Fixing my Windows 8.1 mess

I found my Windows 8.1 got to a point that it needs to be fixed:

• Right click on MyComputer to bring up managment console does NOT work anymore
• Use Charm to get to "Change PC Settings" also does NOT work anymore.
• Can't apply the lastest Windows 8.1 Update 1.  

Usually in situation like this before Windows 8, I need to wipe the OS, and then installing everything from scratch.  But since I am using Windows 8.1, I did this:

• Use the MSDN Windows 8.1 with Update (1) iso (en_windows_8.1_with_update_x64_dvd_4065090.iso), open it, and start installation.
• Choose to keep all application and setting.
• Let the long installation completed itself.

At the end of the installation process, I have a working Windows 8.1 Update 1 with all those previous problem fixed.  The only thing missing is that Windows Media Center was gone.  No problem, since I can use the product ID I purchased (US$9.99) to reinstall Windows Media Center.  And it even remembered my previous setting before the OS re-install.

So with a working OS, I am happy :-D .

Development environment running in VMWare Workstation 10 doesn't work ... at home ...

At work, I deal with a few Xeon server class machines.  They have memories ranged from 16Gb to 64Gb, have 8 to 16 core CPUs and both VMWare Workstation 10 and HyperV (on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2) run fine on them.

The experience on my home workstation Dell XPS 8700, which has a quad core i7 CPU with 8Gb of memory and running same VMWare Workstation 10, is vastly inferior by comparison.  I know it's not fair to compare an expansive server class machine, and I guess I kind of have some expectation on this quad core i7 thing. The fact is that running Visual Studio 2012/2013 on a VM with 4 core and 4Gb memory is unusable on my machine.  CPU is always close to 100% (while memory consumption seems low), and sometime it renders the eSATA harddisk to unresponsive.

For now, I will just stick with using a dual boot system approach to keep a clean environment and a experimental/development environment.  I am probably still going to buy more memory, but I also aware that it won't help much on the dev on VM situation.

In fact, I am afraid that it also applies to my Dell Precision M6600 office workstation laptop.  Virtualization works better on a dedicated server machine.