Windows 7

Apple iMac for a Windows Developer

Bill Tudor — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:11:16 GMT

New Apple iMac Arrives

The latest edition to the growing home computing center is an Apple iMac (Intel E7600 Core 2 Duo/8Gb RAM/1Tb HD/21.5"), which I promptly setup to use Boot Camp with Windows 7 as the default OS. This makes a great Family Room machine, in Windows or MacOS (despite missing HDMI port), and doubles as the iPhone development platform. What is more interesting is the purchase survey, which I took today.

Apple New Purchase Survey

Going though the questions it became clear that there were 3 main goals to the survey: canvass the effect of recent advertising campaigns; perform some basic market research; and make some decisions about Macs of the future. I answered the question about “who am I” correctly (software engineer), so I am sure they ignored everything I said with respect to advertising. Questions related to the second goal were interesting to me (do most people have wireless N or wireless G?), but the third goal – that’s the important one. We, as an industry and as consumers, have benefited from Apple’s presence in the market and I would like this role to continue. I want a say about Apple’s products of the future!

So, just in case my entire survey response ended up in the bit-bucket, I will reiterate some of my survey responses here in the vein hopes that they will actually be heard. . .

What Apple Did Right

Use Intel hardware

The use of industry standard hardware – not just Intel processors – saved Apple from death. This includes seamless operation with most peripherals (printers, etc.) and protocols in use today and not just processors, chipsets, and video cards. But most important is x86/x64, and the ability to run Windows on Mac hardware.

Build what people want

A few misses over the years, but mostly Apple builds what people want.

Provide Boot Camp (boot manager and drivers)

If your going to spend extra on a Mac, you might as well get something extra in return. Such as the ability to run Windows and MacOS on the same box. Nice.

Great hardware design. I mean, great hardware design.

What Apple Still Does not “Get”

The menu bar has got to go

So what if the original MacOS had a bar at the top. MultiFinder is gone; so get rid of the bar.

Secondary mouse click is critical (not to mention useful)

The new iMac comes with an excellent multi-touch wireless mouse that can detect if you click on its left side vs its right side. By default, however, the mouse control panel preferences are setup to ignore this feature. Although it was a simple change to enable what Apple calls secondary click, this should be the default.

Charge a little less. Please?

I wish I could have gotten an i5 (or i7) for the price, and adding $200 for 4Gb of DDR3/1066 RAM is double the price I paid from Crucial (which is where I got my second half). I won’t mention what an additional TB of disk space costs, but at least memory is user-replaceable.

No removable drive? Really?

Somebody tell Apple that (a) hard drives fail, (b) capacity requirements always go up over time, (c) costs always come down over time, and (d) new technology is just around the corner (SSD). Creating a computer without a user-replaceable drive is just stupid. In a year or so when I pry apart the glue in the beautiful glass display panel with a flat-blade screwdriver in order to access the drive, I’ll be cursing out loud. Drop the velvet lint cloth and add 2 screws and a tray.

Development Tools

There’s good and bad, here. XCode is free, and comes with the OS. The App Store is obviously popular (and effective) with consumers. But objective-C? Really? Didn’t even take the time to remove the “ns” (NextStep) from the framework names! Focusing on what’s important or too lazy . . .not sure.

But then there are all those users. Waiting for your app.

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.

Asus EeePC 1005HA Arrives

Bill Tudor — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:37:30 GMT

The latest computer arrived today – an Asus EeePC 1005HA, the perfect Netbook

Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz
2Gb RAM / 160Gb HDD / 1024x600
Wired 100BaseT / Wireless N
Bluetooth 2.0 (stereo audio)
Camera, SD slot, microphone
$400

The Perfect Netbook

The Asus EeePC 1005HA is a beautiful machine. For the same (little lower) price than Dell, Acer, HP, etc., you get the best in network screen resolution (1024x600), reasonable camera, great low-power CPU (hyper-threaded N280), super battery life (8+ hours real) quality HDD, maximum memory supported by the chipset (2Gb), wireless N (not G), and a bluetooth radio that supports my stereo headphones. This allows me to watch Hulu streaming video in [what Hulu claims is] HD quality while running on the treadmill for 8 straight hours with no wires attached to me or the netbook (Full Disclosure: I never really did that). It’s also great for the usual netbook stuff, i.e., “web application” tasks (checking email, IM/Skype, and clicking on stuff in a web browser).

First Boot Experience

The first boot experience was not too bad, particularly when compared to Dell or HP machines. However, Windows XP simply will not do (it looks like a tired old joke these days). After verifying that all of the hardware worked, running some disk checks, running some RAM checks, noting battery performance, CPU/motherboards temperatures, etc., it was time to install a modern operating system on this thing.

Asus ships the machine with several partitions on the drive. The installation media on stored on a secondary (not normally mounted) partition of the drive, and provides a method in the BIOS to “recover” from this media. I wish netbook manufacturers would ship “pure” windows installation media on a USB stick “thrown in the box” instead, and simply forget about the add-on crapware. However, I have to give Asus a little credit – they also partition the drive so that OS is on one partition and data is on another; I suspect that their “recovery process” re-creates the OS partition only, but I will never know. Either way, it is now time to wipe the drive along with Asus’ hard work. :-)

Windows 7 Installation

Note: I am using the RC build of Windows 7

The first step is to build a USB boot disk with Windows 7 32-bit media on board. This is quite easy to do (has been since the Windows Vista days) with the following steps:

Obtain a command prompt in Vista (or later) with Administrative rights
- This is most easily accomplished by clicking the Start Menu, type “cmd”, then right-click “Run as Administrator” on the shortcut.
Use diskpart program to prepare a blank USB drive [Warning: doing this to the incorrect drive is, well, …]
- Purchase a $14 4Gb USB drive, and plug it in
- run “diskpart” in the administrative console command prompt window
- type “list disk” to identify your 4Gb (about 4000 MB) disk
- type “select disk X” where ‘X’ is the disk identified in previous step [obviously important to select the correct disk!]
- type “clean” to wipe the drive [I hope you selected the correct disk]
- type “create partition primary” to create a primary partition [if you get here, then you likely got the right disk]
- type “select partition 1” to select the new partition
- type “active” to mark as active boot partition
- type “format fs=fat32” to format the partition
- type “exit” to quit; unplug and re-plug in the USB drive.
Copy installation media contents to the drive
- Insert the Windows 7 DVD and simply copy the contents to the USB drive.
  - Add some extra utilities if you like (I usually add some diagnostic apps)
- You now have a boot USB stick – much nicer than a slow DVD!

I poked around the BIOS a bit to figure out how to boot from USB on the Asus 1005HA. Although I found it in there, the manual later pointed out that pressing ESC during boot will display a ‘boot menu’ allowing me to select which disk to boot from – USB stick or internal hard drive. Nice. There is a little feature called “Fast Boot”, which I think I had to disable. Not exactly sure what this does, but most likely simply skips some POST steps and goes right to OS loader on same device as “last time”. It did speed up boot time; Asus probably has their act together here, although I wish they would call it something like “skip some power-on tests” rather than “fast boot” so we can make technical decisions rather than marketing decisions about such issues.

Anyway, I booted up from USB and a few minutes (literally) later, I’m up and running with Windows 7. Fourteen minutes, to be exact. Including wiping all disk partitions and formatting a single new one.

Windows 7 Performance

Hardware detection was perfect; driver installation successful for all devices. But are all hardware features available? Here is what I found. Asus does not support Windows 7 at this time, so specific Windows 7 drivers for the equipment cannot be obtained from Asus. I’m sure this will change when Windows 7 is released to the public in October.

The Results:

All hardware devices were recognized by the boot media and drivers installed except for one – the ACPI Device, i.e., power management. This was corrected automatically after connecting to the internet for the first time. Three other drivers (Atheros wireless, bluetooth, and Intel’s onboard video) also took the opportunity of being on the net to updates themselves via Windows Update.
Memory performance, i.e., transfer speed from RAM, was measured at 4074MB/s, which is not too good compared to a modern desktop. This is not reflected in the Windows experience score, so there is either something wrong with the measuring utility or I am too accustomed to max-scores of 5.9 on my desktop boxes (I wonder how good those machines really are).
The “Windows Experience” numbers. Funny how well Aero works with only a 2.0.

Processor: 2.3
Memory: 4.5
Graphics: 2.0
Gaming Graphics: 3.0
Primary HD: 5.4

Network performance was measured with > 50Mb/s throughput under ideal conditions, which is excellent.
The Synaptics touchpad is running with generic drivers. These leaves me without “special” touchpad features (like scrolling). I suspect this will change as October draws near. [Synaptics is a very mainstream touchpad manufacturer]. I’ll update to the Vista driver from the Synaptics web site when I get a chance.
Subjective performance is very good: video is smooth from Web, SD card, and Hard Disk; Aero is perfect, including all the new peek and preview stuff in Windows 7; disk access is good; the little computer is quite snappy.
Battery life came around 8 hours first cycle (fairly-heavy on–and-off usage), charges quickly when sleeping (1 hour or so if I remember correctly?). I have not gone through another cycle. My guess is that with Bluetooth and Wireless Ethernet on and cranking, you will get 8Hr max (less watching video this way), but you could get 10+Hours on an airplane ride with the radios off. Very nice. [Note: Asus markets as ‘Up to 10.5 hours’, which is a reasonable claim.]
Visual Studio: Sorry, I have not installed and run this. I don’t plan on using the netbook for software development. I’ll drag around my “regular” notebook for that purpose.

What else to say? Not much. Great little netbook. Perfect for travel.

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 “Power Button Action”

Bill Tudor — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

I log off all the time. Finished using the laptop, log off. Use the kid’s machine to check a movie listing, log off. Jump on the server to perform some admin, log off. Check the weather on the wife’s machine, log off. Log in with Administrator account to perform application installation or other maintenance, log off.

I never shut down. Just before going on vacation, shut down. Lightning storm, shut down.

I never sleep. The computer goes to sleep all by itself, so I don’t have to.

Besides, if I did want to shut down – or sleep -, hitting the real (hardware) button is faster.

In fact, of all the items on that power button (Shutdown, Sleep, Restart, Lock, Logoff, Switch User), the least likely option I would ever use is Sleep. The next-least-likely is Shutdown.

Sleep, of course, is the default setting. In Vista and Windows 7.

In Vista, you could change the default action of the power button in the start menu to “Sleep”, “Shutdown”, or to “Hibernate” using the Power control panel (all equally unlikely options). “Log off” is buried in the little sub-menu, and could not be set as default action. I was never able to discover a keystroke-sequence that got me logged off without looking. In short, logging off was a pain-in-the-butt.

Finally, in Windows 7, the “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” allows you to change the power button action.

And you can choose “Log off” …

Yea!

Tip: Windows Key, then Right Arrow, then Enter. You’re now logged off.

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.

Windows 7 (beta) Fax & Scan

Bill Tudor — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:26:07 GMT

Oops. I think its time to update this toolbar’s color scheme. :-)

The “XP-Blue” did not look too out of place in Vista, but stands out in Windows 7, which typically sports much lighter toolbar color themes.

The Windows 7 Beta

Bill Tudor — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:44:00 GMT

I hesitate to post on the new Windows 7 beta, but ...

Installation

My installation is a 32-bit install into a 3Gb virtual machine running under hyper-V. The result is “no Aero for me”, which removes plenty of the new eye candy, but I have a beefy host with plenty of memory. I will normally be logged in via Remote Desktop.

The installation experience is nearly identical to Windows Vista. Most of the posts I have been reading praising the installation process are likely from people who have not done a clean Windows install since the XP days – Microsoft did a great job with Vista / Server 2008 / 7 installer. Installing from USB sticks, DVD, recovery images, etc. are all excellent experiences lasting little more than 15 minutes.

First Impressions

First impression is pretty good. I really cannot comment too much on performance, although it appears to be similar to Vista and Server 2008 in the VM, which is good. The usual changes to Windows Explorer are needed (show file extensions, show OS files, turn off pop-up file descriptions, …). Explorer is again “dumbed-down” for the typical computer user, who’s biggest problem after 20+ years of personal computing is still locating their files on disk. We’ll see. Maybe even power users will like the new “libraries”. I’ve added an “Admin” library and a “Development” library to contain folders appropriate to each in order to get a feel for this feature. Might be good.

Start Menu and Taskbar

My first real comment is a good one: Search box in the start menu.

The Search box in the start menu was one of the best new features of Windows Vista, and it is on steroids in Windows 7. Typing phrases remotely related to what you want gives the right answer. For example, when I type “Blog” I get “Windows Live Writer” as the result! I don’t know about you, but I think that is cool.