KB3000850 November 2014 update rollup for Windows 8.1

The November 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 resolves issues, and includes performance and reliability improvements. With more than 700MB this update  rollup includes the following new features and improvements:

Refreshed language packs

Defence-in-depth security and Schannel hardening

Support for newer hardware (boot order allowance, SD card improvements, USB debugging)

Improved Web Services for Devices (WSD) printer support during network switches

Performance and reliability improvements in clustered virtual machine mission-critical environments

Improved manageability

Additional hardware support (devices that have third-party disk encryption software enabled can now be upgraded to Windows 8.1 more easily). More information about this update here.

Ars Technica, this is NOT news, nothing to do with Windows today

NOT news at all. Besides, this is a Windows XP screenshot!

Ars Technica, caterer to the "alpha geeks" technologists and IT professionals, published today this article which may be misleading specially for some unsuspecting Windows users who don't know better. First of all, the whole article is mostly dedicated to explain "how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is" that is, the cryptographic mechanism to provide some assurance that a transferred file (read, downloaded software, update, etc.) has arrived intact. Secondly, this is old news under the guise of breaking news (?); something that happened in 2012 and 2007, according to the article. Just read about this subject in a Wikipedia article citing that "in 2012, according to Microsoft, the authors of the Flame malware used an MD5 collision to forge a Windows code-signing certificate" and the issue goes back to 1996 (!). And how is this "news" related to Amazon Cloud, again? Last, BUT NOT LEAST, the flashy screenshot corresponds to the phased out Windows XP (!). Obviously you can always find flaws in old software, but that is not news!

How to start Windows 10 from a virtual hard disk

Figure 1. A virtual hard disk as a new choice in the boot menu.

So you decided to install the Windows 10 Technical Preview in a Hyper-V virtual machine and now you want to boot your computer directly into that virtual machine (Figure 1). So here is how. You simply use, as an administrator, the command line BCDboot tool (bcdboot.exe) located in the C:\Windows\system32 folder. BCD, as you may know, stands for Boot Configuration Data and it is the "store" that contains boot configuration parameters and controls how the operating system is started (since Windows Vista) replacing the old and less sophisticated boot.ini file. See the BCDboot command-line options. What BCDboot does is simply to copy critical boot files to the system partition and to create a new system BCD store entry (Figure 2). In my particular case, I had the virtual disk in the G: partition . All I had to do was to mount it. How? Select the disk and then, in the File Explorer "Manage" section of the Ribbon (now highlighted with "Disc Image Tools" on the top bar), click on "Mount" to the left (you will have to provide the administrator password. The system will assign a new letter to this drive, say J (this has nothing to do with where the actual virtual disk is located). Then in the command line run bcdboot J:\Windows. That's all there is to it. In a MSDN blog entry, explaining the difference between BCDboot and BCDedit (the other command to manage the BCD store) you can find detailed instructions. The result is what you see below. You need not worry about the new mounted drive. The next time you reboot the system will unmount it.



Figure 2. A new BCD store entry to include a VHDX