Thoughts about Surface Pro
Hey All,
I managed to get a US subsidiary of our company to send me a Surface Pro tablet to Europe. I was observing all the RT hype and immediately knew, the RT is not company ready. For as a company that introduced this year Direct Access as only way of connecting to company resources, including Exchange, only the Pro suites our needs.
What is to know there of the pro? Well, first of all, the Pro is really Windows 8 Pro and that does NOT include BitLocker nor Direct Access capabilities as the Enterprise version.
So the first thing to do when you get your hands on a Surface Pro, install Windows 8 Enterprise on it. That said, you need to take care of the USB stick to be UEFI boot ready. There are plenty of guides in the net on how to do so, but I found to use the tool Rufus to be easiest used with the default UEFI settings.
And now, you need a driver for the wireless network card. Can be obtained from MS site, also plenty of guides available there too.
The most important thing however was for our environment that during the domain join and first restart, the computer must be connected with a cable LAN so all policies get applied correctly. Well in our case, but whoever knows how other Active Directories behave 
I think any USB LAN adapters work here as most of them are old and get recognized by the system without any problem.
After all that I can confirm that working with the Surface is flawless after getting used to the touch cover which feels really handy after a while.
BitLocker activated itself (we use MBAM for that since we introduced Windows 7) after the TPM got successfully initialized.
As mentioned Direct Access works flawlessly and after getting rid of all the recovery and whatsoever partitions during the reinstall with Windows 8 Enterprise, my Surface Pro (128 GB version) has 79 GB space left on the drive. I have although Office 2013 and my Windows Phone 8 synchronized with my device too. For me that is more than enough space to work efficiently. Ah yes, we also use redirected home drives, so the local offline cache for that is also using some space
So anyone planning to get a Surface Pro too? For me the best device and form factor to combine work and private live securely in one device if you don’t need a huge screen and a real keyboard for your work.
[Edit 19.04.2013]: Just found out that the Surface RT loader also works flwalessly for the Pro. Ths shows me that Microsoft is not accesoire price crazy like apple.
Time to act again – CISPA is back on track
The webs version 2.0 of ACTA, PIPA, etc is on its course again. Sadly I see this as a trend as it was with ACTA to be, once signed, being “forced” to the EU soon.
Vote against it here:
https://cyberspying.eff.org/#action
Nokia Lumia 800 – my experiences
As I have shared, I switched from a HTC Titan to a Nokia Lumia 800.
I admit that the change wasn’t just for my fun, but was also driven by the fact that my wife got her Samsung Nexus stolen while traveling and needed a replacement.
I offered her my Titan as I wanted to convince her to use Windows Phone for some time now. Well she is still in the process, hehe. Lets see how she is after a few more days. Fact is she can’t let it lie around for long 
Anyway, back to the Lumia.
As mentioned before, the screens black is really making the overall experience a very smooth one. The phone itself feels so good in the hand and other than to the huge Titan form factor, I can easily use it with one hand.
The battery at the beginning was very bad, but after loading it a few days over the night it behaves almost as good as my Titan’s.
The apps that Nokia delivers with the phone are really worth considering a Nokia phone. The navigation app is great and also the other gimmicks seem to get updates and new apps very frequently.
Finally I have to say that aside from the front facing camera, which I only used when my wife talked to me over Skype recently, I don’t miss any feature and can really recommend this phone.
It is cheap, reliable and feature rich.
Nokia & Microsoft definitely did a great job here!
Switched phone
Today I switched from my Titan to a Lumia 800.
Although it misses a few hardware features like front camera and a weaker CPU, the unibody just feels great and the screen is sensational.
I will share my low spec experiences once I played around a little more.
HackAttack
I am currently on my way to Munich to attend a 3 day hack training called HackAttack.
Looking forward to see something new and gain some insights.
Let’s see
HTC Update for my Titan
Yesterday I installed an update for my Titan.
From what I have read, it is mainly a firmware, bootloader and radio upddate of the manufacturer.
The following shows now in the settings:
OS version: 7.10.8107.79
Firmware revision number: 1600.2200.20501.401
Hardware revision number: 0002
Radio software version: 16.23.06.10_ 16.32.00.23U
Radio hardware version: 2.122.0.D4
Bootloader version: 2.5.160015.3(137079)
Chip SOC version: 1.6.0.0
As I don’t know what changed with the update, I hope that the wireless LAN performance is better. I mean the switching between wireless and 3G which is sometimes a pain.
Anyone has the same update received yet and maybe wants to share what changed?
Messed up my Live sync with my WP7
Hello,
yesterday I had to painfully realize that it is a very bad idea to cleanup and change your contacts over the Windows Live website.
I started to cleanup a bunch of contacts yesterday and had to realize that my synchronization with my phone stopped with an error 86000206 :[
After deleting all mails, deleting all contacts, doing a hard reset of my phone, the stuff still didn’t sync.
I created now a new Live account and this works flawlessly, even with my old contacts (I imported them).
Only sad, really annoying thing, aside from requesting all my Messenger accounts again, is that I lose my purchase history and my XBox achievements :’(
What a crap!
Anybody else had that issue?
PS: I checked of course all MS resources before doing that to my account and mobile.
PPS: I even had worse experience with my Android, can you believe. Also sync issues, so maybe its me after all :S
