware, trimmed down (classic theme, yellow search dog removed, few services), around 105MB used on startup and on a big 7200 rpm HDD it was like using a modern machine with a SSD, so I didn't have to care what the checkbox said.
 
BTW there's app specific stuff.
For instance on my current PC I'm tired of the many HDD reads and writes when browsing, it's not linux doing it but it's Firefox own caching. If i had a lot memory I'd set up a small ramdisk only for that (the cache directory can be changed)
 
One thing that is very interesting, compared to previous Windows is how it uses a VERY large amount of memory to facilitate file transfers as well. The first time I noticed it was when copying a 2 GB file to another drive and it finished almost instantly (I had just been working with that file so it was still cached in memory). Obviously a potential problem if you suffer a power outage and don't have a UPS, but I'm going to assume that Windows does nothing to the original file (say with a Move command) until the file is actually written to the other disk.

Just so many things about Windows 8 that I love that just make me groan whenever I'm forced to use Windows 7.

Regards,
SB
 
One thing that is very interesting, compared to previous Windows is how it uses a VERY large amount of memory to facilitate file transfers as well. The first time I noticed it was when copying a 2 GB file to another drive and it finished almost instantly (I had just been working with that file so it was still cached in memory). Obviously a potential problem if you suffer a power outage and don't have a UPS, but I'm going to assume that Windows does nothing to the original file (say with a Move command) until the file is actually written to the other disk.

Just so many things about Windows 8 that I love that just make me groan whenever I'm forced to use Windows 7.

Regards,
SB

Is this actually a good or terrible thing if you have for instance 2 GB of RAM and this memory at the time of the transfer is occupied by other applications?
Why do I think what you write is a little fishy?
 
Is this actually a good or terrible thing if you have for instance 2 GB of RAM and this memory at the time of the transfer is occupied by other applications?
Why do I think what you write is a little fishy?

Obviously if you only have 2 GB of RAM, there isn't going to be much available for caching. So in the example I posted, you'd be just limited to pure HDD speed for large file transfers.

In my case I have 32 GB of system RAM. 23.1 GB of which is being used as cache out of 23.3 GB available. Only 8.6 GB of my total RAM pool is actually being used by an application at the moment.

Regards,
SB
 
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