Thursday 17 September 2009, 11:36 AM
What causes compatibility problems for Windows 7
Hi... Getting my "writing style" up to the right level will take a little while but I really hope that the topic of application compatibility will be well represented here.
As you could guess, the real focus for this blog will be application compatibility issues on Microsoft desktop and server products
Working with the fine technical people Microsoft it appears that most application compatibility issues for Windows 7 will stem from the following issues;
1. Driver incompatibility (Display, Printer peripheral devices)
2. Legacy 16-bit Memory Issues
3. Networking Restrictions
4. Security Restrictions
If you are using specific drivers for DVD writers or relying on TWAIN drivers for your Scanner, you will probably have to get an upgrade from the software vendor. And if you are still dependant on the really old 16-bit applications (poor you) there is a solution for you - it's called SoftGrid but more on that topic later. Network restrictions will cause some applications to behave in unexpected ways, but my belief is that this will be quite a rare occurrence.
Security restrictions under Vista are very similar to those imposed on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and will be the root cause of most failed installations and expected behaviors. Which, is great news for us application packagers, deployment engineers, and sysadmins. It means that for the most part, Microsoft has provided (or allowed) work-arounds through Shims (through the Application Compatibility toolkit), registry configurations or through the create of manifest security files.
And, this follows the approach of ChangeBASE on application Compatibility. My feeling is that if we can report on an application compatibility issue; we should be able to fix it - meaning to get that application successfully deployed to the target platform (server or desktop) and get the desired functionality user standard user privileges. Quite a challenge, eh?
Wednesday 16 September 2009, 7:54 AM
Getting Started: Common Application Compatibility Issues
One of the most common (and yet rarely publicized) issues to affect almost all applications that are over two years old will be Help file compatibility. Microsoft has deprecated all Microsoft Help file formats and components. Meaning, help files are not supported under Windows Vista and definitely will not be supported under Longhorn Server (due H2 2007).
Help files (HLP extension) are the files that include the application specific documentation on usage, troubleshooting and further support options. While not absolutely essential to application functionality they are a key element to the user experience.
In addition to no longer allowing users to read/use Help (HLP) files; the following Help file components are no longer supported under Windows Vista;
Windows.hlp
Winhlp32.hlp
Winhlp32.cnt
Winhelp.cnt
Nocntnt.cnt
Reading the Microsoft knowledge base article (KB917607), Microsoft has the following to say about Help files on Windows Vista,
"The .HLP files that depend on these files may return an error when users try to open them. These files will be available in the future from the Microsoft download center to address compatibility issues. "
When Microsoft "deprecates a component" it effectively does four things;
1) Disable support for that component on the target OS - meaning it will no longer work
2) No longer provide technical support for that component - meaning Microsoft will not help you on this issue
3) Actively encourage you to try other options - i.e. direct to you to a later component
4) Possibly remove support for component dependencies
Following this methodology, Microsoft no longer will "load" a help file and display it's contents. Instead you will receive a message indicating that this functionality is now longer supported and will direct you to a Microsoft knowledge base article detailing the security issues surrounding Help files.
This will cause a number of "Known Issues" when using Help files including;
· Help Macros are disabled
· You cannot access .HLP files that are stored on intranet sites
· Non-interactive user access has been blocked
· Drag-and-drop functionality has been disabled
I am really surprised at this approach. The WinHelp.EXE engine (version 5.0x) under Windows XP SP2 may be a significant security issue so I understand that an upgrade or update is necessary. However, why not include WinHelp.exe (version 6.0) in Windows Vista?
Microsoft makes an update available (version 6.0 of the WinHelp engine) on their knowledge base website (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6EBCFAD9-D3F5-4365-8070-334CD175D4BB&displaylang=en).
So, you can download it and continue using older, "non-compatible" HLP files as long as you like. Hmmm...
Actually, there are two further points. If you need to support any of the following features you also need to add the following registry entries on your target machine.
Allow Help Macros
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WinHelp
Value: AllowProgrammaticMacros
Type: DWORD
Unblock .HLP files that are stored on the intranet
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WinHelp
Value: AllowIntranetAccess
Type: DWORD
Tuesday 15 September 2009, 6:29 AM
Windows 7 Needs Liposuction
I've tested Win7 in Beta and what turned out to be the RTM. On a dual core with 4 GB of RAM its a fine OS. Faster and much more reliable than Visaster. It did a number of things I was impressed with but there is no compelling reason to run it. That's at work or at home.
I try to install as little software as possible on a computer's OS to keep the running speed to a maximum. In Windows there are limited things that can be done like killing the taskbar tray, shutting off unneeded processes, etc. Even killing the Explorer shell can give you a little speed boost of about 1% and about 15 to 20 Megabytes of more RAM space in XP Pro. Most applications using Win32 API calls will still draw windows and do the Windows Form library functions without having to run a full Explorer desktop.
I find that Ubuntu 9.04 runs the exact same applications as XP I need at work and at home for 85% of my work. Word Processor/office suite, a web browser and email client application. For those situations where I HAVE to run Windows, I'll run XP Pro in a VM hosted on Ubuntu. Its about as fast as Win7 without a VM on the same hardware.
The complaint I have with Windows OS that Linux addresses to a certain extent, is that I can strip out or NOT install big chunks of software that is more rightly defined as application layer software instead of the bloat the has driven Windows into the ground performance-wise.
Considering the speed increases in the hardware, the operating systems ought to be running 5 to 10 times faster than they do. Mr Kingsley-Hughes timings on the install/upgrades confirms to me that the Win7 operating system is too damn fat. (check out his column over at ZDNET.COM yesterday)
Years ago I did tests comparing an application suite software our company wrote running on Windows 2000 Workstation/Pro SP4 and XP Pro SP1 on the the exact same hardware, same RAM, hard drive etc. Win XP Pro ran the software 20% faster than Win2K.
A similar test I've done running our current application on Windows XP Pro and Win7 Beta on the exact same hardware revealed that XP Pro was faster by 5%! What happened?
I went through looking at what processes were running on the 2 systems. I tried to optimize the running processes in Win 7 to approximate what was running in XP Pro. I did speed up Win7 a bit but not enough to be statistically significant. Win7 was still slower than XP Pro. Both tests were done again on the exact same machine with 4GB of RAM, both Windows OS versions were 32 bit and the video and network drivers were Microsoft's device drivers. XP Pro was running SP3 and Win7 was running the Beta.
If you open the Services windows in both XP Pro and Win7 and compare, there are approximately 3 times as many services running in Win7. A lot of them do arcane tasks that have little service for data display or word processor-like applications. The trick is to figure out what can be shut-off.
Its obvious that I will have to repeat the test again once Win7 comes out. I was very surprised by the results. I expected Win7 to blow past XP Pro.
Monday 14 September 2009, 9:01 PM
skye jewellery
lathe diy metal drawing home
signed art glass owl
la roca silver
book character named opal
isle of skye jewellery
joystick machine pendants
high temp hoist pendant station
sapphire diamond princess cut earrings
Saturday 1 August 2009, 12:59 PM
Microsoft drops "E" version of Windows
On Friday, Microsoft backtracked on its plan to ship a browser-free version of its upcoming operating system, Windows 7, in Europe.
Deputy general counsel Dave Heiner revealed the change in plan, saying "we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world."
Back in June, Microsoft that it would launch the new OS in Europe without Internet Explorer, in a bid to appease EU antitrust regulators, who were looking at the bundling of the browser in Windows.
But European commissioners were lukewarm on that idea, saying they thought "consumers should be offered a choice of browser, not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all."
Last week, Microsoft pitched a new idea to the EU, saying it would offer a "ballot screen" in Windows 7 that would let people choose any browser they like. In dropping Windows 7 E, Microsoft is betting that the regulators will go for this plan.
"One reason we decided not to ship Windows 7 E is concerns raised by computer manufacturers and partners. Several worried about the complexity of changing the version of Windows that we ship in Europe if our ballot screen proposal is ultimately accepted by the Commission and we stop selling Windows 7 E," Heiner wrote.
Saturday 18 July 2009, 10:31 PM
Ubuntu 9.04 Snaps Desktop Visaster
I finally had my fill of Visaster on my office desktop. The final kick in the teeth delivered by Visaster was a document that flat out disappeared while I was attempting to move it to a remote shared drive. Explorer did its typical "white-out" and then locked up the desktop and the system had to be power cycled to get responses from the keyboard or mouse.
I got permission from the IT department to go back to doing my own IT admin work. I went into Visaster's Disk Manager and shrunk the third partition (D:) on the 640 GB drive. That gave me about 300 GB of open drive space. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and set all 3 of the Linux partitions manually. 80GB for /, an 8GB swap space (overkill) and the rest for /Home. I set them up for ext3. So now I have a dual boot system. Visaster and Ubuntu, with Ubuntu as default. As I manage to copy project and doc files from the NTFS D drive to /Home, I'll shrink it further.
A definite upgrade for Visaster is Ubuntu 9.04 on the same hardware. Eventually I'll be Visaster-free at work like I am at home.
Open Office 3.0 works fine for what I have to do. FireFox of any version is far superior to Internet Exploder 6, 7 and especially version 8 for access to the crappy commercial wiki I've described before.
While working on the Visaster I discovered something interesting and unexpected. This being a DELL system, there are 3 partitions setup for Visaster, a hidden DELL repair partition of 60 odd megabytes, the C and D NTFS drives. All three of them are primary partitions. The three Linux partitions are primary partitions as well. MS DOS, 16 & 32 bit Windows all have a limit of 4 primary partitions on a drive. But this one has a total of 6 primary partitions and Grub seems to run all of it just fine. Nice.
This particular system has an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz with 4GB of DDR2 RAM so its no slouch. Ubuntu 9.04 on it has done some pretty things I hadn't seen before. Application windows open and close with fades in and out with the panel moving towards and away from the user. Transparency of the task bar and application bars are independently controllable.
Another desktop feature I have not seen before is related to the mouse. If you push the mouse hard over to the right, it shoves the desktop to the left so suddenly it appears as if your desktop is twice as wide as the display (1600 x 1200 turns into 3200 x 1200). The desktop space actually is twice as wide, the setting for the video controller becomes a sliding "window" on the desktop. I suppose its just a variation of the virtual desktop feature but it was totally unexpected and a cool effect! You could park an application window off the right hand side of the screen totally out of sight. It also allows for a mid-range setting so that the "display" window is centered on the desktop range.
Ubuntu 9.04 definitely picks up some significant “snap” with a high power processor. I was impressed, as far as I'm concerned it beats Visaster SP2.
Friday 17 July 2009, 12:10 PM
ASUS N10J - Netbook or Notebook?
By sheer chance and very good fortune, I now own an ASUS N10J netbook. Or notebook. Somewhere in between the two, I suppose, in terms of price, features and performance. This is likely to turn out to be very long, so I am going to start off with the summary, for those who just want the high points, and then I'll fill in a lot more details.
First, price. The typical retail price in Switzerland is 999.- francs (about 570 pounds or 660 euros). That's roughly twice the typical price of other netbooks here, which tend to be in the 450-699 franc range. So it is definitely at the top of the netbook price range, and in fact is well above the lower priced notebooks available here now. I stumbled across one offered at half price, the last demo model in a local store - if that hadn't happened, I would never have considered one, simply because of the price.
Second, features. The single biggest "claim to fame" of the N10J is that it has an nVidia GeForce 9300 graphic controller. But besides that, it is a very well configured system - 2 GB of memory, 250 GB SATA disk, 10.2" display (eat your hearts out, all you 10.1" owners), but oddly only 1024x600 resolution (my HP 2133 has 1280x768 in 8.9"), good sized keyboard, and to top it off, it even has an external USB DVD/CD drive included! The overall size is slightly larger than the roughly equivalent HP Mini 2140, and it is slightly heavier. Still, though, the size and weight keep the N10J squarely in the netbook category.
Third, performance. Overall very good, and very pleasant to use, but it is an odd combination of a relatively slow CPU (Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz), and a relatively fast graphic card (nVidei GeForce 9300). So it takes a comparatively long time to boot, but once it is running the graphic performance is amazing. Various reviews I have seen suggest that it should be of interest to gamers, but I got it because I expect it to be very interesting to a number of my friends who are golf professionals, and need high performance video for their swing analysis software, but want a small/light system that they can carry along easily.
So, the N10J tends toward notebooks in price, netbooks in size, weight and features, and somewhere in the middle in performance. My suggestion is that if you happen to find one at a very good price, as I did, then jump on it immediately. Otherwise, at full price, you had better make sure that you really need what the N10J has to offer, because if what you want/need is a more typical netbook, you can get plenty of good ones at a much lower price.
Ok, so much for the executive summary. Now for the gory details...
I need to clarify at this point that the N10J actually has a slide switch on the side which enables and disables the nVidia display adapter. When it is disabled, the integrated Intel 945GME controller takes over. The idea seems to be that you will enable it when you need high performance graphics, and disable it when you want to optimize battery life. It's an interesting idea.
The N10J came preloaded with Windows Vistaster Business, along with Windows XP Professional recovery DVD. It should be no surprise to anyone that it runs like a terminally ill DOG under Vista - anyone who uses Vistaster on an Atom CPU must be a masochist. Boot time, from power on until the Vista desktop is as stable as it is ever likely to get, is so long that I gave up timing it because it was just silly. It is at least several minutes, maybe as much as 5 or more. If I decide to use Windows on this system, I will certainly "downgrade" to XP, but for the time being I'm leaving Vistaster on it as a reference, because I have long since wiped it from the other computers which had it. Besides, it's good for a laugh when things get boring - just turn it on and watch the N10 try to struggle to its feet.
I have installed a variety of Linux distributions on it (details below), and in the process of doing that I found the BIOS setup, specifically for boot device selection, to be a bit more tedious than most. It seems to think that some of my USB sticks are "removable devices", while others are "hard drives", and the CD/DVD drive is a category of its own, even though it connects via USB as well. It took a few trips into BIOS setup to get all the devices defined and in the right order so that it would boot what I wanted, when I wanted, but eventually it was ok.
The specific distributions I have installed so far are:
- Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04: I did this one first, because I consider it to be the obvious choice. It installed without a hitch, but I ran into a problem which I had previously seen on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, with its VIA Chrome 9 display adapter. The 3D graphic support for the nVidia card is not good, or not present, and the UNR desktop makes extensive use of that. So trying to run UNR with the nVidia enabled is ridiculously slow - unusably slow, for sure. But disable the nVidia, and the N10J becomes a very nice UNR system. The display is clear, bright and easy to read. The 1024x600 resolution makes for a lot of scrolling, but that is typical of most netbook. Both wired and wireless networking worked just fine, as did the SD card slot. The one other thing that was VERY odd was that the built-in camera shows an upside-down picture in cheese. More on this later.
- Moblin 2.0 Beta: I installed this second, so that I could compare it to UNR on this system, and to the Moblin installed on my Dual Atom nettop, which is having serious boot/hang problems. It installed very quickly - one thing you have to say about Moblin, installation is amazingly fast - and it seems to work very well. No sign of the problems I have on the nettop. Although it does not have the performance problems that UNR has when the nVidia adapter is enabled, it does have some display problems - the right side of the menu bar is badly distorted. Turn off the nVidia and reboot, and the display is just fine.
- Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope): The standard distribution installs just as easily as the Netbook Remix, and actually works somewhat better because it doesn't have the display performance problems when the nVidia is installed, nor does it have the display corruption that Moblin has.
- Fedora 11 (Leonidas): Installed quickly and easily, and works just fine. Doesn't have any problem with the nVidia display adapter.
- openSuSE 11.1: Installed quickly and easily, and works just fine.
- Mandriva One 2009.1 (Spring): Installs quickly and easily, and works just fine.
So, the N10 now multi-boots Vistaster and all of the above Linux distributions.
Now, a word about the camera. I have read about this in the past, but I had never seen it myself. For some reason, some manufacturers install built-in webcams upside down. I don't know why, but I assume it has something to do with mounting space, clearance, brackets or some such. The result, of course, is that the image is upside down in applications such as cheese and Skype. There are a variety of fixes and work-around available and in the works, but I do not have sufficient need for the camera in this system right now to spend the time investigating them.
Also, a word about the nVidia GeForce graphic adapter. Because the standard Linux (X.org) drivers do not have good 3D support, if you need that kind of performance you would have to run Windows. That is not a problem in my case, because the golf pros whom I believe will be interested in this system use a video swing analysis program which only works with Windows. So I would just provide them with a dual-boot XP/UNR system.
So, finally, the non-executive summary: To steal a term from the auto companies new SUVs, this is a very nice "crossover" system. It is a netbook in size and weight, and a notebook in configuration and performance. If you can afford it at list price, or you can find one at a good discount as I did, then I strongly recommend it. If you intend to use Windows on it, you should plan to wipe the preloaded Vistaster and load from the XP Professional Recovery DVD. I like that term, because I consider that procedure to be "recovering" a usable netbook from a broken, unusable piece of junk. If you intend to use Linux, pretty much any of the popular distributions will work just fine on it. If you need both, or want to try both, dual-booting Windows and whatever Linux(-es) is easy.
jw 17/7/2009
Wednesday 15 July 2009, 12:26 PM
How to upload movies to ipod?
How to watch moives on ur ipod? At first,it puzzled me a lot.But after I tried the actual operation manually,I can say" Lol,it is so easy".
Especially I wanna thank my boyfriend,for providing me a new software,that is Pavube Video to ipod converters. It enables me to watch moives in a short time and show me HD effects. My BF tells me that ipod only supports video formats like .mp4, H.264, MP3, M4A, AAC & WAV. So he chose Pavtube Video to ipod converter as it can convert video to several formats that ipod support. It is magic and powerful 4 me.
Ok,if u have the same experience as me,u can click my homepage: http://www.pavtube.com/video_to_ipod/
Friday 3 July 2009, 3:20 PM
PreSales Cannibalize Retailers' Opening Day Sales!
(My attempt at writing a tabloid headline.)
A Very Interesting Microsoft event just occurred. Microsoft is offering at a deep discount and through direct retail sale their FUTURE mainstay product. Since I deliberately avoid paying attention to Microsoft outside of office hours, I don't remember if they've ever done that before. Not quite a going-out-of-business sale but certainly one that ought to p.o. a number of the big computer manufacturers.
They aren't doing it in a small way either. Microsoft.com has the announcement taking up about a third of the top of the page. The expiration date of the deal though is only found in the small print on another page detailing pre-sales.
Win 7 Home at $49 US is a loss-leader for sure. It will cover the price to the OEMs, shipping & handling and their margin whatever it is. That is going to eat into Visaster sales between now and past Opening Day sales for DELL, HP etc. My guess is that Microsoft has already covered their backside with the major OEMs by offering to pay them part of the take of the pre-sales. I would suggest they do it as an apportioned measure of the opening week's worth of sales. (Since I'm offering free business advice! Ha!) By the end of the first week everybody will have forgotten the pre-sales.
Offering to hand out copies of Win7 to purchasers of new Visaster equipped systems is also part of this deal.
Why buy a new computer if you can put the deeply discounted Win 7 DVD on your old Visaster hardware? This deal though only appeals to power users, geeks and tech-savvy early adopters. (Was that redundant?)
Maybe they think they can generate some pre-opening chatter especially from the ones who down-loaded the RC.
I think Microsoft is running a little scared. They want to jazz the numbers with the pre-sales counts added to the numbers for the opening day stats like a movie opening up on a weekend. In fact Oct 22 is a Thursday, the traditional Movie Opening day in the US.
In some ways I feel like Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to erase the bad ju-ju they got with Visaster. Maybe this time they won't need to run those idiotic "Mojave" and Seinfeld ads! If we get lucky, maybe the ads will be even worse!
Update:
Ran across an ad on Office Depot's website selling Win 7. Looks like they've pulled out all the stops and the marketing is going full blast. Amazon, Office Max and practically everybody is selling Win 7.
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 2:13 AM
Windows 7 on a Read-only Flash Drive?
Considering that the price of a 4GB USB flash drive has been as low as 5 dollars on close-out specials, financially it wouldn't make sense UNLESS Microsoft decides to go into the Flash RAM business. The full Win 7 Ultra install DVD is 3.9GB large. Even stripped down it will be better than 2 GB so 4GB sounds like the right size for the Win7 USB Flash drive.
The price per Win 7 Starter license I was seeing for netbooks was around $3 each license in volume. That would mean the price of USB flash drives need to be much lower than that to make it possible to do economically.
Then think about what it would take to make a mass assembly line operation to clone the image onto USB flash drives thousands or millions of times! I suppose you could use something like Ghost to make 128 copies at a time through a massively wicked USB "router". The time it would take to plug in and out all the USB flash drives would be tremendous!
Actually its been done sort of by SanDisk. They have a number of U3-based USB flash drives that have a "read-only" partition that plays like a CDR. When its up and running, the USB flash drive looks like 2 drives, a CDR and a HDD. It has some software on it that makes Windows XP Pro work better when it comes time to unmount the USB flash drive. Actually fairly nice.
I don't know how they are doing it. There is likely some sort of JTAG software interface hidden in "plain sight" connected to the USB signal pins. With special commands to special hidden registers, part of the drive is marked as read only.
If you delete the partitions you kill the U3 interface. If you are careful, the read-write partition can be formatted in NTFS and it coexists nicely with the U3 CD-ROM type partition.
I could see SanDisk turning out millions of Win7 USB flash disks on the U3 read-only "CDR"-like partition for Microsoft. But to do it for a price the netbook owners will be willing to pay, hmmm, I don't know about that.
I think most likely Microsoft is going to make the netbook owners that want it on their old netbooks eat the price. It probably won't be available in anything other than download ISO form. Buy your own USB drive. Buy the download on Shop Microsoft. Copy the image over to the Flash. Use an updated tool based on ufdprep.exe to prep the flash drive. It will have a file converter program that will open enough of the image to mount a bootstrap loader on the netbook and then mount and install the ISO onto the system hard drive or internal flash drive or SSD. (Sounds like a job for a really small install of Linux!)
Don't expect this function above to be available until late in the year until after the retailers get an idea how netbook sales with Win 7 pre-installed are doing. Microsoft will think of the USB based install to be a loss-leader, a way to get users hooked on Windows 7 so they'll buy it pre-installed on their next computer or as shrink-wrap for their old desktops or regular laptops. That's what the Win7 RC is by the way, a form of digital "crack" to get the neighborhood geeks all hooked. Call it Windows 7 Express!
Its prettier than XP Pro but not faster. It is definitely better than Vista on substantial hardware, like a dual core CPU with 4 GB of RAM.
I have no clue how well it will work stripped down enough to work on a netbook. I've already had my taste of "Windows-7-crack". Would I buy it?
No.
Previous
