Windows

Windows 7 Up and Running

Bill Evjen — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:41:43 GMT

I have installed Windows 7 on “bare metal” on one of my machines. This was a laptop that I work with and it was a very easy install. First off, it was the quickest OS install that I have ever experienced. You can tell that Microsoft spent some significant time working on the performance and quality of the install and bravo to the team that worked on that feature!

I also used the 64-bit version of the operating system. More and more people are turning to 64-bit and it is really starting to be the time that we should only be installing this OS (even at home). I want to get 8GB of RAM in my home computer and the only means to do this is really to turn to 64-bit.

I have also installed the 64-bit Windows 7 on one of my work machines and I am using it for my day-to-day work now. So, my recommendation is this:

If you are going to install Vista with or without its service packs on one of your machines – you should install Windows 7 instead. It is *considerably* faster than Vista is and more stable. I have to say that I was a big negative voice out there for Vista. I needed to use it for real work and the performance of the OS, the strange behaviors it brought, and more – all of this would always just make me stop in my tracks and say – why am I working with this OS? I gave Vista about three tries before uninstalling it and going back to Windows XP. I am not the only one by the way.

But I have to say that Windows 7 is the Vista that should have been. It is what you are going to want in an OS. It is fast, has some great workflows, is sexy, and is a lot of fun to work with. So far, I am rather impressed. I am looking for some things that are going to stop me from ever using it – but there has been very little.

When I installed Windows 7, it immediately found all my drivers for the two computers that I installed it on. There wasn’t a single driver problem that I experienced with the install. This was very very nice.

I also installed this items and they worked just fine on Windows 7:

Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft One Note 2007
Microsoft Visio 2007
Paint.NET
Tortoise SVN 64-bit version
Notepad++
Window Live Writer (using it right now)
Visual Studio 2008 SP1
ReSharper 4
FoxIt Reader

With that said, there were some things that didn’t install so well. One being some ISO reader software that I usually use to install things. I ended up finding PowerISO that seems to work and you can use it as a trial for a little bit to get your machine going at least.

Technorati Tags: windows7,microsoft,windows,installation,vista

IIS 7.0 Rocks the House!

Bill Evjen — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:55:33 GMT

Yes, we have Windows Server 2008 coming. Yes, also SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Framework 3.5, and more - but probably one of the more exciting new items to come at this same time is IIS 7. As Scott Guthrie states in his recent blog post on IIS, this is a major update to the technology.

IIS 7 will allow for a plug-in architecture and allows you to take out all the pieces of the IIS stack that your applications don't need. It also allows you to build your own extensions and plug those directly in the stack. Before this, when Microsoft came out with enhancements to IIS, they usually had to wait for the next release of IIS. With the new IIS 7, new enhancements can be sent out as extensions and easily plugged in. If you work with IIS in anyway, you really should start getting up to speed on this.

IIS has just hit RC0 and here are some good sites to start taking a look at:

Word Issue - Couldn't Select Text

Bill Evjen — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:36:46 GMT

I woke up yesterday morning, I noticed that Vista had installed three different security updates overnight. Opening Microsoft Word, I noticed that I was unable to use my mouse anywhere within the document anymore. I couldn't select any text. I couldn't right-click. I could only move my cursor around with the arrow keys on my keyboard. For me, this made Word completely useless.

The problem was with a SnagIt add-in to Microsoft Office that was installed on my machine. It all of a sudden seemed to have issues running in the new environment (even though I had this add-in for quite some time on my machine). If you don't have the SnagIt program installed - then it most likely is another add-in.

To fix the problem, you can try to go to the Word Options dialog. You get to this dialog by pressing the Office Start button in the upper-left hand corner and selecting Word Options (a button at the bottom). You will then get a dialog where one of the options will be a Add-Ins page.

From here, you can highlight your add-ins by clicking on the Go button and unchecking all the add-ins. From there, start adding them back in till you find the one that is the problem. If you are like me and couldn't even navigate to this screen, then you are going to want to make the add-in changes to the registry yourself. For this, press the start button and type regedit in the search box to get to the regedit.exe program. BE CAREFUL IN HERE AND DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING BUT WHAT I MENTION HERE OR YOU WILL TOTALLY MESS UP YOUR MACHINE. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE TO ANYTHING YOU DO TO YOUR MACHINES!

In the regedit tool: navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins

Go to the LoadBehavior item in the right-hand pane and double-clicking on it will allow you to change the value from 3 to 0. A value of 0 (Zero) means that the add-in is disabled.

This should work for you - worked for me.

Windows Vista Updates for Performance and Reliability Issues

Bill Evjen — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:48:36 GMT

Some folks are lovin their Vista machines while others are cursing as they are having problems (mostly with the drivers and some lockup issues). It really does only depend upon what you are using your machine for. Though, Microsoft has just released some performance and reliability patches out there:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979

The first one takes care of the following issues:

This update resolves the following issues:

• The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
932539 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932539/) The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver on a Windows Vista-based computer
• The computer stops responding, and you receive a "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer's power button.
• The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations.
• The Diagnostic Policy Service (DPS) stops responding when the computer is under heavy load or when very little memory is available. This problem prevents diagnostics from working.
• The screen goes blank after an external display device that is connected to the computer is turned off. For example, this problem may occur when a projector is turned off during a presentation.
• A computer that has NVIDIA G80 series graphic drivers installed stops responding.
• Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.
• You experience poor playback quality when you play HD DVD disks or Blu-ray disks on a large monitor.
• Applications that load the Netcfgx.dll component exit unexpectedly.
• Windows Calendar exits unexpectedly after you create a new appointment, create a new task, and then restart the computer.
• Internet Connection Sharing stops responding after you upgrade a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP to Windows Vista and then restart the computer.
• The Printer Spooler service stops unexpectedly.
• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009F" error when you put the computer to sleep while a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection is active. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
931671 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931671/) Error message when you put a Windows Vista-based computer to sleep while a PPP connection is active: "STOP 0x0000009F"

While the second one takes care of the following:

This update resolves issues that may affect some Windows Vista-based computers. These issues have been reported by customers who are using the Error Reporting service or Microsoft Customer Support Services.

By applying this update, you can achieve better performance and responsiveness in various scenarios. This update also improves the reliability of Windows Vista.

This update resolves the following issues on a Windows Vista-based computer:

• You experience a long delay when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
• A memory leak occurs when you use the Windows Energy screen saver.
• If User Account Control is disabled on the computer, you cannot install a network printer successfully. This problem occurs if the network printer is hosted by a Windows XP-based or a Windows Server 2003-based computer.
• When you write data to an AVI file by using the AVIStreamWrite function, the file header of the AVI file is corrupted.
• When you copy or move a large file, the "estimated time remaining" takes a long time to be calculated and displayed.
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, it takes a long time to display the logon screen.
• When you synchronize an offline file to a server, the offline file is corrupted.
• If you edit an image file that uses the RAW image format, data loss occurs in the image file. This problem occurs if the RAW image is from any of the following digital SLR camera models: • Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 1DS
For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
932988 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932988/) Files from a Canon EOD 1D or 1DS camera may be corrupted after you use Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Windows Explorer to edit the file metadata in Windows Vista or in Windows XP Service Pack 2
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, the computer loses its default gateway address.
• Poor memory management performance occurs.

UPDATE: There does seem to be some measured results in applying this fix. http://www.aeroxp.org/index.php?categoryid=23&p2_articleid=114. This site is seeing 2x faster results in the perf.

Go to MIX07 for free!

Bill Evjen — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:22:19 GMT

Well, really it already happened. For those that missed it though, Microsoft has just released the entire conference for free online. You will need to install Silverlight to view all the sessions. Outstanding is all I have to say. Thanks Microsoft.

The sessions - http://sessions.visitmix.com

Microsoft Surface and the Future of Home Computing?

Bill Evjen — Wed, 30 May 2007 19:41:17 GMT

The big news of the day is that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer introduced Microsoft Surface.

A table computer that allows the end user to interact with the computer through their fingertips! No keyboard - no mouse. First thing you should do is take a look at the movies Microsoft made about this:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

The ability to drag and drop items around with your fingers. The ability to place a digital camera on the table surface and automatically pull the images / send them / edit them / etc. A bit off in the future but a wonderful look at where technology might be taking us. Is this a glimpse of the future of home computing? I think so. Will it be a table? - maybe not - or will it be a stand up screen like in the movie Minority Report? Its funny, but the table reminds me of my first days of seeing a "computer gaming machine" which was a pong game at my local Pizza Hut when I was a kid. We would lean on the tabletop computer game and play a ton of those pong/asteroids games. Though - that table got really greasy after awhile.

It is interesting to see where Microsoft is spending their dollars for the future of home computing. There will be a emergence of technologies in the future for the home - but when will that come is anyone's guess. Though, right now, Microsoft is making investments in gaming consoles (and doing a good job at it I might add), Tivo-like machines such as Media Center, this Microsoft Surface and more.

Whatever it will be - there will be a heavy emphasis on networking with devices, dummy terminals in the house, communicating with house members at their jobs, as they travel and more. There will be a heavy emphasis on a massive data store in the home for the huge amount of video, pictures, history that a family will want to digitally collect. I, today, could use a 5TB data store for everything I want to store - but alas - not yet.

Too bad we die and don't live on and on as I love seeing technology evolve and the experience just gets better over time. My kids are the lucky ones that will get to play with all those cool gadgets. Enjoy the moment, eh?

VS2005 SP1 for Windows Vista is in Beta

Bill Evjen — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 02:24:00 GMT

Recently, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Looking at this release, you would have maybe noticed that it was fine and dandy for Windows XP, but it isn't going to work on Windows Vista. Microsoft is building a special release of VS2005 SP1 for Windows Vista. The bad news is that it isn't ready yet – but the good news is that it just made beta today. You can download this beta here.

Enjoy!

Office 2007 – Using Microsoft Word to Post Blog Entries

Bill Evjen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:38:00 GMT

This is a test post in a way. Looking around at the new features of Word 2007 – I came across a Blog Post Template type. You can get to this template type by selecting New and you will see it as one of the first options. From there, you will be presented with a large white design area and the ribbon control. You can type in a header and then choose the category you want to publish to. This is very nicely integrated into Office and if you are reading this post, then that means that it posts just as nicely! J

CISCO VPN Client Software on Windows Vista

Bill Evjen — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:26:00 GMT

When working with your new version of Windows Vista, after you install your Cisco VPN Client software - which I did - you might get the error:

"Reason 403: Unable to Contact Service Gateway"

This is due to the fact that your VPN software will not work on Vista. There is presently a version out there (in beta) that works on Vista and you can find it here:

UPDATE - NO GOOD INSTALLS AT THE MOMENT. THERE ARE SOME IN THE COMMENTS.

Installing Fingerprint Reader software on Windows Vista

Bill Evjen — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:16:00 GMT

Installed Windows Vista back on my machine. Took it off for a while due to the fact that the new Zune software didn't work on Vista. It does now - so I'm back! :)

In installing Windows Vista, for the second time - one thing that took me a while was finding all the software for my Microsoft Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader. You can find the software for both the keyboard and the fingerprint reader here:

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/download.mspx

It is two separate pieces of software that you want to install. The first is ItelliType Pro 6.1 (32bit) for Vista. Installing this on Vista will not require a reboot. After installing this, you will then want to install DigitalPersona Password Manager 2.0. This will require a reboot and then you will register your fingerprints after the reboot. Works wonderfully on Vista.

For those that don't yet have a fingerprint reader (whether it is on their keyboard or not), this is something that I highly recommend. I have one at work and at home. You never have to type in your username and password again.