Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 December 22

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December 22

Bing Weather

In Windows 8.1, there is a tile on my Start Page for Bing Weather. It is set to my correct city, state, and zip code. However, the temperature is always off (and off by a very considerable margin). In other words, it's not even close. On a day like today, when it is about 60 or 70 degrees, Bing Weather reports the temperature as perhaps 10 or 11 degrees or so. This is not a one-time discrepancy; this has been happening every day, consistently, for the past several months. The Bing temperature does not list a unit such as Fahrenheit or Celsius; it just says "10 degrees". I am located in the USA (which the computer "recognizes" by my zip code), so I assume that the temperature is being reported in Fahrenheit. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this would be so inaccurate? Is there some way to fix this? Is there some "setting" on my computer that I am supposed to change? Any ideas? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:01, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

OK, upon further investigation, Bing Weather is indeed reporting temperature in Celsius. It is now 53 degrees (F°), where I live; and Bing reports the temperature as 12 degrees (which indeed corresponds to the correct Celsius conversion). Does anyone know how I can change the settings to report F° instead of C°? I fiddled around a little bit, but I could not find any place to edit settings and such. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:18, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Do you know how to bring up the app bar? Open the app and right-click anywhere and there should be a button in the lower right to change to F°. If you have a touch screen, you can bring up the app bar by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 16:29, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

A-ha. Perfect! Thank you! Windows 8.1 is new to me; so all of these "apps" are unfamiliar. I was used to the old Windows 7. Thanks! This worked perfectly. Much appreciated. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:45, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Restore friend's computer from my disk image

I updated both my father's and my friend's computer from windows 8 to 8.1. I created a disk image for my father of 8.0. My friend recently installed a 3rd party card playing program, and it crashed. Now he gets "attempting to repair disk" when he boots, which fails, then goes back in a loop to try to attempt to repair the disk again. First, if I have to, will I be able to sue the disk image from my father to get him back up on windows 8.0? Second, is there some other easier obvious solution I am missing? (Both are HP pavilion laptops) Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 17:50, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Do you want to sue the disk image or use it? :-) AboutFace 22 (talk) 20:28, 22 December 2013 (UTC)AboutFace_22

This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Classic "my friend" story. I blame Snowden. Looks like you need a trip to PC World to fix the damage. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:30, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Hehe, use, obviously. μηδείς (talk) 21:08, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

I once had this problem on Windows 7 and the following worked (it turning out there was nothing wrong with the disk). Press F8 immediately after boot to get via the advanced options into safe mode. Once in safe mode shutdown and reboot normally. Easy as that. A clean shutdown clears the repair loop. However, it seems Microsoft has been making improvements in Win8 so F8 no longer works. However, they give an alternative[1] which I have a horrid feeling won't work because you likely are not getting as far as the sign-in screen. However, someone else may know how to boot into safe mode in Win8. Thincat (talk) 21:35, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Maybe http://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-8-the-easy-way/ ? Thincat (talk) 21:38, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

If that fails, take it to PC World. If it had been a Mac, the Apple Store would have been the alternative. Classsic. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:57, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

We were able to get through to troubleshoot settings, and decided to refresh the computer. We went through the entire process of refreshing, getting ready, scanning and correting the disk. The computer restarted, then now it is saying an error was encountered, and restart is necessary to install windows. After restarting, it loads up, says welcome, then says an unexpected error was encountered, and restrt is necessary to install windows--a new loop. I am wondering what I can do with the disk image on the USB drive at this point, how I can boot and install that on his computer, or if that would be a mistake. 21:59, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

That's a shame. If the disk had some kinds of faulty data my suggestion wasn't going to work anyway. I won't suggest anything further because I simply don't know. Thincat (talk) 22:20, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I am wondering what does with a disk image on a usb if one can't boot in the first place. μηδείς (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

I know you used a built-int Win 8 method to create the image. Can you take a look at the USB disk on another system and let us know what format it is in? I think it will be a .wim file. Can you get to any of the recovery menus since the failed refresh? I'll have to do some research to see if there is a way to restore a wim file to the disk from the recovery menus (not much experience with that side of Win 8 yet), but I have flaky internet again today. If you can physically connect the Win 8 disk to another system (with a USB adapter, or plugged right into a SATA port) then I can walk you through using imagex to do it. I know that will work, but it is a pain, and I expect there will be a good way to do it with the built-in tools on the failed system. Katie R (talk) 15:48, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Here's the best I've found so far. If you can get to the control panel in safe mode, then the second set of steps from the support engineer look the simplest. If you can boot to the system's recovery partition (if it has one) then you can use the first set of instructions, although I noticed it doesn't actually mention the image file at any point - hopefully it is obvious once you get to the last step he gave. Katie R (talk) 15:58, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

And my internet died right after realizing I never included the link. Let me know if it helps - I'll look into things more if you need help, but I don't feel like fighting with this connection if this link is good enough. [2] Katie R (talk) 17:35, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

As a minor aside, AFAIK, it isn't correct that F8 doesn't work. Well it's been changed to shift-F8, but theoretically it should work. The problem is that the window to push shift-F8 is so small it's almost impossible to actually get it to work (I have tried many times on two or three different computers and can attest to that). Nil Einne (talk) 05:03, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

I would suspect a rootkit/boot sector virus. Was the card playing app suspect? There are plenty of tools to help, start with TDSSKiller.--Salix alba (talk): 08:51, 28 December 2013 (UTC)