Windows 8 on Samsung NC110 Netbook

Windows 8 Box

My aunt recently bought a Samsung NC110 netbook. I have a history of trashing(breaking) my aunt's laptops before so I really tried to resist the urge of diving in and tinkering on the new netbook. The netbook came with Windows 7 Home Basic installed and I find it not fast enough, so a bright idea came to me.

What if I installed Windows 8 on this netbook? Would it run faster? Windows 8 is aimed at mobility right?

So I immediately made a backup of everything on the netbook and then installed Windows 8 Release Preview on a VHD. I chose to install it on a VHD so I don't have to mess with partitions and to preserve the original OS. I had the Win8 installer on a bootable USB drive and to my frustration, I had trouble booting to a USB device. After a few hours of googling for help, I found out that I had to press and HOLD F2 to get to the boot menu. Hurray! One problem solved.

I went on and installed Win8. The installation went smooth and fast. It took only a few minutes and I'm already on the home screen. I was very excited. Win8 is indeed faster that Win7 on a netbook. The response is great, albeit not slightly noticeable. All the devices that came with the netbook were recognized so I didn't have to scour the internet for device drivers. That was a great relief.

After checking whether everything is running smoothly, I decided to check out the Win8 apps and set them up. So I launched the Photo app first. The app didn't launch. Instead, it told me that the app cannot launch because my screen resolution was too low. So I went ahead and tried to change my screen resolution and found out that it's on the highest setting already(1024 x 600). Turns out, apps have a minimum resolution requirement of 1024 x 768, and in my case, I'm 168 pixels short on the vertical. After googling a bit for some info, I confirmed that if you don't have a minimum 1024 x 768 resolution, Windows 8 apps ain't for you. If I can't use the apps on my netbook, then this Win8 is nothing but a slightly faster, start-menu-less Windows 7. Annoying!

Despite this resolution issue, I'll still be using Win 8. Until some genius coder/programmer makes a patch or workaround.

Flash PageFlip dream

A few years ago, I came across this nifty Flash application called PageFlip. It's a Flash based application that allows you to present images in a book-styled manner. I instantly became curious about it and went straight to google for some searches. I found a similar applications but sadly, all of them were not free, even for educational purposes. Yes, there may be one out there that's open source or free but I wasn't able to find it at that time. The paid ones have a free but limited version so I just compared the versions I found and chose the one which offers the most - albeit limited - functionality. I downloaded the one from FlashPageFlip.com and started tinkering with it. It was fairly easy to configure if you have your images at the right size. It gets tedious when you have a lot of images of different sizes. You'll have to resize each of them so that the book pages are uniform in size. It gets even harder if you have to convert your book content from text documents to images.

Regardless of the few difficulties I encountered, I put quite a lot of time and effort in learning how it works and how to make it easier to set up and configure. I've also searched for ways to get online. For so long, I've tried and failed to publish one in the past. After a few long years, at long last, I have finally found a way! Check out the flipbooks (amacall them flipbooks) I've made here.

Images, settings, and stuff...

To keep the momentum going, I took some time to fix some of the blogs settings. I've also added a couple of images. I'm not really sure if I should be posting this at all but as I said, I need to keep the momentum. :)

New Blog!

Well, I just set up another blog! Yes, another blog. I have quite a lot of blogs out there already but none of them have been successful. You might ask "Why create so many blogs, why not just update those other blogs?". Well, I would have done exactly that but I forgot the password and usernames. -_- The only things I can remember is that I have blogs out there. Lol!

Anyhow, I hope for this new one I'd be able to actually post some content into it. Let's see how this one goes! Cross-fingers!!! ^_^