Category Archives: Windows 8

Windows 10 – How this free upgrade works

Published June 1, 2015 9:33 am

CaptureWhen I started the day today, I received a notification on my official Windows 8.1 laptop regarding upgrade to Windows 10. It asked to reserve my free upgrade to Windows 10. Upgrade is free for the first year.

I searched little bit around to find an ISO for the same. Could not find one. Anyway I reserved my free upgrade. There is a link on this page to signup for Windows 10 upgrade. Did you reserve yours?

Onedrive synced picture file does not open in the photo viewer for preview

Published December 26, 2014 6:12 pm

I have recently faced this on my windows 8.1 machine. With windows 8.1, one drive is by default integrated into the windows explorer; onedrive shows as a top level node in the left hand side pane along side this pc, favorites etc.

The issue was that I could see the preview of the picture in the windows explorer but when I right click -> preview, photo viewer will fail to open the file. Also copy and paste of the photo will fail. Error code – 80040A47. I could not find any description for this error code. Finally I used command prompt and did dir /a in the folder. It listed the files. dir without /a won’t list the files. attrib * command failed saying Target of the symbolic link is missing. Something was wrong with onedrive on the machine.

I googled. did not find any hit. Finally decided to post a question to onedrive forum at answers.microsoft.com. That is when I came across this helpful link. Since I was not up to date with all windows updates, I updated the machine first. Later I ran the diagnostic tool from this place. It took couple of minutes & Bingo! Problem was resolved. Many of the files were marked with availability as online-only. I have to force sync them or they get downloaded as and when I access them. This is likely side-effect of the reset done by the diagnostic tool.

What is availability online-only in context of onedrive?

Well – there is a availability attribute for each of the local synced copy of files on onedrive. In windows explorer right pane, you can right click -> view -> details and you can see the attribute in the list. If the file is not synced – availability attribute is set of online-only. otherwise, it is set to available-offline. To force sync the file, you can right click -> make available offline.

Windows 8.1 upgrade – ms natural keyboard mapping went wrong

Published October 21, 2013 12:00 pm

Today, I upgraded to windows 8.1 few minutes back. All went pretty smooth; it took order of 1 hour and multiple auto-reboots before finalization. There is two issues I faced.

I use a ms natural keyboard 4000 model. After upgrade, shift + key combination was giving wrong characters. For example: shift + 2 gave ” rather than @; shift + ‘ gave @ instead of “. I binged but did not find a solution. I went to control panel ‘Control Panel\Clock, Language and Region\Language’ and followed to install the language pack English(United States). This may or may not be required. Mentioning it because I did it.

After this, rebooted the laptop once. It fixed the incorrect keyboard mapping problem.

2nd issue: when I connect my windows phone 7, zune was not launching. It mentioned no device detected/connect your abc-phone. I tried setting to forget the phone; reboot the OS. None of these worked. Finally reboot the phone worked.

Did you face the similar problem during upgrade? How did you fix it?