Jonathan Hardwick : Windows XP

Visible Recycle Bin Considered Harmful

jonathanh — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 07:23:00 GMT

Lazy-blogging (verb): The act of letting a thought sit unblogged for long enough that someone else blogs about it instead, thereby saving you the effort. cf lazyweb.

Case-in-point: Many of us OCD types find it impossible to sit with a non-empty recycle bin on our desktop. We just can't do it. It nags at our souls. (We're also the ones who defrag religiously and run Disk Cleanup at the drop of a hat). We just... must... empty... that... bin.

What does this have to do with lazy-blogging? Well, I've had a note to blog about the solution (set a maximum size for the bin, then use TweakUI to remove the temptation from your sight, and let it empty itself behind the scenes) for literally years. Plural. Thankfully Mike Torres beat me to it, and then Omar Shahine followed up with the important "set a maximum size" hint (otherwise your OCD will be going nuts worrying that you'll fill up your disk).

But what really stopped me was that I still haven't found the original inspiration for the idea. Somewhere there's a web page about how the original Apple Macintosh (or maybe Lisa?) designers now consider the "fat trash can" icon to be a terrible usability mistake, because a significant proportion of the population just can't let stuff sit in there. The problem is, I can't for the life of me find that web page. Ergo, I couldn't blog about it. Help me, oh lazyweb...

Edit: The lazyweb came through! Shane S. pointed me to bug #2 on AskTog's Bug Hall Of Fame. Quoting:

The engineers just though they were providing users with a "neato" way to tell an empty can from a full one, but to many users, the new appearance suggested a painfully distended belly. Millions of people developed the unnecessary and undesirable habit of immediately emptying the trash as soon as the swelling showed. Drop something in; empty the Trash. Drop something in; empty the Trash. It became unconscious habit.

Remember the fellow who dropped the document in the trash by accident? Now, when he saw the trash instantly swell up, he was likely to erase it forever—drop something in; empty the trash—relieving the trash of it's apparent distress, even as another portion of his brain, in very real distress, was yelling, "No! No! No!"

Startup processes on a Toshiba M400

jonathanh — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:58:00 GMT

Or, "What is all this stuff doing on my computer", part II.

I've just finished switching my portable life over to a new Toshiba M400 Tablet PC. Gig of memory, Centrino Core Duo, life is good.

At least, it was good until I looked at the process list in task manager. Then it was that same feeling of horror all over again. The situation was bad on my old Toshiba Portege 3500. But this is worse.

Here are all the I'm-pretty-sure-these-aren't-vanilla-Windows processes that are still running after it's finished startup. I give descriptions where I think I know what a particular startup process does, otherwise I just quote the description field.

00THotkey.exe - Enables use of function keys to control laptop functions
APntEx.exe - Touchpad driver (from Alps)
APoint.exe - And another touchpad driver (from Alps)
CrossMenu.exe - "CrossMenu Main"
hkcmd.exe - "hkcmd Module" (from Intel)
igfxpers.exe - "persistence Module" (from Intel)
TAcelMgr.exe - Acceleration manager (what does that mean?)
ThpSrv.exe - Parks your hard disk if you knock the laptop
TMESRV31.exe - "Toshiba MobileExtension Service"
TMETEMnu.exe - "Toshiba MobileExtension", spawned by TMESRV31
TSkrMain.exe - Acceleration "shaker" utility (what does that mean?)
TFNF5.exe - Switch laptop video output using Fn-F5
TRot.exe - Match screen orientation to rotation of tablet screen
TouchEd.exe - Turns touchpad on and off
TFncKy.exe - "TFncKy"
TPSMain.exe - Toshiba power saver applet
TPSBattM.exe - Spawned by TPSMain, probably battery-specific
TMERzCtl.exe - "TMERzCtrl"

In my original post, I counted 11 extra startup processes from Toshiba on a Portege 3500. In just two hardware generations, they've out-done themselves with 18 startup processes. Pretty soon there'll be more random systray applets than there are regular Windows processes. As it is, they're already sucking down 70 MB of working set. Good thing I've got a gig...

Can anyone provide more details of what each of these processes does? And (perhaps more usefully!) has anyone experimented with msconfig or autoruns to see the effects of disabling each of them?

Cultural change at Microsoft, or, "What was the point in keeping quiet?"

jonathanh — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 19:30:00 GMT

In an anonymous comment on “Patch for tcserver.exe memory leak on Tablet PC - at last!”, zzz asks:

What was the point in “keeping quiet”? Is there some kind of NDA that stops from stating the obvious thing (holy cow we have a bug in our perfect product!) that everyone knows about? You could have instead tried to work with the tablet pc community - as it seems that it otherwise takes media attention to give such bug some deserved attention.

This is a good question, and my reasoning probably deserves a wider audience than just a comment-reply, so here goes. There'll be a plea for feedback at the end :)

The Tablet PC community actually knew about the bug and the kill-two-processes-then-restart-one workaround back in May 2004 - see this link from Orlowski's original article. So I wasn't saying anything new, I was just saying it as a Microsoft employee. Despite/because of this, my post rapidly became the top Google hit for “tcserver.exe”.
No, there's no NDA, but there does seem to be a general unwritten rule that you don't pile on to bug reports about another team's product. If it had been my own team, or the Tablet PC team had been blogging back then, I'd have been much more aggressive. Instead I decided to work from the inside, rather than the outside.
If you break rule #2, you run the risk of getting unwelcome notice from the other team, journalists (and then our public relations people), and finally your boss. Sometimes this is worth it, sometimes it isn't, but ultimately it's a personal judgement call. I've skirted close a couple of times over the past year and figured my boss was losing patience with giving me political air cover, so I let this one slide...
Pre-announcing patches is almost always a bad idea, because they typically take longer to test than you first think. This definitely happened here. Do you think the anonymous spokesman who said this back in February is feeling good about himself?

“Progress is being made and there'll be an update soon,” a spokesman told us. “For now, we advise users to reboot the machine on a daily basis,” he added.
Finally, media attention does work as a forcing function in these situations. Media attention gets executive attention, which in turn percolates down and results in change priorities. It’s a fact of life.

Here endeth the self-justification. Am I happy about how long it took to get this fixed? No. Would I do it the same way again? No – but that’s because we have at least one Tablet PC tester blogging, and I could engage on his blog rather than going through “the usual channels”. Do I think I did the right thing at the time? Probably — at least if I wanted to keep blogging :)

What do my readers think? Should I have risked all back then? Pushed the Tablet PC team for greater transparency? Done so from the inside or the outside? In short, how do you make cultural change happen in your job?

Developers rejoice - new API for Windows Desktop Search!

jonathanh — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 09:19:00 GMT

Ever since the MSN team released their first beta toolbar with Windows Desktop Search, developers have been asking how they can add its search functionality to their own programs. Well, the wait is over – the MSN team have quietly added documentation for their Windows Desktop Search API. Oh, and an SDK. And examples of SQL queries. And a command-line interface.

How did I find this out? Because I’m subscribed to the RSS feed of the Channel 9 wiki, and I saw this little diff go by. Yup, that’s the search team doing an update to their own pages on the wiki before they make a formal announcement. Besides, they’re probably too busy telling people about the new international versions of their toolbar :)

I’m looking forward to seeing how people use this in their own applications. Go nuts! And once you’ve built something cool, why not put a note about it on the wiki? After all, that’s why it’s there.

Update: Dare wants C# wrappers so that he can hook it in to RSS Bandit. So does Channel 9!

Category: Windows XP

MaxiVista just got even better

jonathanh — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:53:00 GMT

MaxiVista is a software application that lets you use another PC – your laptop, for example – as an extra screen for your main computer. Since more screen real estate is always better, this is a Good Thing. It's especially sexy with a Tablet PC, because you can rotate the keyboard out of the way, completing the illusion.

In my original review of MaxiVista, I noted their approach was fundamentally different from competing tools, which are basically “software KVMs”. Software KVMs let you use one keyboard and mouse to control two different PCs, often with support for moving the mouse cursor back and forth between the two displays, and cut-and-pasting between the two computers.

Having tried both paradigms, I liked MaxiVista better – and found out six months later that it was dangerously addictive. Now with v2.0 I can have my cake and eat it too, because they’ve added software KVM support! One keypress switches modes, from “laptop as second screen” to “software KVM” and back again. Oh, and for the exhibitionists amongst you (or teachers, maybe?) they also let you mirror one display onto many: see their price list for the different combinations. I’m running the $40 middle-of-the-road version.

Highly recommended – if you’ve got a PC and a laptop, go grab the free trial from http://www.maxivista.com/ and give it a spin. This is slick, seamless, magical stuff.

Update: Scott Hanselman loves it too - “now that I have a TabletPC, I consider MaxiVista to be a required tool”.

FeedDemon vs NewsGator: why platforms are bad and RSS isn't email

jonathanh — Wed, 18 May 2005 03:55:00 GMT

Several months ago I started writing a review of FeedDemon and NewsGator, together with an explanation of why I switched (twice). Now that FeedDemon has been bought out by NewsGator, it’s probably time to finish that review…

Like Alex Barnett, I actually bought both products (Alex, which one have you used the most, and why?) In my case, I ended up with both due to wishful thinking. After trying the demo versions, I decided on NewsGator, because it would result in one less client app to learn. But after trying really hard to like it, I came back to FeedDemon. Here’s why:

FeedDemon does a great job of streamlining the process of reading blogs – I can get in, read the things I’m interested in, and get out. For old timers, FeedDemon is to RSS feeds as trn was to Usenet news: fast, slick, and with enough power features to keep you happy while you teeter on the edge of information overload. By comparison, I believe that NewsGator will always be at a disadvantage because Outlook is fundamentally designed for one thing: reading email. Dare Obasanjo does a far better job of explaining this than I could. Here’s his summary:

The major problem is that the Outlook mail reading paradigm has a fundamental assumption which turns out to be flawed. It assumes you want to read every item you get in your inbox.
Omar Shahine switched away from NewsGator for similar reasons, and ended up using FeedDemon.
NewsGator should win big from its use of Outlook as a platform, but seems to use Outlook features as a crutch instead of a stepping-stone to better things. For example, I want subjects highlighted instead of authors, I want to filter out read items, and I don't want an icon in every damn message saying "hey, I'm a message!" In NewsGator this means creating an Outlook view, applying it to every one of my feeds, and then trying to ignore how it all still looks like email. FeedDemon started with nothing, added “newspaper styles” (which use CSS to format feeds any way you want), and now they’re so successful that Dare put support for them into RSS Bandit. This is an example of where a rich client like FeedDemon really shines – with no preconceived notions of how things “should” be, it evolves a much more powerful set of features in response to user demand.
Tabs tabs tabs! With FeedDemon I can skim a feed, opening up interesting links in tabs in the background, and then return to read those tabs in depth after I’ve finished skimming. Far faster (and less of a cognitive break) than skim-till-interesting-link, wait-for-it-to-load, read-in-depth, repeat. Nick’s latest version of the “Expando” newspaper style even puts single-click links next to article headings, ready to open in background tabs.

So why are they joining forces? So that NewsGator gets a downloadable desktop aggregator, and FeedDemon gets NewsGator Online sychronization support, according to the Lockergnome interview. But I’m wondering if the bigger picture isn’t, as Marc Orchant points out, a fear of Yahoo and Microsoft moving into the space. I’m not quite as down on the whole deal as James Avery is – after all, I can always jump ship to RSS Bandit, which will still synchronize with something – but I’m definitely in the anti-Outlook camp. Or, as Steve Makofsky puts it, “RSS is NOT email”.

MSN Desktop Search is out of beta - go get it!

jonathanh — Mon, 16 May 2005 08:55:00 GMT

The MSN Search team have just announced that their desktop search tool is out of beta. You can read more about it in this CNET article (via Scoble), or go straight to the download page like I did.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve become reliant on desktop search – it’s hard to imagine that we used to spend time opening folders, looking for things, closing that folder, opening another one, nope not there, let’s try somewhere else… . Through the past few months of dogfooding, the bits have just gotten better and better, and I know that the MSN Search folks have even more cool stuff to come. In fact, dogfooding actually caused problems when I was helping out on the wiki or the newsgroup, because I had to think back to what the old release bits looked like, many months ago! Now we can all catch up to this shiny new version.

So if you had problems with the previous betas, please give this release version a try. We had lots of Microsofties giving lots of feedback throughout the dogfood process, and the MSN Search team did a great job of fixing bugs and adding features.

Oh, and it’s now called “MSN Search Toolbar 2.0 with Windows Desktop Search”. Hmmm… you know I love you guys, but could you do something about the name? :)

Maxthon joins the RSS sidebar party

jonathanh — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 21:36:00 GMT

Right now Maxthon is my tabbed browser of choice – it’s slick, rock-solid, and uses the IE6 rendering engine for maximum compatibility. Most importantly, it’s being updated at a feverish pace that would put a pack of crazed weasels to shame.

This morning its auto-update feature offered me v1.2.00, which adds an RSS sidebar to the mix. How could I say no? One minute of OPML importing later, I had the sidebar up and running. It’s got most of the features you’d expect: auto-discovery of RSS feeds on web pages, tooltip previews of blog posts, and nice integration with the web browsing experience. No CSS-based “newspaper” view of your feeds, though, and very light on the configuration options.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re just getting into weblogs, or you don’t want to run a separate app (if you’re a power user, I can heartily recommend FeedDemon)

Skype install problems? Try the updated installer

jonathanh — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 17:11:00 GMT

Like Jeff Sandquist, I couldn’t get Skype v1.1 to install when it was first released two weeks ago – the installer would happily kick off two processes that would then just sit there, doing nothing. Omar Shahine came up with a workaround of booting into safe mode before installing, but by this point I’d had enough and said I was “hoping that Skype fixes the problem and brings out a new installer”.

Cue Skype v1.1.073, dated 18th January 2005, which installs just fine on my tablet running XP SP2. Well, the two processes still hang around doing their strong-silent-type shtick, but only after they’ve put the right bits in the right places. So if you were one of the many Skype users having problems, give it another try.

How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster

jonathanh — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 02:58:00 GMT

Like most other techies, whenever I install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader I also uninstall most of the pointless plugins, to speed up its dog-slow startup process. If you want to learn more about speeding up Adobe Reader 6.0, just ask Tim or Chris or Greg or Omar or Kevin (“site:blogs.msdn.com adobe reader” is a wonderful search term!).

Now that the even-shinier Adobe Reader 7.0 is out (via Mike Gunderloy’s excellent Daily Grind), I thought I’d document my steps for optimizing this new version. So here’s what I just did on two of my machines:

In Edit-Preferences, do the following:
- General tab: turn off “Automatically save document changes”
- Internet tab: turn off all three checkboxes
- Page Display tab: turn on “CoolType”
- Search tab: turn off “Enable fast find”
- Startup tab: turn off “Show messages and automatically update”
In View-Toolbars, turn off “Rotate view” and “Search the internet”. Under “Show button labels”, turn them all on so you can figure out what the heck those icons means.
Fire up Windows Explorer and do the following:
- Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\
- Right-click to create a new subdirectory, and call it plugins_uninstalled
- Move all the .api files from the plug_ins subdirectory to your new plugins_uninstalled subdirectory, except for AcroForm.api (for form-filling) and EScript.api (dependency of AcroForm.api).
Finally, go to Start-Run-All Programs-Startup, and right-click and delete the “Adobe Reader Speed Launch” link that Adobe silently added to your startup process.

What, you wanted to actually know what all those plug-ins did so that you can make up your own mind? Move them back again, launch Acrobat Reader, and go to Help-About Adobe Plugins to learn what each plug-in does and what its dependencies are. Oh, and if you sped up Adobe 6.0 by removing some plugins, the update process will have left some subdirectories under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\, so if you’re tidy-minded you can delete those too.

Of course, if all this seems like too much hard work, you can just wait – I’m sure the good folks over at AcroPDF.com will update their “PDF SpeedUp” freeware utility to work with v7.0 before too long (Update: Yep, they have - you can get it here)

Update: a couple of readers have suggested that most users will also want search functionality, in which case you can keep Search.api and Search5.api in your plug_ins directory.

New MSN Search wiki on Channel 9

jonathanh — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 21:54:00 GMT

Check out the new wiki pages that the MSN Search team have created on Channel 9! This is a one-stop community information resource for everything and anything to do with MSN Search – the web search engine, the desktop search tool, bug reports, feature requests, random questions, cool hacks, you name it. Anyone can browse, but you'll need to log in to Channel 9 to contribute. And please do contribute: the search team will be using it as a source of customer feedback to guide the development of future versions.

(Yes, this was another of my crazy shower ideas, mainly because I was getting tired of keeping track of cool desktop search hacks from different blogs! Big thanks to the Channel 9 team for giving the green light, and to Brady Forrest of the MSN Search team for taking my initial outline and turning it into a real site)

Do you prefer single-click or double-click behavior for system tray icons?

jonathanh — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 04:45:00 GMT

Many Windows client applications can iconify themselves to the system tray instead of taking up an entry on your taskbar. I love this feature for apps that I keep around all day, because it means that I always know where to find them — they're in the system tray, stupid! The problem is that there is no consensus on how many mouse clicks it should take to de-iconify such an app from the system tray: the "Microsoft standard" seems to be double-click, while the other applications that I use are now all single-click (Nick Bradbury's excellent FeedDemon was the last to move to single-click). So here's my current situation:

Application	Purpose	To deiconify
Outlook 2003	Mail client	Double-click
MSN Messenger v7.0 beta	IM client	Double-click
Maxthon v1.1	Web browser	Single-click
WinAmp v5	MP3 player	Single-click
FeedDemon 1.5b3	Blog browser	Single-click

The inevitable result of all this confusion is that I find myself single-clicking the Outlook icon, and then staring stupidly at it for a couple of seconds expecting my mail to appear, or alternatively double-clicking the Maxthon icon, and staring stupidly at it for a couple of seconds as it appears and then iconifies itself again. So, a couple of questions for different audiences:

For UI geeks — is there a "standard" written down anywhere for this stuff? Maybe even some nice thick usability studies that I can whack PMs round the head with?
For hackers — is there some fabulous little wrapper or registry hack that makes Outlook recognize single-clicks in the system tray (or alternatively, makes everything else recognize double-clicks)?

*Of course, Raymond Chen points out that we're not meant to call it the system tray, but when Google gets almost three orders of magnitude more hits for “system tray” than for “taskbar notification area” I think the battle is lost.

Why is MSN Desktop Search so slow at indexing my disk? And other tips...

jonathanh — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 06:57:00 GMT

A quick follow-up to four points, since "Dogfooding MSN Desktop Search" seems to be getting a lot of attention.

First, Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research is disappointed with the initial indexing speed of desktop search, because it took 2.5 hours to index 7GB of data and 800MB of email on his laptop. I’m not sure if that’s considered fast, slow, or in-between, but I do know one way to speed it up — defragment your hard disk first! This applies to all the desktop search utilities out there: MSN, Google, Yahoo, X1, Copernicus, the lot. Their indexers have to crack open every file to look inside it. If that file is in nice consecutive blocks on your disk, it’ll be slurped up in a flash, but if the blocks are scattered hither and yon, your disk head isn’t going to thank you.

Second, the indexer is very cautious, and will immediately back off if it thinks either your or another application is using the machine. So the fastest way to build an index is:

Defragment your hard disk
Start up just Outlook or Outlook Express (so that it can index your mailbox)
Install MSN Desktop Search
Leave it alone!
If you can’t leave it alone, right-click on the magnifying-glass icon in your system tray and select “Index Now”

Third, the two videos of the MSN Desktop Search team on Channel 9 are long, but if you want to get any idea of the history or future direction of the tool, they’re well worth checking out. The Silicon Valley team show off all the capabilities of the desktop bar, while the Redmond team talk about the big picture and shipping product. Scary tidbit: some of the core code is apparently left over from Cairo, way back in 1991!

Finally, I’d previously suggested leaving feedback on the msnsearch blog, but there’s an even easier way from within desktop search itself — right-clicking on the MSN butterfly button and selecting Help->Send Feedback will take you to the MSN Toolbar feedback page. Of course, then you don’t get to read the cool blog comments, like the team fixing customer problems, or readers reverse-engineering the registry hacks shown on the video!

Oh, and Scoble, do we have a record yet for the greatest number of items indexed? I just saw an email from one internal user who’s got 1.2 million…

Dogfooding MSN Desktop Search - tips and tricks

jonathanh — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 23:28:00 GMT

The new MSN Desktop Search tool represents the combined efforts of several different search teams within Microsoft, some of which have shown their tools externally (e.g. MSR’s Stuff I’ve Seen), and all of which have had their own internal beta programs. I’ve played with a couple of them over the past year, but to be honest they suffered from a lack of good UI, and search is such a short-lived task that a bad interface can mean you’ll never bother using it. Thankfully, not only did all the different search teams sit down together for long enough to ship something, but they found some UI designers too

So, here are some thoughts after dogfooding MSN Desktop Search for the past couple of months:

My favorite “power-user” feature so far is prefixing words with = to turn them into commands, which are then stored in history for one-click recall. This has completely replaced Start->Run for me.
By default it’ll put search-boxes everywhere - in your taskbar, in Outlook, and in Internet Explorer. Choice is good, but since I’m a bear of very little brain I just stick to the taskbar version. Whatever I’m working on, I know that I’ll always have the taskbar visible, and Ctrl-Alt-M will put my cursor into the search box ready to start typing. Of course, I very rarely even see the Internet Explorer version, since I almost exclusively use Maxthon (aka MyIE2), for its tabbed browsing capabilities…
If you’ve got a loud disk or a variable-speed fan, you’ll have to reset your expectations of judging what your machine is doing by the sound it’s making. With my laptop, I’ve set things up so that if I’m not actively crunching something, both the fan and the disk are idle. But MSN Desktop Search considers (rightly!) that your idle time is the perfect time to make sure that your disk is indexed — which can lead to the unnerving experience of the disk suddenly spinning up 15 seconds after you stop using the machine. If this freaks you out too much, Snooze Indexing is your friend.
MSN have put a lot of thought into the security and privacy aspects of desktop search. I know that there are user scenarios that they just cut completely for the beta, because these same scenarios could conceivably be used in certain corner cases to leak information that might potentially be private. It’s great to see us being really pro-active about this stuff.
It’s a beta, so there are bugs! I found one that I think is still in the public beta, but will be fixed in a future release (if you want to repro it: the wordwheel window won’t always appear if you have multiple vertical desktops and a vertical taskbar).
The good news about bugs is that the desktop search team have been incredibly responsive to internal feedback— they’ll be blogging on the msnsearch weblog, so head over there (or just post a trackback) if you’ve got external feedback! You can also watch videos of the Redmond team and the Silicon Valley team over on Channel 9, both showing off demos of desktop search.
Did you notice how Scoble “subtly” set up the blogosphere for this release over the past few days? There was the hints of things to come this week, the no-comment reporting of leaks, the reviewer’s guide, and even pointers to search blogs to watch (of which SearchEngineWatch seems to be first with feedback). That’s our Robert, about as subtle as a 2x4 upside the head

Of course, now that the damn thing’s gone public I feel compelled to master all of its other power-user features as well, just to “keep up”. Sigh, the life of a dogfooder…

Sysinternals blog - required reading for every Windows administrator

jonathanh — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 03:11:00 GMT

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, the guys behind Sysinternals, now have an RSS feed. If you don't know what Sysinternals is, stop reading right now and go to http://www.sysinternals.com. They make administration tools that are so good we reference them in Microsoft knowledgebase articles - just ask Sam Gentile or Craig Andera, or see my earlier posts on autoruns and procexp. And the nice thing about the RSS feed is that it includes news about point releases of their tools, which can otherwise slip by unnoticed. Highly recommended.