Chris123NT's Blog

Ok, sorry everyone about the site going down yesterday.  Seems someone decided it would be funny to try and fuck with the database on me.  So whoever they are I hope they die – in a fire.

So please bear with me while I finish getting everything back, going to re-import the comments table tonight and then after that all *should* be well.  Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Edit: Comments now imported, i think we’re back in business

I was doing some thinking over the past few weeks and I came to a realization.  Windows 7, with all of it’s improvements in performance, new features, and more streamlined development process, will actually save Microsoft and redeem them from the whole Vista crash.  So I decided to write up WHY Windows 7 will tromp every previous Windows version and why we should pay close attention to it.

In order to properly get everyone up to speed, first I must take you back to 2003, back to when Microsoft was all about the “Longhorn Vision” and what it will mean for the end user.  Microsoft was promising everyone an amazing world where you would be able to accomplish almost anything with this amazing new operating system.  The demos were absolutely breathtaking, but unfortunately, most of these demos were nothing more than smoke and mirrors.  In reality, the physical code that was Longhorn, was an absolute train wreck.  The builds were horribly unstable, and it looked as if the vision would come crashing down like a house of cards, and in August of 2004 it did just that.  Microsoft set off to reset the codebase and restart Longhorn from scratch.  Normally this wouldn’t have been so bad, except they decided to remove many of the promised features, and 2 years later they delivered Vista, a half baked release and something that didn’t even come close to the original Longhorn that we all wanted to see.  Vista was plagued by driver issues, performance issues, and stability issues.  It got off to a very bad start with the press literally throwing it under the bus, and to this day the mere mention of Vista in a crowd makes people cringe.  Granted, a lot of the issues were fixed in SP1, but not enough to make people want to switch, many bugs that were reported during the beta still remain in Vista to this day.

With Windows 7, Microsoft realized it needed to change things radically.  Jim Allchin had retired from his post as chief of the platforms division, and Microsoft brought in Steven Sinofsky under the new title “Vice President of Windows and Windows Live.”  Steven has a reputation of driving releases that are on target, meet deadlines, and most importantly, deliver results.  Steven’s first order of business was to re-organize the whole Windows division in order to streamline the development process and ensure a quality product at any point in the build process.  He instituted a series of code quality checks, wherein NOTHING is allowed to check into winmain unless it meets a stringent quality standard for stability and function, something that really did not exist during Longhorn/Vista development.  The purpose of this is to ensure that almost any Windows 7 build plucked out of the winmain lab will be stable enough for regular usage.

The second part of the policy change, and the one that I might not fully agree with, is his disclosure policy.  During Longhorn/Vista development, Microsoft was extremely open about the process.  The public literally had an open window to look in on Longhorn development and see how things were going.  The problem with this though, is that the public also had a bird’s eye view of the failures, the feature cuts, and the pushing out of the half-baked Vista.  I do think that Steven went a little too far with his non-disclosure policy, but looking back I really can’t fault the man.  He managed to keep Windows 7 development under wraps long enough to genuinely surprise all of the PDC attendees that saw the first public demonstration.  The fact that we were seeing real working code, and not some director demo was also extremely satisfying.

And finally, the third part of the policy change, and this one is actually rather profound.  Steven wants Microsoft to promise, and then deliver exactly what they promised, and so far they appear to be doing just that.  And dare I say it, Windows 7 is MUCH closer to the original Longhorn vision than Vista ever was.  If you honestly think about it, Longhorn had many conceptual features that appear in current builds of Windows 7:

• New, Animated boot screen:  During the Longhorn project, there were concepts for a new, high resolution, animated boot screen.  This feature was later pulled from Vista, although it could be enabled (minus animation) with a boot loader hack.
• New Taskbar: During Longhorn development, there were many UI concepts going around for a new taskbar that would rethink the way the user deals with tasks and launches applications.  In Windows 7, the new taskbar (codenamed superbar) delivers on that goal.  It unifies the quick launch and running applications, gives nice visuals of open tasks, and generally streamlines the task management experience.  I think this is a huge step forward for Windows, and a much needed change after 14 years of little change in this department.
• Federated Search: In Longhorn, Microsoft wanted to implement WinFS for easy file searching and data management, but they also wanted to enable this functionality over the network.  In Windows 7 this will become a reality with the new federated search feature.  This new feature allows users to search over the network or on websites with little to no code changes on the server side.  Pretty cool if you ask me.
• Castle: In Longhorn, a new networking feature (called castle at the time) was being worked on that would easily allow people to network their home PC’s and share and stream information over the network.  In Windows 7 this feature is back in a functional form under the name “Homegroups”.  Homegroups allow a user to create a network of Windows 7 with extreme ease.  Gone are the days of pulling out your hair trying to create a networked environment of XP or Vista machines in your home.
• New Explorer Views:  In Longhorn there were many new explorer view ideas, and while not all of them appear in 7, one major one does.  The stacking view.  This view allows you to stack files by date, author, and many other filters.  This view especially shines with pictures.  Want to sort your pictures by month taken and have them stacked?  Easy.
• Device Stage: One of the concept features in Longhorn included a new way to visualize the connected devices on your PC.  Windows 7 really delivers here with the new device stage feature.  It allows for a much more visual experience specifically tailored to your device that allows you to see information and perform tasks all in one easy to use location.

Windows 7 comes with even more on top of all of that.  It comes with new additions to Aero, such as Aero peek, Aero Shake, Aero Snap just to name a few.  These features really make the experience of using Windows a whole lot better.  Aero snap is really useful when viewing multiple documents and you want a side by side view.  Aero Peek is great when you want to get a quick look at the desktop or a specific window without minimizing everything, and Aero shake is nice in touch based applications as a quick way to un-clutter the screen.

The bottom line is Microsoft really set out to change perceptions and fix the problems that plagued Vista.  And so far they are doing a very good job of that with Windows 7.  Current builds of Windows 7 are amazingly fast, driver support is better than Vista, even at this early beta stage, and the stability is absolutely unbelievable.  I have been using Windows 7 as my primary operating system for a while now and I have absolutely no intentions of going back to Vista.  Actually, you couldn’t even pay me to go back to Vista at this point.  In my view, Windows 7 will be the operating system that breathes new life into Microsoft, and revitalizes the Windows and PC community as a whole.  Apple, get ready to meet your match, you’re not going to be able to poke fun at this release, it’s probably going to trump Snow Leopard too.

Yet another Windows 7 build has escaped Sinofsky’s watchful eye, except this time the circumstances were a bit different.  This build was actually stolen off a machine on the WinHEC China demo floor by a few gutsy guys who decided to image one of the boxes.  This could explain some of the issues that I will outline further down.  Paul over at Geeksmack was kind enough to write up a little mini-review on this build so I figured I would post what he wrote and add a few things to it.  I’m really not going to do a full scale guide for this build because of how badly broken certain things are, it just isn’t practical for every day use.  So without further ado, on to the review after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

Before we begin, let me just mention that this is Paul, and not Chris writing. I hope you all enjoy my first guest post!

Looking back on the year 2007, when Windows Vista was released, we all can remember the harsh criticism that it faced. It was slow, buggy, a memory hog, incompatible, and “it wasn’t worth the upgrade as there wasn’t anything new from XP”, quoting many critics. Despite the fact that most of these problems have been rectified now in the post-SP1 era, no amount of marketing or proven facts can convince most people that Vista is any good. Vista’s reputation is badly bruised, and it will take a LOT to heal it. Microsoft needs a fresh start. An operating system under a new name with new features, improved speed/reliability, and most importantly an OS that has drivers ready for it upon launch.

I can say firsthand that Windows Vista was definitely not as bad as people said it was. It ran very smoothly even when I had a Pentium 4, and I never experienced any problems with it except for when I had incompatible drivers installed after an upgrade from XP. A fresh, clean install fixed that. With that said, Vista also has many flaws. The UI is very inconsistent, it lacks many of the features we expected with Longhorn, the Ultimate Extras are a joke, and UAC was pretty intrusive.

Now let me turn the spotlight to Windows 7 Build 6801. Like many, I got my hands on it as it spread all over the internet, and I must say that after a week of use, I’m very impressed with it. I did all of the things that I normally do with my PC, such as gaming, designing, coding, and browsing the internet, and at times I forgot that I was using a pre-beta build. When I installed Windows 7, all of the essential drivers were installed (all that was left out was my HP monitor). I didn’t have to go through the hassle of installing the networking driver and running Windows Update to get updates and drivers, so that saved me 10 minutes of my life.

Seeing that most Vista problems were caused by incompatible drivers, I think this feature will definitely help 7 maintain a good reputation. Once I started using Windows 7, I immediately started to love it. I have a C2Q Q6600 rig, 2GB of OCZ Platinum Rev. 2 RAM and a 9600GT on top of that, yet I STILL noticed a speed increase over Vista. I looked at the task manager and I saw that without anything else open, I only had 43 tasks running in the background.

I haven’t had 1 crash yet. I have encountered some minor bugs, such as choppy window animations on my nVidia card, but that’s about it. Something I also noticed that Microsoft got the memo on was the highly inconsistent UI. Just about every program had a different GUI. Now, they seem to have 2 major GUIs; the Windows Explorer GUI and the Ribbon GUI, which both seem to be taking over most of Microsoft’s applications.

Recently, Rafael managed to make a patch that unlocks the hidden goodies in 7. Among the goodies lies the Superbar, and that one feature really made me fall in love with Windows 7. Before all of you hardcore Mac and Linux fanboys go flaming Microsoft saying that this is a feature copied from other operating systems, let me just remind you that the superbar is basically quick launch, window grouping, and window previews all combined in one. The whole quick launch idea is something that Microsoft has had since the stone age, so its not like they’re copying anyone. Anyways, the superbar just made window management much better for me.

I normally have a lot of windows open at one time, so my taskbar would look like a pigsty. Now, I just pin all of the programs which I most often use on the superbar and it groups them all and makes it fast and easy for me to launch them. My point is that Aero Shake, Aero Peek, Jumplists, and Libraries among other things all bring us closer to the Longhorn vision. Touch also will introduce a whole new way of interacting with your PC.

I’m just blown away with the performance, reliability and features that I have seen in build 6801, and I eagerly await Windows 7 RTM. I can go on and on about how several things in 7 are improved, such as UAC and networking, but I’m sure you got my point. Microsoft is molding and developing Windows 7 to become a much improved version of Vista. Of course, they cannot market it as Vista SE, because Windows 7 is Microsoft’s fresh start.

Windows 7 should have a smooth RTM compared to Vista as it won’t face the same driver issues as Vista had, and it automatically retrieves and installs the essential drivers when installing the operating system. Another criticism that Vista has faced is on the lower-speced PC topic. While Vista indeed ran fine on my Pentium 4 (I must admit that XP did run faster), many other people say otherwise based on their experience. Based off of what we heard at PDC, Sinofsky mentioned that Windows 7 will make a push onto the new and emerging Netbook scene, which means that people who have netbooks or lower-speced machines might have better luck with 7 than they did with Vista.

With all of these aforementioned factors in mind, its very possible for 7 to massively heal Microsoft’s wounds that were left by Vista’s bad launch. From what I see, they seem to be able to make the launch date as they most likely won’t have to go through with what happened during the development of Vista. With Windows 7, Windows Live, and the introduction of Windows Azure, I think that Microsoft’s future looks very bright. Now if only they can improve IE8’s standards…

A new version of Rafael’s Blue Badge tool for Windows 7 has been released.  This new version brings many improvements as well as implementing a few rather interesting discoveries that were made.  The other night (I think it was Saturday), we started digging around in a build of Windows 7 that out of the box that had all of the features protected but was known to have working Aero Peek.  Conventional Blue Badge patching was not working to enable peek.  As a matter of fact, everything except peek was working.

This led us to do something that caused us to discover how it works internally.  We set our machine names and criteria to match the Microsoft criteria the build checks for and everything turned on, including Aero Peek.  After a little investigating, Rafael found code references to checks pointing to specific registry keys that when set to a certain value, will turn on the feature associated with said key.  So we dug up all the ID’s, compiled them together, set the proper attribute value, and voila, blue badge, the easy way.

So just to outline, here are the improvements in this revision of the Blue Badge tool:

• Completely Build Independent: Will work on any build of Windows 7 that contains protected features.  This version of the tool works perfectly on build 6801 as well as 6936.
• No Patching of System Files: This revision works its magic through the registry, no system files are altered in any way.
• Blue Badge on a Per-User Basis: since this tool applies the feature ID’s under HKCU, you can patch each account at your own discretion and compare.  So you can have users with all the features, and others without.
• Enables Aero Peek on 6801: After using this revision of the tool, users of build 6801 will be able to enjoy fully functioning aero peek on their machines.

That pretty much wraps it up, look below for download links for the tool as well as a link to Rafael’s post about the new tool (where he even includes a new flowchart).

Download: Revision 3 for x86 and x64

View: Rafael’s Post

As many of you undoubtedly know by now, newer builds of Windows  7 come along with a “Send Feedback” link to the left of the min/max/close buttons of nearly every window you open.  This is reminiscent of the old “Comments?” link that was present in Whistler/XP betas.  So Rafael and I set out to find a way to do this.

Fortunately we can remove this link pretty easily.  It just involves a simple registry edit.  For the sake of easiness I will post the reg code below, all you have to do is copy/paste it into notepad and save it as feedback.reg.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FeedbackToolEnabled"=dword:00000000

 

Merge the registry file, say yes to any UAC prompts or otherwise, log out and back in and enjoy your clean window frames!

I posted this over at Geeksmack

So last week, winfuture posted about Windows 7 build 6954 having a new boot screen. Ever since then, people have been wanting to see exactly what this new boot screen looks like. I can tell you it looks pretty nifty. It is basically 4 animating balls that come together and form a glowing windows flag, making for a pretty cool effect.
I recently had a chance to film this boot screen in action, so without further ado, watch the video of the new Windows 7 boot screen below. Excuse the iffy quality, had to do this with my digital camera.

So, looks like Microsoft removed it from soapbox, so now a youtube video is available below.  Thanks to whoever uploaded this for me, I tried last night but it wasn’t processing.

If you’re like many others, then upon installation of Windows 7 build 6801 you have an unknown device in the device manager that doesn’t seem to fit with any of your hardware.  And if you look at the hardware ID it is shown as DETECTED\blbdrive.  Up until now we thought this was something to do with backup, but we now know it is for the “File as Volume” driver.  Which probably has something to do with the VHD mounting technologies in Windows 7.  The following guide will show you how to fix the unknown device in the device manager.

1. Navigate to %windir%\system32\drivers
2. rename blbdrive.sys to blbdriveold.sys or something similar
3. Go into the device manager and right click the unknown device and click “Update Driver”.
4. You want to find the driver on your own, so select the bottom option.
5. At the screen, select the option shown in the screenshot:
   
6. Next, click the have disk option, and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\blbdrive.inf_amd64_neutral_f7447a670ab06496 (for x64, x86 name should be similar).  Select the File as Volume driver and click next.
7. You will be presented with a prompt warning that the device may not be compatible.  Ignore the warning and click yes.
8. The device will install.  The system tray may report that installation failed, but that is not the case.  Reboot when asked and enjoy a clean device manager!

So I decided to do some extensive research into the BLBDrive mystery in Windows 7 build 6801.  This driver shows up as an unknown device in the device manager that isn’t actually installed.  (well it is, half installed that is).

I have determined that this driver belongs to the component known as “File as Volume Driver”.  With a little coaxing I managed to get the component to install and I now have a clean device manager.  I will be posting a set of detailed instructions on how to get this to work tomorrow, so stay tuned!

So I just got home from a little trip I took and noticed that Rafael Rivera has published both the x86 and x64 versions of his blue badge tool for Windows 7 Build 6801.  This tool enables all the hidden features that are only otherwise exposed to internal full time Microsoft employees who posess a “Blue Badge”.
Surf over to Rafael’s blog for the details and the download links.

View: Blue Badge Tool

PS: Tomorrow I will be posting a write-up about Windows Server 2008 R2 (which is built on the same Kernel as Win7) So stay tuned!