Windows 10 Tech Preview

Thought I would have a go at this when I heard about the opportunity on Windows Weekly, knowing I could learn something under way.

If all went well I would have learnt nothing, but it didn't. I made the flash drive, but I just couldn't get it to work. After a lot of time spent looking for the answer, I wrote a post on the relevant Windows forum, and went on to try another PC, my old T91MT.

This installed with none of the Samsung's problems,  and,  though the screen resolution is lower than the prerequisites, everything else worked much faster than Windows 7..

This success led me back to the Samsung, where a couple of lucky Google searches pointed me at the Rufus flash drive builder. First efforts with this failed to install as well, but another lucky search led me to producing another Rufus build,  this time in FAT32 format. Lord knows why, but that allowed me to complete a custom install, which got rid of all the Samsung rubbish, which was so difficult to remove in 8.1.

From there it was all plain sailing :-)

Once I was happy with the status, I carried out a new Macrium Backup, very fast now! I also looked into Recovery, making Bootable flash drives  for both PCs, and custom Recovery folders with the help of reagentc and recimage.  (See Evernote)

This used up all the old flash drives, so I ordered a couple of new ones, which might arrive today.

Rooting the Galaxy S2, the odd man out

As the Nexus Rooting euphoria gradually faded away, I was left with my unrooted Samsung GS2. Looking for a way to Root this wonderful device required much Googling, and reading of XDA threads, as I searched for a Mac way to carry out this task. This proved to go unrewarded..

So often willing helpers would point to the simple PC way of carrying this out. "Use Wugfresh", "Get Odin", "Install Kies", etc., so, in the end I thought OK I'll give it a go, not knowing what frustrations this would stimulate!

At the time I had a tiny ASUS T91MT, which invariably started with an hour or so of Microsoft updates, before one could begin the slow process of installing Kies, a large package needed just for the drivers Odin requires. (Why can't someone simplify things and put up a link to the drivers?).

Anyway, all my thanks go to Jose Farrugia aka @wiredmash who offered the clearest instructions on Rooting the GS2, using the Siyah kernel, see the video and point by point instructions at http://www.wiredmash.com/how-to-root-samsung-galaxy-s2-i9100-jelly-bean-4-1-2/ ... :)

All went well with the above, but for one hitch. The Odin UI more than filled the vertical dimensions of the tiny T91MT, so I was unable to get at the Start button! I tried everything, including a lot of very bad language, until the solution came to mind - change the screen resolution! That gave me a 5x3 inch UI with a tiny Start button I could press, and a minute or so later all was done. Dead simple as the XDA guys said..

Just dusted off the T91MT

It must be many months since I last powered on this, my remaining Windows device, probably stimulated by all the talk of Surface RT..

Spending the usual hour or so slowly installing updates, and removing a couple of unwanted apps, has been enough to put me off Windows for life...