Vista

Windows Search – Good or Bad?

Bill Tudor — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:55:55 GMT

One of the things I have always hated was “Windows Search”. Why the heck would I need “instant results” – instant as in donating countless CPU cycles and disk churns to background indexing operations running all day long on my box? YUK! I am never actually “looking” for something – I know where everything is. It’s right where I put it. Who are these people “looking” for things on their computers all the time?

Typical Scenario

My typical use case came up again this morning: I downloaded a source distribution from Google Code, and decided to check the files into my local SCM system (sidebar: this project is not taking any patches). Before doing this, I would like to delete all of the hidden “.svn” folders that came down with the distro. “Search for all folders named .svn”. Now keep in mind that I am not actually looking for the folders, as I know where they are (there is one folder named .svn in each of the folders in the distribution). I simply want to find them so I can control-A (select all) and press the delete key. You see what I mean.

Trouble with Windows Search

I always have trouble with Windows Search. I start typing “.svn” and immediately my file display window changes and I get a bunch of wrong answers – files with the letters “svn” in them (dot being ignored), sometimes files with “svn” inside of them, as well as virtually all of the files inside the folders, since many contain .svn extensions. Great. Hundreds of results when I was expecting around ten. What happened to the good old days when “find files” actually did what I wanted!

Read the Manual

Read the manual. For the first time, I decided to read the manual. I found a page at microsoft.com with the search syntax. For my scenario:

kind:folder .svn

The dot “.” is still ignored, and you get all folders – not just folders with “svn” in the name. Hmm. A little more digging. . .

kind:folder name:.svn

Now I am getting just the folders named “.svn”, but I am still getting folders named “svn” (no dot), as well as any folder with “svn” in the name. Hmm.

kind:folder name: “.svn”

That did it. The dot is still being ignored, despite the quotes, but it is not a wildcard in some sort of pseudo-regular expression. The documentation says that * and ? are the wildcard characters, taking on their typical meanings. There’s plenty of syntax for AND, OR, greater or less than (for things like dates and sizes), and virtually any property you can think of – in or out of the file(s).

Maybe I’ll spend some more time looking over the documentation. Maybe not. At least I can now find a bunch of folders to delete. The next time I’m looking for a MSWord document containing the phrase “place contract”, the word “lease”, and was edited within the last 3 days, created by “mydomain\joe”, and last saved by “otherdomain\mike” – I’ll know how to do it. Thanks, Microsoft.

HP / DELL Crapware Gone Wild

Bill Tudor — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:02:22 GMT

Why would a company act against its own best interests?

A while back, I purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400 from the small business store. My first boot experience can only be described as a nightmare – many minutes of disk crunching craziness only to be left with a useless machine running 79 processes! Seventy-nine! I tried to shut the piece of junk down, but got tired of waiting – killed the power. All I had was the “Dell Recovery DVD”, which promised to restore all 79 processes in their over-bloated crapware glory if I used it. No thanks.

I pulled out a real DVD of Vista (retail), booted, and happily destroyed all partitions on the drive (including the Dell utility partition) with a great big smile on my face. Vista installed nearly in less than the time it took to first-boot the crapware box, and was soon running smoothly with 52 processes. “What a shame”. For Dell, Microsoft, and many many customers.

Why would a company act against its own best interests?

Recently, I was reminded of this experience …

What about HP? / What about today?

Apparently, the situation is no different today, and no different with HP.

I recently had the “pleasure” of examining a two-day-old HP machine (not sure of the model number). I can only imagine how bad the first-boot experience could have been. When I got the machine, the hard drive was still chugging away and the OS was running 78 processes on boot.

Why act against their own best interest?

Why act against their own best interests? Because they don’t think they are acting against their own interests. On the contrary, companies like HP and Dell believe that the price savings realized by installing paid crapware are in their best interest. I can’t image it being worth more than $10-$20 on a $500 machine, but I have no idea. Would that be worth it? Certainly not! The damage done to the company image is much worse than that – unless you can deflect some of that damage to someone else, say, the OS manufacturer?

How many users are willing to wipe their drives clean? Companies like Apple Computer understand. HP and Dell do not.

Fundamentally Wrong

The PC makers are fundamentally wrong on this issue. They are in the business of selling a computer, not an advertising platform. By supplementing their business, they diminish their business.

Microsoft’s Role

Crapware may be bad for HP and Dell, but it is much worse for Microsoft. Microsoft’s role is clear to me – they need to stop this. PC makers have cleverly cast the hardware as theirs, and the software as someone else’s. The crap must be part of the OS, right? Microsoft has two options, the latter being my favorite:

Require that clean OS DVDs be shipped with products
Add a “wipe-out” feature to the OS

What I mean by “wipe-out” feature is that during the first-boot OS installation completion process, the first question asked should be “Do you want to remove useless crapware that has been installed by your PC manufacturer from the computer? If yes, the following occurs:

A driver inventory is taken; signed drivers are tucked away
Format the install partition
Perform an unattended install of the OS.

Take that. Add too much crap and more people will choose the wipe-out option.

The “Start Over” button.

Windows 7 Reliability Manager

Bill Tudor — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:24:28 GMT

The reliability manager, introduced in Windows Vista and included in Server 2008, is a great tool. At one glance, I can see installs, windows updates, crashes, etc, all laid out on a graph by date. For example, this machine I am typing on now crashed back on April 9th, an instance of Visual Studio 2005 (devenv.exe) hung when I ran it (April 21), and various updates were installed since then.

In Windows 7, the Reliability manager snap-in is gone, and does not appear in the Computer Management console or as an available snap-in. I actually filed a “bug” with the Win7 beta program (which was denied and closed with no explanation).

Today, I found my explanation – it’s in there! Buried, yes, but it is there.

Open the “Action Center “
Expand “Maintenance” group
Click on the little sentence “View reliability history”

Bingo, Windows 7 does have the reliability manager. Look a little different, but it is there.

My reliability is a perfect “10”, but I have only had the RC version of Win7 running for a few days. I am not sure if the reliability manager was added in the RC version, or if it was always in the beta. It would have been nice if “it’s in there” was listed as the reason for my “bug” rejection. No matter.

There’s always this little trick (also introduced in Vista):

Start Menu | type ‘Reliability’

Why didn’t I think of that.

Windows Vista SP2 + Bluetooth Audio

Bill Tudor — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:16:02 GMT

What a nice surprise, today. I had been hearing about improvements to the Windows audio stack for Windows 7, but I did not expect them to show up in Vista Service Pack 2. (Maybe I should have?)

Connecting a Bluetooth Audio Device

I have a Motorola HT820 stereo Bluetooth headset. Great device. When I turn this device on and pair it with the computer, it is logical to assume that I wish it to become my primary audio output device. Right? Previously, I had to use the Bluetooth control panel, connect or ensure the device was connected, set as audio output device. Further, any running applications (such as Windows Media Player) would not “see” the device until they were exited/restarted. What a pain – but not so anymore! Just turn on the headset and audio output magically switches to it on-the-fly. Even with the applications open.

Disconnecting the Device

The disconnect experience had been even worse. Turning off the headset resulted in an error dialog: something like “An audio device is no longer available”. After clicking OK, all running application (that produce audio) need to re-start before the built-in speakers could be used again. Yuk. No so anymore! Turning off the headset results in audio output switching back to the built-in speakers. On-the-fly. Perfect.

I’m glad these improvements made it out “early”.

Windows 7 is Great!

Bill Tudor — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:46:53 GMT

Hey, this windows 7 thing is great!

There are glassy, see-through window frames.
I can make an image backup and restore to a new disk in 10 minutes flat.
I love the DVD Maker capability.
What a great screen snipping tool.
Search box in the Start Menu!
My install experience: I was only asked about 4 questions and took less than 15 minutes total time.
I love the “CPU Usage” gadget that floats around the screen.
You can see what specific services are running inside “services.exe” (or dllhost.exe etc.) using the task manager
The diskpart utility works with USB drives – I can make a USB boot disk by simply using diskpart to prepare the disk, and copying files over from the install DVD.
IPv6 stack!
Encryption for the whole disk drive, if I want.
The x64 (64-bit) version works just as good as the x86 (32-bit) version of the OS. Maybe even better!
The remote desktop client finally supports dual monitors.
On my notebook, I love the little “Mobility Center” tool.
I can even control individual sound volumes for each application.
…

Just when I was starting to get sick of reading post after post of how great “Windows 7” is, I am starting to realize that it is not just XP users who have been missing the party for the past few years – it’s all those darn SKUs! Microsoft really screwed up Vista – big time. Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, etc, etc. For me, there never really was a choice: all of us software developers needed Ultimate. So I assumed we all got that. After all, we (a) needed to install inside virtual machines (for free in addition to the physical machine installation), (b) we need to be a member of a domain, and (c) we really needed Media Center! :-)

As a result, I am not sure of what SKU contained what. The Windows 7 beta, of course, is the ultimate edition. So it has Backup/Restore, Media Center, Mobility Center, and so on.

Will Microsoft screw up again with the SKUs? I don’t know.

May I suggest …Two SKUs:

Windows 7 Crippled - $50 [no tools, no glass]
Windows 7 Normal - $99 [Turn on/off whatever you like]

[Now you know why I do not work in marketing.]

In either case – get ready, all ye Beta Testers; your favorite features will be gone when you buy that new Dell with “Windows 7 Home Basic”. Because someone told you that was all you really need.