New laptop ordered .. and something I didn't realise about CPU performance

Well, I've finally taken the plunge and ordered myself a new laptop. SharePoint 2013 has finally gone RTM and the hardware requirements are eye watering to say the least.

My Current Laptop

Now .. I always thought that my existing laptop was no slouch. It was pretty high spec (as older laptops go) and even thought it was primarily a gaming machine it certainly tackled most development requirements with a pretty good rate of knots.

Intel i7-740QM
16GB DDR3-1333 RAM
512GB Crucial M4 SSD (SATA II)
1GB ATi Radeon HD 5850

 But with SharePoint 2013 there are quite a few things lacking. 16GB really isn't enough to run a proper SharePoint 2013 environment and I also like to play around with features even in SharePoint 2010 that could do with more juice (I have given presentations on Performance Testing and Kerberos which really require 5-6 separate VMs with a fair amount of RAM each).

Wish list for a new laptop

For my new laptop I had 3 core requirements:

1. Increased RAM (32GB at a minimum) to run multiple SharePoint VMs
2. Native USB 3.0 and SATA III support for faster drive speeds (my current SSD drives support this, and I have a load of USB 3.0 devices, so this was a must)
3. Improved Battery Life - my current machine only gets 2 hours tops and I ideally wanted an "all day" device for those coffee shop / conference moments

But before I dive into that I wanted to share a discussion I had on twitter and a small revelation I found from checking up the statistics and information about CPU performance, in particular the Intel i7 CPUs.

All of the laptops I looked at satisfied criteria 1 and 2 so it was initially only battery life that was going to swing anything .. or was it .. ?

Does CPU speed matter?

Well this was first brought to attention by @tristanwatkins through his blog article on i5 versus i7 performance speeds and this was also joined in discussion from @benjaminathawes.

Now .. this is something that I never really considered, especially when you look at the model numbers of CPUs these days:

• First Generation : i7-740QM
• Second Generation (Sandy Bridge) : i7-2720QM
• Third Generation (Ivy Bridge): i7-3740QM

I always glanced and didn't really notice much of a difference .. until you dig into the specifications:

• i7-740QM - 1.7Ghz, Turbo Boost to 2.9Ghz
• i7-2720QM - 2.2Ghz, Turbo Boost to 3.3 Ghz
• i7-3740QM - 2.7Ghz, Turbo Boost to 3.7Ghz

This is quite a staggering ramp up in CPU speed (especially as each generation ALSO offers enhanced battery life).

At this point in time I was also working on a SharePoint 2010 project and logging into a friend's development machine remotely. I couldn't help noticing that with an identical VM clone of mine his was deploying and refreshing the pages vastly quicker than mine (so much faster I had to double check the Visual Studio settings to make sure it WAS actually deploying the files). IISRESET and Application Pool recycle were SO much faster I could barely believe it. To top this off, his VM copy was only running on 6GB RAM (and mine was running on 10GB)!

I checked his system settings and he was running a new 2nd generation i7 (actually a i7-3930) but was running a much higher clock speed than mine

So that was kind of conclusive, a new item on my wish list therefore became:

• Faster CPU

To be honest this didn't actually have much of an impact on the decision of which laptop to buy (because ALL of the 2nd Gen / 3rd Gen i7 CPUs are vastly quicker than the 1st Gen i7 CPUs). But it did have an impact on the "I need a new laptop" decision beyond just battery life and RAM.

All of the laptop models I was looking at came with exactly the same spread of Intel i7 and i5 chipsets so it didn't really have any impact, but this analysis was very interesting nonetheless.

Battery Life and the final decision ..

The final stretch was looking for battery life and rounding it down to a few final models .. I did consider a number of different candidates, and in particular there were two models I was looking closely at:

• Dell Precision M4700
• Lenovo W530

The Dell Precision range came quite highly recommended and the Dell Precision M6700 looked like a beast of a machine but with a 17.3" screen it wasn't very "portable" and I do tend to carry mine around London quite a lot. The alternative model was the Dell Precision M4700 (15.6") which also looked very nice (with very similar options to the Lenovo W530, also a 15.6") and the build quality and spec of both machines was very similar (both of them with a large number of ports).

Both the Lenovo W-series and Dell Precision machines come highly recommended to me from friends on Twitter and everyone seems to be very happy with their machine (regardless of which one they have). They both have a pretty damned similar range of "internal" specs and the same kind of generic options:

• Latest 3rd Generation Intel i7 chips
• 15.6" 1080p screens
• Wide number of ports (USB 3.0 / HDMI / etc)
• Ability to remove the optical drive for a second disk drive
• Ability to clip on a "battery slice" to the docking port on the bottom of the laptop - which can extend (even double!) the battery life of the machine

At the end of the day the settling factor was the battery life, and this was the only real stand-out feature which made the Lenovo W530 jump out of the crowd.

The W530 comes with an additional Intel HD 4000 Integrated Graphics chip. This combined with their apparently excellent power management software, basically allows the laptop to switch over to a low-power graphics chip which makes an enormous difference to battery life!

The Dell Precision workstations both come with NVIDIA Quadro graphics chips, which although very good (especially for CAD / Photoshop) do chew through the battery on high-performance modes. The W530 also has the same graphics chipset, but at least it can turn it off when not needed.

The results of this are (from several internet sources, the blogs of which I seem to have misplaced):
Disclaimer - I can't verify the accuracy of these numbers, but from various conversations and anecdotal evidence I believe them to be accurate

• Dell Precision M4700 (with 9-cell battery)
• Light Usage: ~6 hours
• Heavy Usage: ~2 hours
• Lenovo W530 (with 9-cell battery)
• Light Usage: ~12 hours
• Heavy Usage: ~6 hours

This was a staggering difference .. and when you add another 9-cell battery slice this takes the W530 up to over 16 hours for light usage (i.e. conferences / flights) and even on heavy usage can easily last "all day" on battery alone!

My new laptop - Lennovo W530

So my decision was finally made, and I ordered myself a Lenovo W530. I really can't wait for this to arrive, and I'm definitely going to be doing some performance test comparisons to my current laptop (running identical VMs) just to see what the difference is!

I am also presenting at SharePoint Saturday UK in December on Performance Testing with Visual Studio 2012 so I hope to have the new laptop fully up and running by then!

Full Spec:
(well .. the important bits)

• 3rd Gen i7-3840QM (2.7Ghz, Turbo Boost up to 3.7Ghz, 8MB Cache)
• 32 GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
• NVIDIA Quadro K2000M with 2GB DDR3 and Intel HD 4000 Integrated Graphics
• 2x 512 GB Crucial M4 SSD (SATA III / 550MB/s)*

(* note - to get two hard drives in this I will remove the optical drive and use a drive bay adapter. I don't really need / use optical drives these days anyway, and I install Windows off a memory stick)

Watch this space and once it arrives I'll be giving a summary of any noticeable changes!

How many apps do you really need for a phone?

I must have had this conversation a dozen times, and seen it from various trolling on the internet ... the Windows Phone Store doesn't have very many apps, and therefore iPhone / Android phones are better.

Honestly .. I can't say I've noticed ..

The stores of course differ wildly in size, back in March 2011 the "app store" sizes for each of the major handsets was (apparently)

• Apple - 330,000+
• Android - 206,000+
• Windows Phone 7 - 11,000+

So .. only 10k apps (I believe the number is a lot higher this year, especially with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Office 2013 all making their moves towards an "app" model) but the premise is the same .. there are a LOT more apps for iPhone / Android than there are for Windows, but does that actually make a difference to your phone?

I thought I would share what apps I have installed and use regularly, just to see how much I am "missing out" by not getting myself the latest shiny tech device from competing providers.

So here they come, in no particular order..

Twitter

Take your pick, there are a whole bunch of them out there in the Windows Phone marketplace. There is the official twitter app plus the popular rowi and Seesmic variants.

For 99% of what I need I actually use the built-in "People Hub" which allows me to read the latest tweets and also post some of my own updates too. However it doesn't include direct messaging, search or (un)follow capabilities so a dedicated app is still sometimes useful.

Facebook (only just!)

Same story here to be honest. The "People Hub" does pretty much all I need and I can't say I have logged into the web interface of Facebook for almost 2 years. I still use a dedicated app (in my case the "official" Facebook app, published by Microsoft) but this is only to check direct messages and occasionally change the odd setting or check something .. but I only tend to fire it up once every 3-4 months.

Honestly I could survive with just the people hub which is built into the phone (as I can always use a computer for those hard-to-reach places if I am desperate) .. but there are dozens of Facebook apps in the marketplace anyway so I tend to have one to hand anyway.

Weather

Probably the first one I install to be honest. I used to use AccuWeather but now Microsoft have released their very own Weather app (which I have been using for the past few months). Its useful to have it pinned to the home page so I get live-tile updates (in case I can't be bothered to look out of the window), but its nice to know if I should expect rain in London before leaving for work so I can grab a rain-coat or umbrella.

Adobe Reader

This is just for simple PDF support. I occasionally receive PDF files as email attachments and sometimes download them (usually terms and conditions) from websites so having some kind of PDF app is a must. Luckily the integration is solid and it launches "on demand" when a PDF file is opened.

YouTube

Now I'm not even sure if you would need this in Windows Phone 8 due to the HTML5 and Native Flash support in the IE10 browser but on my WP7.5 device I still need an external app to view YouTube videos.

Again, the integration is seamless, if you click to view a video the app launches automatically then plays the video in the native phone video player.

Flashlight

Simple this one .. I have dual LED bulbs on the back of my phone (for the camera) but why not use it as a flashlight (or a "torch" as we say in the UK).

I live in a very dark part of the countryside so having a handy flashlight when I need to navigate my garden at night, or getting from the car to the house without tripping over things is really useful.

Tube Map

Ok .. I admit it .. the London Underground is a bloody rabbit warren. If you haven't lived there for 30 years, don't like jellied eels or don't understand what "dog and bone" or "apples and pairs" means then you will need a tube map!

I specifically use one which allows me to have offline maps because (surprise!) there is no signal on underground trains :)

..

And .. that's it ..

As I have a Nokia phone it comes with world leading Voice Turn-by-Turn SatNav courtesy of "Nokia Drive" with full (free!) offline maps worldwide and offline searching too, as well as a whole bunch of camera functions, public transport apps and streaming music.

All Windows Phones have Office built in which gives you excellent Word / Excel / PowerPoint / OneNote integration (the OneNote is especially awesome and I use it all the time!)

Social integration is baked in with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (which are the 3 social networks which I tend to use on a daily basis .. probably like most people in the SharePoint industry).

The "cloud storage" story is an interesting one as SkyDrive is baked in across the product (you can auto-upload your photos, as well as opening documents from the office apps and browse photos using both the People Hub and the Pictures Hub) but arguably you might get a bit of legs from installing a custom app (there is for example dedicated DropBox and SkyDrive apps in the marketplace)

Wireless HotSpot capability is built in so I can use my phone as a roaming wireless router for my laptop / tablet of choice (along with the usually Bluetooth / hands free functions).

And the email client supports a whole range of email accounts from Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo through to Exchange and Nokia Mail .. or even just a custom POP / IMAP email account.

The only thing that really stands out is more the "one off" apps that crop up from time to time. You are watching TV and they say there is a companion app .. or one for online banking .. or an app which goes with your latest cook book .. these all seem to be Android and iPhone .. but I survived without having apps for absolutely everything so I think I'll continue to survive with a Windows Phone.

What is your story?? Any apps which you really can't live without? (that you can't find in the Windows Phone marketplace?)

That is one smashed phone ..

Well, it was bound to happen eventually as I use my smartphones every single day and this is the first one I've managed to spectacularly break after about 6 years of using them.

I went and dropped my Nokia Lumia 800 from about 4 feet onto a wooden floor and the screen (well .. the gorilla glass covering it) has smashed and now spiderweb cracks covers roughly 1/4 of the screen.

Ironically this only happened when I took the rubber "condom" (protective covering which goes over the phone) off because I thought it might be interfering with my signal (it wasn't!). The normal covering on this device is quite shiny and doesn't give you much traction, which led to the phone slipping out of my hand.

Quite impressive is that the touchscreen still works fine, in fact apart from making it difficult to read in a few places it hasn't really affected the functional at all.. There is one thing though which is that the proximity sensor (which detects when you are holding the phone to your ear and turns the screen off during calls) can't see through the cracks at the top of the phone. This means that during a call the screen won't activate and therefore I can't do trivial tasks like .. hang up, or activate the speaker, or use the keypad!

Luckily I've found a local repair shop who will do a replacement screen and glass for £100 with a 24 hour turnaround, so I am dropping it off tomorrow and hopefully will have it back Friday.

For those of you who want to laugh at my clumsiness, a photo of my phone is below :)

Yep .. that's a smashed screen alright!

Possibly the best order confirmation email in the world ..

I recently managed to smash in the screen on my old Nokia Lumia 800 (blog post pending on that little accident!) so had to resort to my trusty old HTC HD2 (the phone that runs anything!).

Unfortunately it was still network locked to my old T-Mobile account. I needed this phone for work and cannot survive for long without txt / phone / 3G capabilities so I went online and got myself an unlock code from www.globalunlock.com. The second best part was I got a working unlock code in under 24 hours by email which worked first time.

The best bit was their order confirmation email (below) .. which was truly awesome! Global Unlock .. you're doing it right!

Email Received Below

To Our Finest Customer

Thanks for the details on your unlocking order.! As you are reading this, a high-priority siren

alerted all Global Unlock personnel to attend to your order immediately. Our dedicated team of

programmers immediately put on their lab coats and rushed to our state-of-the-art code-unlocking

laboratory. We use only the finest unlocking software - software with algorithms developed by

Nobel Prize-winning mathematicians.

Fuelled by giant cups of black coffee, our programmers are working hard so you can sit back and relax knowing your code will arrive within the promised turnaround time. In case you would like to

check your order status, our web design team has made a webpage just for your order because

that is how special you are to us. Check Order Status (note link removed in this blog post!)

As soon as your code is ready, our quality control team will check every single character not twice,

but three times to make sure that the code works flawlessly. Our customer service specialist will

say some words of goodwill before sending a personalized thank you email to you with your code

in it. The entire Global Unlock team will then hold a big celebration in your honor as our "Best Global Unlock Customer Ever." A solid gold plaque with your name on it is being ordered as we speak to commemorate this occasion.

We hope you enjoyed ordering from Global Unlock. Your code is on its way. For additional support,

our trusty Customer Support representatives are ready to help 7 days a week, sometimes when they

cannot sleep they come online to check customer emails just to give our favourite customer the best

service they deserve.

The whole team is a little exhausted from this occasion, if you appreciate the service, tell a friend,

Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/globalunlock), Twitter (https://twitter.com/globalunlock) or just scream outside your window as long as you can "I love Global Unlock" Now back to waiting by the phone for any friends or family members you send out way to service them as our second favourite customer as you of course :)

Cheers,

The Global Unlock Support Team.

www.globalunlock.com

New-SPWebApplication : The IIS Web Site you have selected is in use by SharePoint. You must select another port or hostname.

I have to admit .. I am a bit of a PowerShell n00b. I have only really "converted" and seen the light recently but I am kinda loving the whole "scripting" thing again (I feel like I've gone back in time to the 1990's and everything is driven off batch files again .. in fact it feels like SP2003 development using DDF files and MakeCab commands! :D)

Anyway .. I started building my Web Applications using PowerShell using a very handy TechNet article (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806885.aspx). This describes "Create a Web application that uses Windows-claims authentication" which is required for SharePoint 2013 because "classic" (i.e. non-claims) web applications are deprecated and should not be used anymore.

Unfortunately this has a rather glaring bug. You see the PowerShell command that it tells you to use is:

$ap = New-SPAuthenticationProvider

$wa = New-SPWebApplication -Name <ClaimsWindowsWebApplication> -ApplicationPool <ClaimsApplicationPool> -ApplicationPoolAccount <ClaimsApplicationPoolAccount> -URL <URL> -Port <Port> -AuthenticationProvider $ap

Unfortunately there are two of the commands missing ... but how did I find this out (because the first time you run it .. it works!)

I basically tried to create a SharePoint 2013 Web Application using the command above. The URL was going to be http://test and I was running it on Port 80 (standard for non SSL traffic). The Web Application created fine, but I was getting 404 errors trying to access it. I tried to create another web application (thinking something went wrong) and I got the following error message:

New-SPWebApplication : The IIS Web Site you have selected is in use by SharePoint.  You must select another port or hostname.

PowerShell Error message when creating a second Web Application

Something was clearly wrong. So I went checked out IIS. My site was there, but for some reason it didn't have any of the host name binding information that it should have had (for http://test the "Host Name" should be "test") :

IIS Site created without any Host Name bindings

I then also checked the "Virtual Directories" folder to make sure that the folder had been created correctly and found something a little odd. Instead of creating my site using the web application name (which it normally does) it had created a folder using the number 80 (the port number).

IIS Virtual Directory created using Port Number (80)

This seemed more than a little odd to me but after some digging it seems that the original TechNet article (mentioned at the beginning) had some information missing. Well, if you check out the New-SPWebApplication PowerShell command then there are two other commands that you need to specify:

HostHeader Specifies a valid URL assigned to the Web application that must correlate to the alternate access mapping configuration, in the form server_name. (If no value is specified, the value is left blank)

Path Specifies the physical directory for the new Web application in the virtual directories folder (If no value is specified, the value %wwwroot%\wss\VirtualDirectories\<portnumber> is applied)

So without a HostHeader value the IIS Binding information had been missed out. And without a Path specified it had used the port number (80) for the IIS folder. This technically "worked" as far as the script goes, but when I tried to create my second web application it was trying to use the same (blank) host header and the same folder name (80) which .. of course .. "is in use by SharePoint" already.

I added these two additional parameters to my script .. and voila! Everything started working.  The full command (at a minimum) should therefore be:

$ap = New-SPAuthenticationProvider

$wa = New-SPWebApplication -Name <ClaimsWindowsWebApplication> -ApplicationPool <ClaimsApplicationPool> -ApplicationPoolAccount <ClaimsApplicationPoolAccount> -URL <URL> -Port <Port> -HostHeader <HostHeader> -Path <IISFolderName> -AuthenticationProvider $ap

I deleted the old (80) web app and recreated it with a proper path and now everything appears to be back to normal.

Is it worth upgrading your laptop to USB 3.0? And if you do, which drive should you pick?

I have long been experimenting with different drives aiming for the utopia of a "high speed" external hard drive.

For many years I have been stuck on USB 2.0 (with its quite poor transfer speeds) and have been through a journey of eSATA (they all seem to require external power supplies) and finally settled on a USB 3.0 ExpressCard (that's PCMCIA to you old skool people). I have a relatively old laptop (well .. I bought it two years ago) which was before laptops started coming with over 3 hours of battery life (I wish!) and USB 3.0 as standard so I wanted some way of getting some decent speeds with the advantages of plug-and-play capabilities and an ExpressCard seemed to be the answer.

These ExpressCards have been around for a while and you can generally pick them up for around £30 and they claim to offer "plug and play, USB 3.0 transfer speeds". You can couple this with a whole variety of USB 3.0 external drives (or drive caddies, which you can fit your own 2.5" hard drive or solid state drive into).

Being the curious person that I am I have decided to benchmark the different speeds I get with various drives I have:

• Samsung 500GB USB 3.0 External Drive (which is a spindle HDD running at 5400rpm)
• USB 3.0 2.5" Caddy with a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB HDD (@ 7200rpm)
• USB 3.0 2.5" Caddy with a Crucial M4 512GB Solid State Drive

I will test all of these over both USB2.0 and USB3.0 and also compare them to my own internal Solid State Drive (also a Crucial M4 512GB SSD).

In order to run all of these tests I have been using CrystalDiskMark which runs a series of tests for both sequential and random read/write behaviour. I tested at both 1GB and 100MB sizes but frankly they were identical on every single drive so I have here published the 1GB results (as most users I know are typically playing with virtual machine images, ISO images or backups, all of which are typically quite large).

Test 1 - Internal SSD Drive (SATA II)
First off was my internal drive (Crucial M4 512GB) which is an SSD with a maximum advertised transfer speed of 550MB/sec.

Internal SSD - Crucial M4 512GB

At first glance the throughput of 200 - 250 MB/s looks a little low, but the motherboard on my laptop only supports a SATA II interface so my SSD drive is capped to a theoretical maximum of 300MB/s (assuming 2.4Gbit/s after encoding). If I had a newer SATA III motherboard then it should be almost twice as fast!

Test 2 - USB 2.0
I had 3 different tests to perform on USB 2.0. We have our 5400rpm Samsung drive, a 7200rpm Seagate drive and another Crucial M4 SSD drive. The results were not terribly surprising


USB 2.0 SSD - Crucial M4 512GB

USB 2.0 HDD - Seagate Momentus XT 500GB @ 7200rpm

USB 2.0 HDD - Samsung 500GB Drive @ 5400rpm

The results as you can see are utterly underwhelming. USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum transfer of 420Mbit/s (52MB/s) but this is split two ways so the 20 - 28MB/s we are seeing here is pretty much flat out.

The only advantage the SSD drive has is the random read/write performance which for large 512K chunks is just as quick as sequential read/write and although the 4K chunks are a paltry 4MB/s this is still around 10x faster than the HDD can manage!

Test 3 - USB 3.0
This was an identical test to the USB 2.0 tests but this time running on USB 3.0. The spec for USB 3.0 claims a maximum throughput of 5GBit/s so it is pretty close to the SATA III maximum of 6Gbit/s (and certainly outweighs my own motherboard's maximum throughput).

USB 3.0 SSD - Crucial M4 512GB

USB 3.0 HDD - Seagate Momentus XT 500GB @ 7200rpm

USB 3.0 HDD - Samsung 500GB Drive @ 5400rpm

This was quite surprising on two notes.

USB 3.0 - Random Read/Write Performance
The random read/write performance of the SSD over USB 3.0 is vastly quicker, with the 512K chunks showing the same performance as a sequential operation (which obliterates the HDD performance) and the 4K chunks showing a 2x - 5x speed improvement.

The HDD are showing almost the same as they were getting before, although again the 512K random read/write is a lot faster (but HDD really can't achieve the random speeds that SSD drives can)

USB 3.0 - Sequential Read/Write Performance
This was the shock .. pretty much all of the drives get the same performance (between 80MB/s and 95MB/s) and although this is a vast improvement over USB 2.0 (every single drive shows a 400% increase in transfer speeds).

For HDD this is pretty close to their maximum speed as even internal SATA HDD rarely get above 90MB/s purely due to the limits of mechanical magnetic based drives. For me the big surprise is that the SSD drive doesn't get anywhere near either the speed for the drive or the speed for USB 3.0.

I can only expect this is due to the throughput of the actual ExpressCard itself. The specification describes that the maximum throughput you can get between an ExpressCard and the PC is up to 1.06 Gbit/s throughout (which is 135 MB/s). Once you take account of encoding this will drop and explains why all of our connections are capping out below 100MB/s.

Conclusion
Well .. I can't deny that the performance is a big advantage even being well below the USB 3.0 maximum spec!

Even using an ExpressCard / PCMCIA adapter you are still likely to get a massive performance boost. To put this in perspective if you were transferring a 40GB Virtual Machine backup to an external drive then:

• Using a USB 2.0 port (at 21 MB/s write) it would take 32 minutes
• Using a USB 3.0 ExpressCard (at 85MB/s write) it would take 8 minutes

If that is all you are doing then it really doesn't matter whether you get an SSD or a HDD as your external device. The HDD are going to be FAR cheaper and you can pickup 1000GB USB 3.0 external drives these days for under £100 depending on which brand you are looking for.

However, if you are planning on going for a "native" USB 3.0 socket on your next machine then going for SSD could give you a huge advantage. You could be looking at over 400MB/s with a full speed USB 3.0 SSD drive which would reduce that 40GB transfer down to 1.5 minutes!!

The alternative is that you want to use your external drive for every-day storage, reading/writing files (perhaps running multiple virtual machines from the drive) in which case you will definitely benefit from the SSD. The random read/write speed even over USB 2.0 is blazingly fast compared to even the quickest HDD and on USB 3.0 this gets even better.

The only question I suppose is .. can you afford it?

Memory Leak in SharePoint 2013 (Preview) Search

Any of you who has setup their own SharePoint 2013 box (and cried at the Hardware requirements) will be aware of a process which is chewing up your RAM like nothing else

noderunner.exe

There will be four of these running (you can see them in Task Manager) and these basically represent the four major topology services for the FAST Search engine which now powers SharePoint 2013 search services.

The problem is the current implementation (the Preview aka "Beta" build) has a memory leak! This was confirmed by a TechNet blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mpriem/archive/2012/09/05/sharepoint-2013-preview-hungry-search-service.aspx) who also described two potential workarounds to alleviate the stress that noderunner.exe puts on your system:

Jose Vigenor from MS beta support pointed to two options to contain these processes:

1. Use Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced to reduce the CPU impact the search service has on your test environment.
2. Modify the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config so that it can only consume X amount of RAM.
   Change the value at <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="0" /> to any amount of RAM you like to contain the memory leak.

Be careful when you implement this though, Paul Hunt (aka @cimares) has his own blog post (which is where I found the link above by the way!) where he encountered some "Out of Memory" exceptions when this is configured a little too tightly!

SharePoint 2013 (Preview) PowerShell bug .. sort of ..

This threw me when I got my first few SharePoint 2013 farms up and running. It looked like PowerShell had failed but actually everything was working fine.

When you start up the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell (aka PowerShell) then you get an error:

could not create a CmdletConfiguration for CmdletName Start-BulkOperation, CmldetClass, CmdletHelpFile C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\CONFIG\PowerShell\Help\Microsoft.Office.Education.Institution.dll-Help.xml. Cannot process argument because the value of argument "implementingType" is null. Change the value of argument "implementingType" to a non-null value.

This all looks kinda scary, but its actually just a bug in the SharePoint 2013 PowerShell scripts (don't forget .. we are talking about a beta build here!)

In fact .. you should find all your PowerShell stuff works just fine

My experience of installing SharePoint 2013 Preview

I finally got some downtime and used it to get my new SharePoint play-pen up and running. I've been running an Office 365 Preview (aka SharePoint 2013 Online) account for a while to get my SharePoint vNext goodness .. but thought it was time to get myself up and running with a full server build (and flex those good old IT Pro skills while I was at it).

The good news .. it was damned similar to SharePoint 2010!

I was also kind of pleased to hear (from Spencer Harbar) that if you are installing the (sometimes painful) User Profile Service then there is "absolutely no difference whatsoever" between SharePoint 2013 (preview) and SharePoint 2010 (http://www.harbar.net/archive/2012/07/24/348.aspx).

This was slightly disappointing (because it can be a pain in the backside to get started for first timers) although good because I know most of the ins and outs of that particular FIM-based product and can typically get it running first time every time these days.

Hardware requirements ..

This has been quite a contentious topic with various furious discussion on twitter and blogs. This has mostly stemmed from official Microsoft documentation which suggests that you need a minimum of 24 GB of RAM to run a SharePoint 2013 dev box (including all of the pieces like VS and SQL).

The main reasons for this are 2 key pieces in the new infrastructure:

1. App Fabric is now used extensively to boost performance. You will see DistributedCacheService.exe chewing a lot of RAM (typically between 500MB and 1GB on my machine) but this also means you get cross-server caching and blistering performance.
2. FAST Search is also now baked in. The good part is you get a massive load of new search features out of the box. The bad news is that the FAST "noderunner.exe" processes (4 of them) will be running and probably chew between 1GB and 2GB of RAM on their own (without even doing very much!)

There have been people on the web (mentioning no names) who have bordered on the offensive mocking others for "ignoring Microsoft advice" and insisting that you are being foolish for running with less than "best practice" kit.

Then there are others (who to be honest I respect a lot more) who have been running on the TAP program and happily say that you can get it working on 6GB but ideally 8-12GB is needed for it to run smoothly (reports of FAST crashing if you have under 8GB have been heard!)

My personal rig is a single virtual machine which runs with 12GB RAM and 4 virtual cores. I am running full Search, User Profile Sync, most of the core services and have 3 web apps up and running. I have AD, SQL and SharePoint all on the same box with Visual Studio 2012 and so far it has been fine! I can imagine putting a lot of test data and running some hefty development scenarios might make it creak a bit at the seams, but so far no real problems.

Personally I liken this a lot to SharePoint 2010 scenarios. If you want to run EVERYTHING on a single box (Office Web Apps, FAST Search, BI services) then you are going to need a LOT of hardware. But for the average single user demo / developer rig you can get away with a lot less (I've run SharePoint 2010 farms on 4GB RAM before now .. and once they have "warmed up" they are quite happy for single-user demos).

The other bits ..

I also decided to refresh my environment with the other tools that go side by side with a new platform refresh (also because these have all hit final RTM release through MSDN):

1. Windows Server 2012
2. SQL Server 2012
3. Visual Studio 2012

To be honest the installers for these was very straightforward, and there is really nothing special to mention which is any different to a normal dev box install.

Windows Server 2012 obviously was a bit "different" due to the new "not called Metro anymore" interface but I've been running Windows 8 on my laptop for about 6 months now so I was quite used to it. All of the old settings and options are still there buried behind other menus so no massive surprises for people used to using Server 2008 R2 or before.

The only real point of any note is with the service accounts when configuring SQL Server 2012. I am used to creating dedicated service accounts to run the SQL service instances but with this new version the default is baked-in service accounts which it creates for you! This is great for dev boxes as it is a few less accounts for me to setup and maintain!

SharePoint 2013 Preview  ..

This was actually surprisingly straightforward. The "splash screen" installer is identical to SharePoint 2010 (not sure if this a sign of the "preview" build status .. they might get around to updating this for RTM by in my opinion "if it's not broken" rules and this works quite well).

The Pre-Requisites took care of everything that was needed (after 2 reboots) and then I was good to go. The actual install of the binaries went smooth as a whistle and then it was on to PSConfig.exe ..

Yep .. that's right .. PSCONFIG .. any of you using the Configuration Wizard shame on you! (I only ever use it to get the "State Service" running once my farm is fully configured!)

PSConfig.exe allows you to setup your initial farm, create the Config Database and Central Admin database. The main part is it allows you to specify the database names so you don't get nasty GUIDs appearing in SQL Server.

This isn't exactly necessary for a single-server dev box, but I like to keep the old muscle memory in practice and it is good to practice a "clean" environment at all times (so you don't get into bad habits!)

The syntax is pretty straightforward:

PSCONFIG.EXE -create configdb -server localhost -database SP2013_ConfigDb -admincontentdatabase SP2013_Admin_Content -user MyDomain\SPFarm -password [SPFarmPassword]  -passphrase [FarmPassPhrase]

Just make sure that the farm account has DBCreator and SecurityAdmin permissions in SQL Server and it should run fine!

Once that has finished, run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard to setup your Central Administration web app (basically just choosing the Port Number .. which I go for http://localhost:2013/ to keep it simple!).

Setting up the core services ..

Once that has been completed you should be into Central Admin and its time to setup the core services. It should be smooth sailing from here but as a general rule I configure 4 Web Applications and get going with the basic services.

Web Apps:

1. http://sp/ (Using "Team Site" as the site collection)
2. http://my/ (Using "My Site Host" as the site collection)
3. http://ctype/ (default Content Type Hub .. "blank site" with all features turned on)
4. http://apps/ (the new SharePoint 2013 App hosting site! don't provision anything)

Services:
Once that is sorted I go for the core services:

1. Managed Metadata Service (using http://ctype/ as the syndication hub)
2. User Profile Service (using http://my/ as the my site URL)
3. Search Services

The setup for these I found identical to SharePoint 2010 so there shouldn't be any surprises here.

Obviously search was slightly different (due to the FAST pieces) but nothing to write home about for  a simple "single server" rig. There is also simple "import only" option for User Profiles which is new to 2013 and you can find out more here: http://www.harbar.net/archive/2012/07/23/sp13adi.aspx

Apps:
Now .. I don't know a great deal about "apps" infrastructure yet so this is basic in the extreme! The only thing I know you need to do initially is create a blank web application, then use the "Manage App Catalog" option in Central Admin to provision the default "app catalog" site collection from which you can manage internal apps distribution and publishing.

Hopefully more to come on this (including developing some custom apps) but at the moment we're all learning! ;)

That was pretty much it .. basic SharePoint 2013 farm up and running and ready to play!

I haven't really been delving too much into the details yet, and plenty more still to learn and find out so watch this space, and hope you found this useful!

Windows Server 2012, Internet Explorer and missing links in Central Admin

This is one that stumped me for a short while. Anyone who has experienced "missing links in Central Admin" may be aware of this already. You install SharePoint, login to the server and try to navigate to Central Admin from a favourite in Internet Explorer.

Note - I realise you shouldn't really be using IE locally on production servers. This is typically a "demo/dev box" problem

Everything is fine until you try to configure some services, and you find that a bunch of links have disappeared! In particular I spent a good 15 minutes working out why "Services on Server" had gone walkabout (for about 10 of those minutes I thought I'd gone mad and forgotten where it was).

You will probably have checked your permissions without any success:

• Are you logged in as an Administrator? (yes)
• Are you in the Farm Admin group? (yes)
• Have you tried rebooting? (yes)

The truth is slightly more simple than that. There are two vital settings which are required for this to work on a server:

1. Turn off "Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration" (IE ESC). This is a pretty standard task for most single server demo / development boxes.
2. When starting IE "run as administrator"

The second one is the kicker. When you run the "Central Administration" link from the Start Menu / Start Screen it automatically kicks into elevated privileges (and if you have User Access Control turned on then you get the normal prompt to "run as administrator").

If you are running Server 2008 R2 then it is a pretty simple task to just modify the IE shortcut in your taskbar / desktop to "Run as Administrator" and you are good to go.

If you are running Server 2012 though things are not that simple! Sure, you can set the same option, but it won't work (at least it didn't for me).

The only way I could get it to work was to browse to the IE 10 install directory (C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\) and create my own shortcut to the iexplore.exe application.

I then set that shortcut to "Run as Administrator", pinned it to the taskbar and voila! success!

Just another one of those Windows Server 2012 quirks to get used to I guess...

If you have found an easier / quicker way to do this .. then please let me know in the comments!

10 things I love about Windows 8 (Release Preview)

This follows on from my post earlier this week titled 5 Little things that are annoying me about Windows 8 (Release Preview).

So for balance I am talking positive and talking about the features and options in Windows 8 that really make that upgrade worthwhile (or at least things where you go .. "cool!").

I am very much ignoring features like "file history" as this is really an existing feature (Previous Versions) with a different name. So .. in no particular order ... here are my top 10 ..

#1 Updated Task Manager

This is one area of Windows needing a facelift for quite some time now, and this version has several improvements.

The most noticeable part is that the standard "Process" screen has been uplifted. The columns are simplified and show a colour-coded representation of how much strain they are putting on your system (they turn yellow, orange and eventually red if they start causing a bottleneck and maxing out your system).

The "Performance" screen looks pretty similar, but the graphs have been given a bit of a facelift and now show a neat real-time graph for each component, while showing the detailed view in the main window.

Equally cool is the network information which shows you traffic (upload / download) for your network connections.

There is also a very cool "App History" tab which shows you how much CPU time (hours / minutes / seconds) and how much network resources your apps have consumed.

This not only gives you an insight to how much you use your apps (useful for those you have paid for!) but also which ones are using your all important network bandwidth (which will be incredibly useful for those on 3G or tariff network connections).

#2 Updated file transfer dialog

Windows explorer has also had a facelift, but the one I like the most is the file transfer dialog. The main change here is a graph showing you the history of the file transfer speed. These also stack so if you have multiple files being transferred they are all docked into the same window!

#3 Natively mount ISO images

This is one I've been waiting for, and always used to end up installing some third party ISO app (such as "MagicISO".

Now you can just right-click on your ISO image and select "Mount" at which point it appears as a drive letter. This is great for downloading and installing tools and apps from MSDN or digital download sites. Most of my VMs use mounted ISOs as well so I can use the same ISO for both! :)

Easily right click on an ISO to mount it

And it appears as a new Drive Letter :)

#4 Hyper-V and Native VHD Mounting

Another brilliant add on (and "finally" moment). Virtual PC really was terrible and I have always stuck to VMware Workstation.

Now they have brought together the full Server 2012 Hyper-V experience to Windows 8 and much missed it has been (you simply have to add "Hyper -V" as one of the selectable "Windows Features" and off you go!)

Along with this you also get VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) mounting too, which is the native format used for Hyper-V. This works in the same way as ISO images described above. I love this feature as it means you can check the contents of your VM even if the machine is turned off (so you don't need to waste CPU / RAM / boot time to get a couple of files from it).

#5 Storage Spaces .. hot expandable software RAID?

This is a great alternative to using RAID setup. It basically creates a mirrored array using a new distributed file system where you have two or more physical drives. They don't have to be identical drives (although similar performance will certainly help matters!).

Windows will then split files across both drives so it can recover the contents when one of your drives fails, a particular gotcha it seems for people with a history of failing HDD or SSD (Chris O'Brien .. I really hope you are reading this!)

The best thing about this "Storage Pool" is that you can expand it on-the-fly with additional drive storage, so if you get another hard drive you just plug in your partition and off it goes.

Mainly I can see this being useful for full desktop workstations (with multiple drive bays) or people using Windows 8 for their home entertainment / NAS replacement. When your storage gets a little low just slap in another drive and off it goes :)

Note - it was a bit hard to find, right-click on the bottom right to get to Control Panel, and its under "System and Security"

#6 Lock Screen and Live Tiles

Well lets face it, I couldn't really get away without mentioned the Lock Screen and the Live Tiles functionality. I've had a Windows Phone for a couple of years now and I do really like the Lock Screen notifications (although I admit I don't really use Live Tiles on Windows 8 .. but I can see this being awesome for people who live in Metro, especially touch-screen tablets and Windows 8 RT environments).

The lock screen in particular, showing up Metro Apps (and you can configure which ones can post updates .. if any!). In particular I have two Mail accounts (Hotmail and Exchange) so I can see "at a glance" without even logging back in whether or not I have any new emails or messages.

#7 Fully Integrated Search

Another item that some of us have been crying out for. You can now search pretty much everything from one place. Can't find it in your Apps? check the App Store, or check your file system, or even check.

The search has a nice internet-driven auto-complete, and switching from one search to another is a breeze. If the app you are using also has search capabilities then that filter will be automatically selected for you.

Search loads from the right-pinned "Charms" bar so your main window is still visible

#8 Login using Microsoft Account

I have to admit I was a little sceptical about this first off, but the more I've been using it the better I have found it. This basically allows you to login to your machine using a "Microsoft Account" (which for most of you will be a Live account which you use for Hotmail or SkyDrive).

The most obvious benefits when you first login is that it automatically configures a bunch of stuff for you:

• Account picture automatically pulled from your online Live profile
• Mail App automatically includes your Hotmail Account
• SkyDrive app is pre-configured for your online SkyDrive folders
• People and Messaging hubs automatically sync with any "Live Connected" accounts such as Twitter and Facebook
• Photo app automatically pulls content from SkyDrive / Facebook / etc

So a lot of the initial setup pain is already taken care of. This gets even better though when you look at "Sync Settings"  .. which seamlessly syncs to "the cloud".

This includes a whole bunch of stuff such as:

• Colours, backgrounds and themes
• Browser settings, favourites and history
• Language, Keyboard and input preferences
• App settings and purchase history

It can even sync your passwords, although it does limit you to only doing this from a "Trusted PC" (which requires you to setup your "Trusted Device" using Live Essentials and configuring it through your Live Account settings).

#9 "Save to Microsoft Account" for BitLocker keys

For those who don't know BitLocker is a drive encryption tool (which through recent enhancement now rivals TrueCrypt for performance and encryption capabilities). The premise is that your drive contents are encrypted, requiring a password for key token to "unlock" the drive on boot. This stops people from booting to another OS using a memory stick, or simply taking out your hard drive and putting it in another computer (thus bypassing any of the Operating System or NTFS permissions).

The main issue with BitLocker is if you need to move your hard drive or re-install Windows you can't access the drive without a Recovery Key (a complex long-text string). Normally you would put this on a backup drive or memory stick to keep safe, but this always seemed a little "amateur" for me.

Well, Windows 8 now supports automatically backing up your key using your Microsoft Account! :)

This was a nice surprise which I really wasn't expecting. I ended up removing BitLocker from my Windows 8 machine because the Release Preview clearly has some bugs in it and the disk performance was about 50% lower when turned on (and hardly noticeable at all in Windows 7) so a few IO issues to iron out, but definitely showing promise!

#10 Metered Network Support and Airplane Mode

To be honest, this was a must for any truly "mobile" device and I'm including both laptops and tablets here. Airplane mode is a simple one (instantly disables ALL wireless connectivity, including 3G/4G and Bluetooth). You can access this from the Network Connections side-bar (by clicking on your network icon in the system tray in Desktop Mode, or accessing the "Network" option from the Settings "Charms" menu.

This is a great companion for "Metered Connections" which allows Windows 8 to know if you are on a connection for which you get charged "per MB".

This has several angles. First, when you setup a new connection (such as a WiFi hotspot) you can mark it as being a "Metered Connection".

Once the connection is known as being "Metered" then all sorts of options start coming into play. There have been some telling signs in some of the other screenshots, but I've noticed this in a bunch of places which I will list out here:

• Task Manager's "App History" shows you how much network traffic has been sent over metered connections by each app you have installed
• Sync Settings allows you to control whether you sync "over metered connections" to try and limit traffic when you are on a limited network connection (default no)
• Device Manager allows you to configure whether to download "Device Software and Drivers" over metered connections or not (default no)

I'm sure there will be others (and I've probably missed a few) but the good news is that Metered Connections are front and centre!

..

So that's all for now .. bear in mind this is just the Release Preview (build 8400) of Windows 8 so some things are bound to change and get switched about by the time the final commercial release comes around.

Anything you love about Windows 8 which I've not mentioned?? Please let me know in the comments :)

5 Little things that are annoying me about Windows 8 (Release Preview)

So Well, last week I took the plunge and got Windows 8 Release Preview (Build 8400) installed on my laptop. And so far the experience has been pretty good (very stable, very fast and no major glitches so far).

However, there are a few things that are annoying me (and if anyone knows me .. they know that its all these little things that REALLY annoy me).

[UPDATE - Please also see comparison post : 10 things I love about Windows 8 :)]

I know .. I know .. this is a release PREVIEW so it is really still in beta and a lot of things can change .. but there are some obvious flaws coming to the surface here, so without further ado, my list of..

Windows 8 (Release Preview) Pet Peeves

#1 Metro and the Taskbar

Now .. I have to admit I'm quite a fan of Metro. I have a Windows Phone 7.5 device (Nokia Lumia 800) and the metro interface is a very vibrant, quick, easy and (above all else) FUNCTIONAL interface.

However, there are some major annoyances that I'm finding impact on my day to day work, and the main one is that Metro Apps don't appear in the Desktop Taskbar.

Now .. this might not be as bad as you think, but I spend a LOT of my working day in the Desktop mode (and therefore I have a lot of shortcuts pinned to the task bar) and like to use it for quick unobtrusive productivity notifications such as;

• You've had some emails
• Someone has started/posted to an instant chat
• Your file has downloaded
• Your application needs to tell you about something (i.e. it is flashing)

All of these happen at the bottom of the screen and don't really "get in the way" .. the best bit is being able to "pin" favourite folders / tools / whatever into the taskbar button itself.

However .. a lot of default functionality runs as "Metro Apps" and the problem with Metro Apps is that they don't run in the task bar. They go full-screen and you lose all of that notification information I described above... so far these apps include:

• Mail (i.e. Email .. which is exactly why I don't use it and instead use Outlook 2010)
• Windows Reader (especially for PDF documents!)
• Video
• Music (although this will admittedly run in the background)

So .. just to be clear ... you cannot watch a video using the Metro App while also keeping an eye on other "running apps" (such as downloads, several instant chat and email at the same time). Yes .. you can "pin" the other apps left and right .. but I don't really want them there ALL THE TIME .. I just want to know if they are doing anything worth my attention.

#2 How the hell do you "close" a Metro App?

Yes yes .. I know .. you aren't SUPPOSED to close them. The beauty of a Metro App is that it saves it's state and consumes 0% CPU while it isn't active onscreen (with a few exceptions .. such as music).

This is based on the model used for Windows Phone 7 where you don't really need "multi-threaded" apps because for most productivity apps they aren't doing anything if they aren't in focus.

However ... the biggest problem is that they appear in the Alt-TAB "App Switching" dialog...

In the screenshot above the Taskbar shows one program running (IE10) but there are a whole bunch of Metro Apps running in the background (including another IE10 instance in Metro)

This is going to confuse the shit out of end users ..

Now admittedly I'm thinking of my dad and my sister here.. but when you combine this fact with the apparent inability to CLOSE a Metro App ?? and you have a bit of a problem (especially with the "always on" mentality of the modern Tablet / Ultra-book device that never gets rebooted).

You can actually close them fine using the old Windows shortcut keys Alt-F4 but what percentage of the average user base knows this? (outside of developers, IT admins, tech geeks and power users??) .. I'm guess under 20% ..

#3 Move my mouse where??

Ok .. the removal of the Start Menu I could kind of stomach. I get where they are going with this and I know they want to get everyone using the new interface ... but they REALLY need to put a tutorial in this for their commercial release..

The "gestures" (for want of a better word) for the main operational menus (as far as I can tell) are as follows:

• Bottom-Left Corner, Left Click - Start Screen (yes .. the Metro one)
• Bottom-Left Corner, Right Click - System Tools (for want of a better word .. access to Control Panel, Computer Management and such)
• Bottom-Left Corner, move cursor up - App Switching Panel
• Top-Left Corner, Left Click - cycle through currently running apps
• Top-Left Corner, move cursor down - App Switching Panel
• Top-Right Corner, move cursor down - "Charm Bar" (access to Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings)
• Bottom-Right Corner, move cursor up - "Charms Bar"

Now .. you can add to this list what you would "normally" find in a Windows environment

• Bottom-Right Corner of Desktop View - Show Desktop button (which still works .. if the Charms Bar doesn't get in the way)
• Top-Left Corner - File Menu (when the app-switching button doesn't get in the way)
• Top-Right Corner - Close / Minimise buttons (when the Charms bar doesn't get in the way)

So I really have 2 issues here. There being a lot of different (completely opposite) places to move my cursor around .. and ...

How the hell am I supposed to know this ??

I've also got some screenshots to show you what some of this looks like..

First you move the mouse cursor bottom-left and the small slightly nasty looking "Start Screen" graphic appears (yes .. the fact that it shows the size and location of your ACTUAL pinned apps is kinda cool .. but it still looks like a Tetris puzzle from the 90's!)

You then move your cursor "up a bit" and the "task switching" bar appears ...

Similar experience for the "Charms" bar .. you move the cursor top-right (or bottom-right) to get it to show (with white icons and transparent background)

Then move cursor down a bit (or up) and the actual charms bar pins in for interactivity ..

The actual experience (once you've worked out what you are doing) is ok (and I'm sure in 5 years time I'll swear its the best part of the interface) .. but expecting people to just "get" this ??

I see a lot of people struggling (especially the less technically literate!)

#4 Metro - Settings, Options and Menus - Keeping you on your toes!

This is a bit of a wail and complaint about the new Metro App interface and how they deal with things like settings, options, menus and the like.

When Windows 3.1 came out they provided a standard way of providing menus (and pretty much every single application for the next 20 years was using the good old File, Edit, View, Tools, Help menu bar). Didn't really matter what you were using .. you knew where to look and generally where you would find it (apart from idiots who put Options / Preferences under the "Edit" menu).

However in Metro the interface seems to be a bit all over the place. You never really know where you are supposed to be looking, or how you are supposed to get there.

My new expectation is that if you right-click you get the menu bar popping up (NO idea how you'd do this with a touch-screen device .. if someone wants to tell me?)

Examples:

• Start Screen - Bottom Right
• IE10 - All 4 corners (although click on "Add Tab" in the top panel .. new option panel for pages appears ... at the bottom !!)
• Weather - Top Left, Bottom Left and Bottom Right
• Mail - Bottom Right
• Maps - Bottom Right
• Windows Store - Top Left
• Photos - Bottom Right
• SkyDrive - Bottom Right
• Calendar - Bottom Left and Bottom Right
• Video - Bottom Right
• News - Top Left
• Sport - Top Left
• Wikipedia (3rd Party App) - Bottom Left

I hope you can appreciate I don't really know where to expect to find things .. and my eye is constantly switching from top to bottom, left to right. To make this worse I can see 3rd party apps using different icons for the same thing ... or the potential for worse .. the same icon for something else!! (I can see this getting MUCH MUCH worse as the Windows Store starts filling up).

Does this make it "unusable"?? not at all .. I just find it annoying.

I'm hoping that once the commercial version comes out there is some form of "standard" for layout of options and menus. I think part of the problem is that the "touch screen" friendly interface means you don't have very much room, which is why IE10 (one of the most functional "toolbar heavy" apps you'd want to use on a touchscreen device) has to resort to using all 4 corners of the screen.

#5 Metro .. or Desktop .. ?

This is my final frustration, and I've already found probably 3 major apps which I use every single day .. but can't see myself ever really using the Metro App versions;

• Web Browser
• E-Mail
• Twitter / Social

And this harks back to the problems with the Task Bar (Pet Peeve #1 and not being able to close them, Pet Peeve #2).

The problem is this:

• Only Metro Apps will post statuses to the Lock Screen (like Music / Messaging / Weather / Email .. very very similar to Windows Phone 7 experience!)
• Only Metro Apps support Live Tiles

However (as previously discussed)

• Metro Apps always run full screen
• Metro Apps are "touch" oriented and feel clunky with keyboard & mouse
• Metro Apps don't appear in the Task Bar!

So I've found myself configuring a Metro App like Mail (to get Live Tile / Lock Screen) but never actually running it! I just jump over to the Desktop and fire up Outlook instead (although I've very keen to see what the next "Metro" version of Outlook is like!)

But certainly my biggest issue is the separation between Metro and Desktop

I have basically replicated my Start Screen in the Task Bar

This just feels plain wrong .. why am I doing this twice? I never really felt the need to do this before (because the Desktop was everything, and the Start Menu was just a place to store the shortcuts for things "I use but not very often") but now I almost feel like I have two computers.

To make things worse you can't set an easy "default" app either for both environments. If you are in the Metro interface and click on a URL it will open the Metro Web Browser. It doesn't prompt you, and I can't work out how to override this to go to Desktop either.

Why is this important?? Well .. the Metro app doesn't have the same favourites as the desktop app! (yep .. they are as far as I can tell completely independent!)

And I can see the same kinds of things happening. If I click "New Mail" is it going to force me to use the Metro "Mail" app or can I have it auto-prompt to the desktop "Outlook" instead? And if so .. how would I configure this?

Summary ...

I think at the end of the day I can sum up my Pet Peeves on Windows 8 with this:

Desktop Workstation

My laptop is basically a desktop workstation. I want to use Desktop mode .. all the time. Do I like the some of the new features of Windows 8 ??? hell yes.. the new Security features, system recovery, awesome boot times, new task manager, windows explorer functions, ISO mounting and Hyper-V integration are almost worth the upgrade alone!

Do I like some of the new Metro Features?? Hell yes .... I love the Live Tiles .. I love the lock-screen updates and the interface is pretty neat and slick  ... Will I actually use any Metro Applications?? No ... I will avoid them like the plague (for reasons well stated here).

My parting shot ... I am a Microsoft guy through and through. If you cut me in half it probably says "Windows" in there somewhere (and definitely says "SharePoint") and these are peeves I am prepared to live with .. but will everyone else? I see a lot of new users struggling (a LOT) and I can see businesses very rapidly choosing to NOT deploy this.

I really hope Windows 8 is a success and I don't think it will bomb like Windows Vista did (this doesn't have any of the performance / compatibility issues that Vista did) .. but with some of these niggling things I think it might be a bit of a damp squib.