Windows 7

Behind the times

As someone who writes about technology for a living, I pretty much have to use the latest version of all of the software that I write about. As such, it is easy to forget that there are people out there who do not always keep their systems up to date.

Yesterday I got a phone call from an old friend who is a business owner, but who is not involved in the IT industry. He had been seeing all of the Windows 7 commercials on TV, and wanted to know what I thought about it. After giving him my honest critique of the new operating system, he asked me a question that just floored me. The question was “Is it better than Windows 98″.

Obviously, WIndows 98 has worked well for my friend, or he wouldn’t have continued to use it for all this time. I shudder to even think about what the migration process is going to be like though. I guarantee that Microsoft doesn’t have a Windows 98 to Windows 7 migration path documented on the Internet anywhere. I just can’t help but wonder if there are other organizations who are still running pre-Windows XP operating systems and have decided that this is the time to upgrade.

More Windows 7 Themes

I was playing around with Windows 7 earlier today, and I stumbled on to something that I had to pass along. Like every other version of Windows in recent memory, Windows 7 comes with some built in themes and wallpapers, and also allows you to use custom themes. What I didn’t realize until today though, is that Windows 7’s themes are regional in nature. For example, I live in the United States, so many of the wallpapers that are available to me by default are photos that were taken at different locations in the USA. If you activate the various international themes though, you can get wallpapers from around the world. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal for some people, but I absolutely love foreign travel, so I got a real kick out of this.

To get to the themes, just open WIndows Explorer and go to \Windows\Globalization\MCT\. From there, there are several regional folders. Open the folder of your choice and then go into the Theme sub folder and double click on the theme file within the folder to activate the theme.

Posey is Back!

Those of you who assumed that I had completely abandoned my blog will be happy to know that I’m finally back online. I am sorry for having such a prolonged absence but unfortunately it could not be helped. Without going into too much detail, an injury resulted in three weeks of blindness. Even though I continued to write some articles during that time the process was painfully slow and required the assistance of others. I am happy to report though, that I have most of my eyesight back and can use a computer without assistance.
On a more technical note, I have been using Windows 7 on my primary workstation since it was released last month. So far, the operating system seems to be rocksolid. I have run into a few unexpected glitches that there hasn’t been anything major. For example, my soundcard driver refused to work even though it was designed for Windows Vista. Thankfully, Creative Labs offers a Windows 7 version of the driver. I also discovered that after I switched to Windows 7, Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 had to be reactivated. Aside from those particular issues, Windows 7 appears to be working well for me.

Windows 7 Device Drivers

I ran into something interesting this morning that I wanted to tell you about. As you are no doubt aware, Windows 7 is built on the Vista kernel. In fact, some critics have referred to Windows 7 as Windows Vista 2.0.

Being that Windows 7 and Vista are so closely related, I had assumed that I would be able to use Windows Vista device drivers. Apparently that isn’t always the case though. This morning I had to replace the sound card in one of my computers. When the new sound card didn’t work, I decided to look for Windows 7 specific drivers. Sure enough, once I downloaded the Windows 7 drivers, the card began working.

Windows 7 Installation

Last week Microsoft released Windows 7 to some of their customers. Over the weekend I decided to try installing Windows 7 on a couple of machines. One of the machines was an older desktop that had already been upgraded from XP to Vista. Rather than doing a clean install, I wanted to see if Vista could be used as a way of indirectly upgrading from WIndows XP to Windows 7. I am happy to say that the process worked flawlessly.

For my other deployment, I wanted to see how well Windows 7 would do with a Vista upgrade on a newer machine that had never had XP installed. The machine that I ran the test on was a brand new Toshiba laptop. During the installation process I received a warning message indicating that my wireless network adapter wouldn’t work after the upgrade. I wanted to see what would happen, so I went ahead with the upgrade. Surprisingly, the wireless NIC continued to function after the upgrade with no adverse side effects.

More Windows 7 News

In a recent post I mentioned that Windows 7 would be available, preloaded on new PCs in October. Today Microsoft sent out a much more detailed E-mail message disclosing the release dates. Here is when Windows 7 will be available through various channels:

Volume license customers with the software assurance plan: August 7th

TechNet subscribers: August 6th

Non English versions of Windows 7 should be available through these channels as of October 1st.

Windows 7 Release Date

It looks like Microsoft has finally made public their release date for Windows 7. Last night I received an E-mail message indicating that PCs that are preloaded with Windows 7 will start showing up on store shelves on October 22nd. As for the Release Candidate, you will be able to contine to download it until August 20th. After that time, you will still be able to install the Release Candidate, and you will still be able to acquire a product key, but you won’t be able to download the bits.

An Update on Some Recent Posts

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on a couple of my more recent blog posts.

First, as you may recall, I tried disabling virtual memory on my Data Protection Manager server in an effort to eliminate paging and the problems with inconsistent replicas that paging seems to cause. Since that time, all of the replicas of my protected volumes have remained in a consistent state.  The replicas for my Exchange storage groups became inconsistent after about a day, and my system state replicas became inconsistent about a day or two later.

Although I use multiple methods to back up my network, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I ended up replacing the system board in my DPM server tonight, and upgraded from 2 GB of RAM to 4 GB. I will keep you posted on what happens.

The other issue that I wanted to talk about was the problems that I am having with Windows 7 and the wireless NIC that’s built into my lab laptop. After doing some more research, I have discovered that the issue may be hardware related. I found a technical article that said that there is a bug in my laptop’s firmware and that because of the bug, you have to flash the BIOS before you will be able to install Windows Vista SP2. According to the article, the bug was directly related to the wireless NIC.

I went ahead and flashed the BIOS, and for kicks I installed Windows Vista with SP2. Unfortunately, I am now having the same issue with Vista that I was having with Windows 7. One thing that may possibly be causing the problem though is buggy drivers. I’m not positive, but I may have been running the 32-bit version of Vista when everything was working correctly. I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and am currently using the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, I am going to need the machine for a project that I am working on for the next two months, so it will be August before I will be able to blow Windows off of the machine and test my theory.

Until then, I want to say thank you to Glen at Microsoft for his helpful suggestions.

The Windows Experience Index

When Microsoft first introduced Vista, one of the new features that was introduced along with it was the Windows Experience index. The basic idea was that the performance of various system components was rated and assigned a numerical score. The lowest score represented your overall Windows Experience Index.

At the time, Microsoft wanted to simplify things for home users by getting software publishers to list a minimum experience index rating for applications rather than firm hardware requirements. In other words, if an application required a minimum score of 2.0, and your computer was rated at 3.0, then you could be guaranteed that the application would work. Well, that was the theory anyway. Ultimately, I don’t know of any software publishers that actually began using the Windows Experience Index.

Although nobody really uses the Windows Experience Index to determine what applications they can perform, I do use it to test the effectiveness of hardware upgrades on my primary workstation. Tonight something interesting happened though. My computer previously had scores ranging from 5.0 to 5.9 and had an overall score of 5.0. I ended up replacing the system board, the CPU, the power supply, and the graphics card. This time when checked the Windows Experience Index, all of my scores were 5.9.

What I didn’t realize is that in Windows Vista, the scores are capped at 5.9. No matter how good your hardware is, you will never score higher than 5.9. This means that there will eventually come a time when the Windows Experience Index becomes meaningless as a benchmark because of improvements in hardware. Windows 7 also includes the Windows Experience Index, and the maximum score has been raised to 7.9. Even so, I have to question the effectiveness of the index if it is capped. Oh well, I guess that’s what the Performance Monitor is for.

Automated Installation for Windows 7

It’s kind of funny how timing works out sometimes. About a week ago I mentioned in one of my blog posts that I hadn’t seen an automatic installation kit for Windows 7 yet. Today Microsoft sent an E-mail message to beta testers asking them to try out some of the new Windows 7 tools. Among these tools were:

• The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
• The Application Compatability Toolkit
• The User State Migration Tool
• The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

None of these tools are really new. We had all of them in Vista, and some have been around for longer than that. I haven’t had a chance to download any of the new versions yet, but it will be interesting to see how much or how little these tools might have changed.