If you suspect your Windows 8 system may have a corrupted hard drive, then you might be tempted to use the old chkdsk /f command. This does still work, but it’s horribly slow, and won’t do anything at all until you reboot. What’s more, it may no longer be necessary now.

Windows 8 now regularly runs chkdsk in the background, looking for problems, and recording them. And then, when run at boot time, it doesn’t have to scan every single sector of your hard drive. It just fixes the known problems, usually in a few seconds.

The first lesson here is that you probably won’t have to use chkdsk any more.

But if you want to try it anyway, don’t use chkdsk /f first. Enter chkdsk /spotfix instead, agree to run a check when you next reboot, then restart your PC and any fixes will be applied, much more quickly.

While this works most of the time, there are no guarantees. If you’re out of other options then you can still try chkdsk /f later.

Set up lots of live tiles on the Start screen and you could find they’re using a lot of network bandwidth, which could perhaps become a problem if you’re running a slow or metered connection. But Windows 8 does offer one option that might help.

Click your network connection on the taskbar (or the Start Screen Charms bar), right-click your network connection in the list and select “Set as metered connection” (you’ll only see this with wireless adaptors). Windows will then limit what individual live tiles can do, while also downloading only priority Windows updates, and applying a few other restrictions. Right-click the connection again and select “Set as unmetered” to change it back.

1) I clicked SHIFT+F10 to get a command prompt, then typed in devmgmt.msc to get the device manager. It will have the unknown or devices without drivers expanded. I disabled some but I also found that you can install drivers too. If you have all your manufacturer drivers on a USB stick then just right-mouse and select update driver and then browse to the root of your USB stick e.g. E:\ and have it search subdirectories and it should find the right driver for that device.

—-and at the same time I..

2)   typed in taskmgr.exe to get the Task Manager and in  the processes list I killed any running msiexec.exe processes and cmd.exe command prompts if they looked like they were hung i.e. no CPU and the disk light on the Laptop wasn’t really running. This step 2) is the most important step as it seemed to allow the first use setup to step on.

The install then quickly finished the “setup is preparing your computer for first use” stage and I got the username, hostname and so-on questions.

The SHIFT+F10 trick and using the devmgmr.msc and taskmgr.exe works at any stage from the “setup is preparing your computer for first use” display onwards because Windows is actually running only services haven’t started and the hostname and account details haven’t been created.

Physical Memory Limits: Windows 8

The following table specifies the limits on physical memory for Windows 8.

Physical Memory Limits: Windows Server 2012

The following table specifies the limits on physical memory for Windows Server 2012.      Windows Server 2012 is available only in X64 editions.