Dan's Blog : Vista

Up & Running on Win7

dtjones — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:13:18 GMT

Rock and Roll! Yesterday I did a clean install of Win7 x64 Beta on my Lenovo x301. Setup was fast and completed without any issues. In fact it had no problem with the SATA drive set in AHCI mode. The Vista RTM install couldn’t handle that. I had to use a custom driver or switch it in to compatibility mode.

Boot time is lightening fast as is resume from sleep. I haven’t played much with hibernate yet. Yes this is a clean OS install but I did a clean install of Vista on the same machine recently and it was not nearly as fast.

Over all performance feels much zippier. Apps load more quickly and the system feels far more responsive.

So far I’ve only run into three minor issues:

1) The current release of Live Mesh doesn’t play nicely with Vista video settings. I got a dog food QFE from the Mesh team that cleared the issue up. I don’t know when this will be released publically. (note: Dog Food is an internal term used for testing another groups product prior to public release.)

2) For some reason Win 7 didn’t play nicely with the sound system. I cleared this up by repairing the driver install. The build of Win 7 I installed is an Microsoft IT (MSIT) build. They mock with a bunch of stuff so I don’t know if I can blame this on Win 7 or not.

3) The start menu froze on me just once. It happened in a strange situation. Again this could have been caused by some Microsoft IT (MSIT) stuff.

So for all of my road testing in the last day I can safely say I’m impressed. I haven’t played with many of the new features yet. Once I do I’ll report back.

Now for the early litmus test – do I want to go back to Vista? So far the answer is no.

What Has 2 Thumbs & Is Excited About Windows 7?

dtjones — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:38:26 GMT

Answer: This guy!

I’ve been following very closely the press and reviews on the early peaks of Windows 7. I’m not as big of a Vista hater as some people out there. In fact I like the OS. I recently had to reinstall XP on another machine and was absolutely astonished how old it looked and felt. In fact I couldn’t stand it, I had to reinstall Vista on the machine right away.

Being a MS employee and shareholder I have double the interest in Windows 7 being successful. But I’m also a critic. I look at each of our products with a scrutinizing eye. If you read my blog you’ll find two MS products that I absolutely love: Windows Live Writer (which I use to write this blog) and Windows Live Mesh (which I use to synchronize files between machines). I’m also a huge fan of SQL Server (duh!) But I am a critic of the product and I know first hand it’s not perfect, especially in the manageability space, but I’m working tirelessly to improve it one release at a time.

Back to Windows 7. Part of me felt that Windows 7 wouldn’t have a chance of being successful. Granted it would almost be impossible to cause a worse impression than Vista but I felt people would hold it to an unfairly high bar and nit pick every last square inch. Everything I’ve read thus far is very favorable. On top of that there seems to be some excitement for it!

One of my very good friends did a clean install and an upgrade from Vista without a hitch. He’s super critical and even he had great things to say: GUI enhancements, power management enhancements, etc.

I’m starting to believe that Windows 7 is THE OS everyone wanted Vista to be. Windows 7 will likely be to Vista what XP was to ME.

Next week I’m going to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my main laptop (Lenovo x301). I have 4 GBs so I’m going to do an x64 install. I’ll report back on my experience.

Vista Parental Controls Slows Down Zune Marketplace

dtjones — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:53:00 GMT

I’m a huge fan of my Zune and the Zune Marketplace. I have a Zune and my two daughters do as well. I’ve owned several iPods but I just love my Zune more; especially the subscription option for music. $15/month for all the music I want is fantastic. Yes, not everything is included in it and if I stop paying I lose the music but so what. It’s far cheaper in the long run and allows me to explore a lot more music that I otherwise would. I think this is a great way for artists to gain exposure. Anyway, this isn’t the point of the post.

Each of my daughters has their own login to Vista and I’ve setup Parental Controls on their login. This caused a severe performance slow down on the Zune marketplace. Searches and downloads were painfully slow. Running under a full admin account everything worked great. I found one potential solution where the person added 20-something URLs to the allow list. Yuck! That’s not a solution in my book. If one URL changes or another gets added in a software upgrade it’s back to the drawing board. I dug into the Parental Controls stuff in Vista and found a solution. There’s a list of programs that Parental Controls will completely ignore. I added zune.net to the list and viola everything works great. There’s no GUI for this in Vista so it requires editing the registry directly – this means do this at your own risk…

Using information from this site: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial139.html I added a new value for c:\program files\Zune\Zune.exe under the hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Parental Controls\HTTPExemptions. This worked like a charm. What this does is exclude zune.net from Parental Controls. I think this is the best option as I can still control browser access but not impact Zune marketplace performance. It's unfortunate that MSFT doesn't provide a GUI to control this list of programs.

As I said, I love my Zune and so do my girls. They’ve already downloaded a ton of music and exploring a whole new world!

Lost Network Connectivity on a Dell Precision 470 Running Vista

dtjones — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:26:22 GMT

I ran into an interesting situation on my older Dell Precision 470 running Vista. For some reason a few days after I installed Vista it wouldn’t maintain network connectivity. I’d get a little yellow triangle – the warning icon – stating that I’m not authenticated on the network. I tried installing the latest drivers, I tried bypassing the integrated network controller by placing a network card in the box. I even disabled the on-board controller in the bios. Nothing worked. It would connect for a little bit, drop, and then reconnect. incredibly frustrating.

I did some searches using all the keywords I could think of. I finally came across something that sounded similar. The reports had to do with connecting to small business server but the symptoms were the same. So I tried what they suggested and it worked. To get it working I had to disable IPv6 on the properties for the connection. Doing this solved all of my problems. This shouldn’t be a problem as I don’t believe we’re going to exclusive use of IPv6 anytime soon. There may be some other implications but those aren’t clear to me just yet. For now my connectivity is working as expected.

I don’t generally like to blog about these topics – at least not on this blog – but since I had such trouble finding a resolution I thought I should do a posting so that others might benefit from my experience.