Nicke Andersson

Curiosity killed the cat’s computer

Ok, so installing the pre beta-version of Windows 7 that we got at PDC on my work computer maybe wasn’t the brightest idea ever. There were simply too many things that were half-baked, and prevented me from using the machine. From the past tense used in this paragraph you’ve probably by now deduced that I went back to Vista.

At least the following things happened during my brush with pre-beta Windows 7:

• Random BSD:s
• Hanging when resuming from standby or hibernation
• Windows Explorer crashing every now and then
• For the first time ever, a crash (ending in a bluescreen) that made it impossible to recover a Powerpoint document I was working on
• Problems installing applications
• Files becoming broken when copied over my home network (or copies failing for no obvious reason)

I’m not 100% sure all of these were just Windows 7-related, but the evidence is compelling.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t like Windows 7. I do, and I can’t wait to get to use it.There were a lot of nice things in there. The improved Windows Explorer, for one (especially the library-feature). The presentation mode selector. The window docking. Better configuration experience (although there’s way too many icons in the Control Panel now that they’ve been relocated there). The non-polluted icon tray. Better network configuration tools. It improves the computing experience in several small ways, just like Vista did over XP.

Anyway, one should never give up, so I’ll be back when they release the first proper beta version of Windows 7. Which should be around Christmas this year.

Microsoft made me lose my virginity

Or rather, it was my computer that lost its virginity. You see, I had a nice, pristine, clean computer, without any open source software on it whatsoever. It was a completely commercial experience. I loved it. And MSDN Subscriber Downloads ruined it.

You see, Microsoft has started to use the Akamai Download Manager for distributing files. I wanted to download SP1 for Vista, but Akamai refuses to play nice on Vista, and can't save files because it seems IE won't let it (at least on Vista). I'm sure this can be fixed somehow, but I didn't figure out how. It's really nice how they use a program that doesn't work well under Vista to distribute SP1 for Vista.

So what I ended up doing in order to get the beastly Akamai to work was to install Firefox, and use it to download SP1. I will never hear the end of this at work.

Intel 3945abg on my Latitude D820 with Vista

Ever since I installed Vista on my laptop (a Dell Latitude D820) I've had a range of problems with my wireless. Initially, back in December when I installed the RTM version of Vista, I found that it would loose the wireless connection from time to time, and the only resolution seemed to be to reboot the machine. It didn't seem to relate to my wireless router, since I was experiencing the same problems both at work and at home. I tried a bunch of different versions of the driver for the wireless card, including drivers from both Dell, Microsoft and Intel. My problems, with varying drivers, included the following:

• Bad reception (signal strength was much lower than it should have been), which led to dropped connections
• My machine would blue screen from time to time, always complaining about the driver
• The radio (wireless) would shut off, the WiFi light would die, and nothing except a reboot could bring it back

Some of the best results I had with an old driver, but the later drivers (the

The latest driver from Dell, version 10.6.0.29, was among the worst. That one kept dying, at worst it could kick the bucket a handful of times per hour. The latest one from Intel, version 11.1.1.11 was not much better. But at least it was better than the version they released during the winter, because that one was pure blue screen hell.

So, I've been trying to find a resolution to this, and finally I came across the following discussion:

http://thevistaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=9834&st=120

It seems a lot of people have been having the same problem, and without much of a response from Dell.

So what I ended up doing was what what is called the "XP fix", which means installing a driver intended for XP on my Vista.

The way to do this was to download driver package R127811 from Dell. You can search for it on their site, or download it from the following link:

http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R127811&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=169955

On Dell's site the driver claims to be version 10.1.1.4 in the release title, but once installed it says that it is version 10.1.1.7. Oh well...

To install an XP driver I had to do the following:

1. Open the Control Panel
2. Select "System" and then "Advanced system settings"
3. Go to the "Hardware" tab, and click on "Device Manager"
4. Open up "Network adapters", and right-click on "Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection", and select "Update Driver Software..."
5. Select "Browse my computer for driver software"
6. Click on "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"
7. Click on "Have disk..."
8. Browse to the folder where the driver was located, in my case it was "C:\dell\drivers\R127811\Drivers"
9. Select the file "W39n51.inf", and press "Open".
10. And then press "OK", and let the installation begin

If I didn't follow this, and instead tried the normal driver installation method, the installation went through, but at the end it immediately reverted back to the version I had before I tried to install this driver.

Anyway, since I got the driver installed (about a week ago) I haven't had any problems with my wireless.

One interesting point is that a bunch of my colleagues use the same model laptop, with Vista, without any problems. So this may relate to different revisions of the 3945 card or something.

How Microsoft Marketing can save Windows Vista

My, oh my! Things are not looking good for Vista and Office 2007. A few days ago Microsoft announced that Office will be delayed again, and now a lot of people are expecting Vista to be similarity delayed again. It can’t be easy working in Marketing at MS, in charge of pumping up a positive vibe about the new OS. But fear not, Redmondian Marketers, I have a solution for you! And it is so insanely great I will let you have it for free!

Do you remember how, back in 95, Microsoft was using the Rolling Stones song “Start Me Up” to rev up excitement about the product? I for one felt that it was a way for Microsoft to become more Apple-ish in their marketing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’ve probably seen that hilarious “If Microsoft designed the iPod box”-video? That’s what I’m talking about. In ‘95 the open source movement wasn’t strong enough for it to make sense to use “Sympathy for the Devil” as the song, otherwise that would have been a really rockin’ pick!

Anyway, with all these delays I think it’s really up to marketing to save the day. You guys need to come up with a cool concept that can get people focusing not on the schedule-related problems but on some of the new great things in the product. Why not pick security, since you’re already flogging that horse within inches of its life? Vista is all about security, right?

So, if you are overly concerned about security and worried that all those script kiddies are out to get you, what are you then? That’s right, “Paranoid”! Of course you could argue that the lyrics of “Paranoid” are not really suitable for an OS, but please remember that “Start me Up” contains the phrase “You make a grown man cry” which is hardly appropriate. Or on the other hand perhaps it was, since Windows ‘95 sure had that effect on me a few times.

There’s one final and more (obvious) reason for picking “Paranoid” as the marketing song for Vista. Both Black Sabbath and Microsoft have a front man called “Ozzie”.

Come on Microsoft Marketers! Make this happen! Considering the state Ozzy is in I’m sure you can buy the rights to the song for a bottle of Novocaine. Or Viagra.

 

P.S. Ok, ok, so Ozzy’s no longer in Black Sabbath and his name is spelled a bit differently, but it’s close enough don’t you think? And Ozzy is from Birmingham and Ozzie is from Boston, both begin with a B, which most surely must be a sign. Boston is a very European city, and Birmingham is in Europe, which in my mind is as much proof as if this had been found inscribed on a stone tablet in Tutankhamen’s grave. Higher powers are at work here.

P.P.S. If, however, Microsoft would decide to stick with the Stones for a marketing tune for Vista then wouldn’t “Paint it Black” be the obvious choice?

Microsoft delays Office 2007 (again)

It seems Microsoft has decided to delay Office 2007 once again. More info here. Now they are aiming at a release to enterprises (corporate customers) before/at the end of the year and a retail version for early 2007.

This is a disappointment, mainly because we are currently using the Office 2007 beta 2 in both internal projects and in a couple of proof of concepts for customers. We had been hoping on the previously promised October release date as actually being true, and have set our schedules accordingly. But obviously this is one of the risks with using beta stuff for development.

I have to agree on the performance concerns they are listing as reason for this. I have been using Office 2007 throughout June for everyday work, and it can be sluggish. Very sluggish even at times. And I have a fast laptop with lots of memory.

In the article there is speculation on whether this implies that Vista will be delayed again as well. I think it does. The current plan (as far as I remember) is to release Vista to enterprises in November, but I find it slightly unlikely that they would release Vista before Office, especially since they have publicly stated that they wanted to release them together. Then it was a matter of having the Office release wait for Vista, and now it is the other way around. Will be interesting to see what happens.

I'm "running" Windows Vista

Since there is no place like the bleeding edge (ok, Vista is not that bleeding edge anymore) I decided some weeks ago that I would install Vista Beta 2 once it becomes available. I downloaded it and the Office beta right away when they were published, and spent Wednesday evening installing Vista on my Dell Latitude D820. On Thursday I installed it again...

I have one major issue. Really major. No graphics driver for the GPU in my laptop (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120M). Vista incorrectly identifies it as a Geforce 7400, and while that driver does work it provides horrible performance and some crashes. I also tried the the Windows XP drivers from Dell, and while they also "work" I still get a bunch of bluescreens every now and then and lousy performance. And I don't get Aero Glass. Sniff...

The funny thing is that my GPU is on the Nvidia list of Vista supported chips, and my laptop has a sticker on it that says that it is "Windows Vista Capable". I consider that a personal insult to me from Dell. I don't get it, why support about 100 other chips, but not this one? And not its precursor, the 110M either.

What seems to happen is that whenever something that involves multimedia or 3d attempts to run the os bluescreens, blaiming nv4_mini.sys. I emailed Nvidia about this. Their support system promised me an answer within 24 hours. About 2 hours left, so let's see what happens. I'm not holding my breath. Until they get a new driver out I'm stuck with slow graphics and crashes whenever I try to run anything that uses 3d or multimedia.

Everything else about the installation went pretty smoothly. The only thing I had to dig out a driver for myself was the Alps touchpad. For that I used the XP driver, and that worked nicely.

P.S. Office 2007 fuckin' rocks!

[Note: I got this working later on, and I’ve outline the procedure in this post. It probably works on other cards than the 120M as well.]

Vista Beta 1 installation problems

As I wrote a couple of days ago I managed to install Windows Vista Beta 1 on a Virtual PC. However, when I was playing around with it I realized that Avalon, Indigo and WinFX didn’t come preinstalled, and that they had to be installed separately.

They were included on the installation DVD, but that installer didn’t work. Not even after a reboot. Not after two reboots either. When I ran the installer everything seemed to be going fine, it claimed to install all three components in less than five seconds and that everything went great, but at the end of the installation it pointed out that actually, the Indigo installation had failed, and as a result of that it hadn’t even attempted the other ones.

Since I didn’t have any pigeons I could sacrifice to the gods of the non-working installers, I had to try something else. I decided to download the installation package from MSDN and see if that worked any better. And to my surprise it actually did.

Please note that it worked better. That is not the same as working fine, unfortunately. The first time I ran the installer it successfully installed Avalon, but wasn’t able to install Indigo and WinFX. But it left a shortcut to the installer on my desktop, and suggested I try again. Which I did, and that time it managed to get the two remaining components in there.

The reason I am bothering to put this in the blog was that I couldn’t find any references to problems like this on Google, and perhaps if someone else runs into similar problems they might have some interest in seeing what worked for me.

Update 2005–08–05: It has been suggested that the installation might work better if the installation files are copied from the installation DVD to a local folder instead. I have not tried this myself, but it might be worth a try if you are experiencing the problems described above.

 

Installing Windows Vista

Today I finally found the time to install Windows Vista beta 1 on a virtual machine and play around with it. I’m quite excited about the new OS, so this was actually something I’ve been looking forward to for some time.

Since the installation was not entirely straightforward I decided to write down what I did to get it workin, and perhaps it someone else will find it useful.

Installing Windows Vista Beta 1 on a Virtual PC (VPC)

The first hurdle was that VPC couldn’t capture the ISO image of the Beta 1 DVD as a drive (I haven’t been able to mount any DVD ISO images with VPC), so I had to burn it to a DVD first and use the physical DVD drive on my laptop and let VPC boot from that. The other option could have been to use the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel from Microsoft, available at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe. This tool is unsupported, and is not particulary easy to use or anything. There are other similar tools available, but since I haven’t tested any I won’t list them here (according to what I’ve seen on other blogs, at least Daemon Tools should work, and it seems to do a fair bit of other stuff as well ).

The next thing I ran into was that the installation program for Vista could’n format the partition. This was also explained in the readme that came on the DVD. So, by pressing shift+F10 I got a command prompt and was able to use the diskpart-utility to format the partition. After rebooting the VPC and starting the installation over I was able to proceed.

At least on VPC the installation was slow. In addition it didn’t say that much about what it was doing, it only told me that it had all the information it needed from me and that now it was going to continue the installation on its own. I did its own thing for about half an hour, and after that Vista booted. In 4–bit colors…

Since 16 colors clearly wasn’t doing Vista justice I decided to try and install some other graphics drivers or something to get it running in 32 bit colors and a resolution above 800x600. That didn’t really get me anywhere, but then I remembered reading something about installing the VPC extensions (available from within VPC) to improve the resolution. So, I installed them and rebooted the VPC, and that worked. It initially started up in 16 bit colors, and the alpha colors didn’t really work on the desktop icons, but that was easy to fix through the control panel.

So now I have Vista up and running. Only afterwards did I realize that it never asked me for any usernames of passwords or anything. So I guess it gave me an administrator account by default. Will have to look into that.

I will post more once I’ve had a chance to play around a bit more with Vista.