June 2007 Archives

Not long ago I posted about using the Reliability and Performance Monitor tool to figure out where all that disk-bashing was coming from in Vista.  After some feedback from people "in the wild" and some work on my own, I've found the two biggest sources of unexpected disk activity are:

1. The defrag application running in the background, and
2. Volume Shadow Services.

The latter is the one most people are not immediately aware of.  I've noticed that VSS kicks in on a notebook when you bring it up out of hibernation or sleep mode, and it's been off for a long enough period of time that a new shadow copy repository is about due to be created.  When this happens, you see a lot of disk activity that doesn't seem to be related to anything -- and, as I've found, if you start doing regular work with the computer, it doesn't seem to affect performance very much, since VSS runs at a lower I/O priority than most other things.  (The same goes for defrag.)

Here's how I figured it out: the next time I fired up my notebook and saw the disk bashing, I used the R&PM to single out disk activity and sort it by writes, and looked at the File column.  Sure enough, the file in question was one of the shadow-copy repositories (found in the hidden C:\System Volume Information directory).  You could turn off System Restore to prevent this behavior, but to me, that's kind of self-defeating -- especially since System Restore and shadow copies have saved my bacon more than a few times.

As it turns out, the scheduling for how System Restore runs is now controlled in Vista by -- you guessed it -- the Task Scheduler.  A default task is created for creating System Restore points, and I'm going to look into seeing if there's some way to tweak how it's triggered so that it works better with my particular habits.

An oft-raised complaint about Vista is that if you want to do any detailed work in the Program Files directory (such as deleting or moving things around), you get bombarded with UAC prompts.  Here's one way to work around that: create a shortcut that opens an elevated instance of Explorer, which you can then place in your Quick Launch or Start menu as needed.

1. Right-click somewhere (on the Desktop is fine) and select New | Shortcut.
2. In the item location text box, type %SystemRoot%\explorer.exae "c:\program files"
3. Click Next.  Type a descriptive name, like Program Files (Admin).
4. Click Finish.
5. Right-click on the new shortcut and select Properties.
6. In the Shortcut tab, click Advanced.
7. Check the Run As Administrator box and click OK.
8. Click OK to close the main Properties dialog.

That's all there is to it.  Run it, and you'll get one UAC confirmation, and then an Explorer window that opens directly onto the Program Files directory.  From there on you can do everything you need without being pestered repeatedly.  (If you want to use another directory name, just substitute it for Program Files in step 2.)

(Note: I generally have the Explorer option "Launch folder windows in a separate process" turned on.  I don't think that should affect the behavior of this tip, though.)

(Note #2: This is also a great way to do a lot of work in the Control Panel -- for instance, in the network configuration section -- without being interrupted. Just remember to close that instance of Explorer when you're done.)

(Note #3: If you already have other instances of Explorer open, or a "lingering" instance of Explorer.exe open in the Task Manager [one without an attendant window], close those first!)

During my review of NetFlix's "Watch Now", I mentioned that I had to do a rebuild of the Windows Media Player library -- it got damaged because I had the player open in its normal instance when I launched a "Watch Now" window, and I tried to close it.  I passed on a warning about that, so that other people don't make the same mistake -- and I hope it can be fixed in future iterations of either WMP or the "Watch Now" client.

The results of the rebuild process itself, though, was pretty interesting.  I have a lot of music in my library -- some 15,000 songs, or about 100GB of music -- and I found to my surprise that library actions in WMP took place much more quickly after the rebuild.  I suspect the library database is prone to internal fragmentation, and that forcing a rebuild from the ground up helped resolve that.

Another interesting tip: When you close WMP and you're in the middle of a playlist, switch to the Now Playing tab first before closing the program -- that is, if you're not already there.  This seems to more consistently allow the program to come back up not only with the same playlist, but at the same song you were playing before the shutdown.  I noticed that WMP did this before, but it wasn't until after I conducted a bit of experimentation that I determined the exact circumstances for how the playlist is preserved.

People have said for a long time now the big fight for the computing world is between Google and Microsoft.  Probably easier to say Google and Microsoft are bitter rivals, among many others who vie for being people's default choices for how specific things are done.  Today, the Times reported that Microsoft is going to make changes to Vista to allow users a choice of desktop search engines, in response to Google's complaints that Vista doesn't currently allow such things with ease.

A good idea, or on the same level as the editions of Vista and XP that don't include Windows Media Player?  Depends on how it's implemented: when they revised XP to make it that much easier to integrate a third-party browser into the system, one of the things that irked me was not that they did it, but that the interface used to select which browser (if any) or which media player (if any) to use with Windows was amazingly unintuitive.  The cynic in me is convinced they did that on purpose, to dissuade people from ever bothering with it.  If they just re-use the existing interface for such choices, at least I won't have to dig around in yet another window to find out how to do it.

Plus, I'd like to see how well Google's desktop search engine replaces Microsoft's -- like, for instance, if it just snaps into the existing search infrastructure in Vista instead of creating a whole new set of interfaces I have to re-learn.  If MS makes it that much easier to do that, great.  (For what it's worth, I've become quite dependent on the Vista indexed search system; it's saved my bacon more than a few times when I couldn't find something that I knew was somewhere in my mess of files.  People are not born organizers, and having a PC to take care of at least some of that work is a good part of what they're for.)

In sum: How they do it is going to be even more important than the fact that they're doing it at all.

[Edit: Added another screenshot to better explain pre-buffering.]

[Edit: Added details about usage time.]

I've had NetFlix's "Watch Now" function enabled on my account for a few months now, and I think it's safe to say I'm hooked.  It isn't quite the same as, say, having a set-top box for VOD, but in some ways it's better -- mostly because it's an extension of an existing video service that I've come to love, and it works almost entirely without hassle.

For those of you who don't know about this, NetFlix's "Watch Now" feature serves up on-demand video across a broadband connection.  It works in IE only, since you need to install a small (1MB) client-side component that uses Windows Media Player as the delivery mechanism.  But for the most part, it's painless; installing the plugin is the most difficult part.

Watching a movie is like a streamlined version of picking something out of the NetFlix catalog.  Click on the title you want to watch, and after about a 30-second pre-buffer delay you're watching the movie.  The picture quality is virtually indistinguishable from a DVD -- it's marginally softer, but that's about all.  I watched several of my favorite titles in fullscreen mode and saw no discernible difference between them and their DVD counterparts.  The playback window can be resized and also shown in full-screen mode, too.

 
NetFlix Watch Now version of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
The video quality is practically a match for the DVD edition.

The movie also pre-buffers as you watch.  Note the darker segment of the seek bar; that's how much has been pre-buffered for playback.  After a couple of minutes you have a generous (5-6 minute) read-ahead buffer that keeps the picture from cutting out on you even under bad network conditions.

 
The playback pre-buffers as you watch.

Also, TV shows are handled a little differently from movies: note the "Episode | Prev | Next" buttons at the bottom right of the player.  This way you can switch between episodes of the same show without having to exit the player and relaunch it.

The amount of playback time you get per month depends on which subscription you have.  I have the four-at-a-time subscription, and with that I get 24 hours of playback time a month -- enough for a whole season of TV, or 12 feature movies.  That's more than I'll probably ever use in a given month, personally.

Here's what I don't like so far:

• Limited selection of titles.  There's probably not a lot that can be done about that right now, since the service is still young.  But NetFlix is in one of the best possible positions -- aside from Amazon.com -- to offer the broadest selection of material.  And the number of things that have already shown up are impressive enough to get me watching right away: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (as well as the original Ghost in the Shell theatrical film), The Matrix, 3 Women, Being There, Casablanca, Chinatown, The Last Temptation of Christ, Jaws, House of Games, Memories of Murder, Real Genius, Rebel Without A Cause, Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense (and the hugely underrated True Stories), The Year of Living Dangerously, and on and on.
• Seek function in the playback control is very crude.  You can only seek to within a minute or so at best when playing something back.  On the plus side, seeking within the area you've already buffered to your computer is pretty much instantaneous.  There's also no frame-advance or frame-back function, which would be really handy.
• Not available on all accounts yet.  It wasn't active on my own account for some time, and I suspect that's been due to them adding more servers and allowing that many more account-holders to access the service as time goes on.
• Video quality varies.  Some of the less well-mastered titles don't look as good.  Gohatto ("Taboo"), for instance, was originally created from a PAL master and had some field-blending issues.  The A-list stuff typically looked great, though.
• No multiple video / audio streams.  I'm used to having switchable audio or subtitle tracks on DVDs.  Watch Now only has one of each, so foreign films are typically subbed with hard-coded titles that don't look as good as their DVD counterparts.
• You need to close WMP before using it.  Not a big thing, but be warned.  At one point I had WMP open when I launched the player, and a bizarre cross-interaction caused WMP to crash and corrupt my music library.  It wasn't hard to rebuild that (it happened automatically when I next launched WMP), but it's best not to have something like that happen beforehand.

Still, if you have a NetFlix account and have a "Watch Now" tab in your main menu, give it a shot.  I'm going to be very interested in seeing how this develops over time -- especially if they plan to also allow streaming of HD content in the future.  (Can they?  Perhaps they can -- what they can do within the existing constraints of bandwidth is already pretty impressive.)

No matter what kind of work you do with a PC, you almost always have to do some kind of impromptu troubleshooting at some point.  One of the first things I've learned to check is this: Is the problem a system issue, or a user-profile configuration issue?

Here's a classic example.  Earlier today, my copy of PowerDVD stopped working under Windows Vista -- which was odd, because it had been working fine the day before.  (This led me to consider another classic debugging question: What changed between then and now?)  Removing and reinstalling the program didn't fix anything, but logging in under a clean user profile did work -- the program ran fine there.  Deleting the user-specific information for the program didn't work, though.  Curiously enough, it would play the audio track on a DVD, just that the video would come out blank.  That also in turn told me something: whatever had gone wrong was probably not within the application itself.

What else was left?  One other thing came to mind: ATI's user-specific control settings for the video card.  I fired up their support application and noticed that the preview pane for the video playback configuration was blank.  Aha, thunk I, and tried changing the video playback settings there.  Bling!  The pane lit up.  And, as luck would have it, PowerDVD started working again.

What happened?  Odds are, some configuration information for the ATI driver got reset (although I'm still dubious how that happened).  The application itself was never aware of it; it went on attempting to create DirectDraw surfaces without knowing there was any problem.

I've encouraged people to try and replicate any problems they have with a given app in more than one user account on the same machine.  You never know what kind of insights it'll give you.

There's been a good deal of press about the release of Apple's web browser Safari for Windows, in its 3.0.1 incarnation.  Most of the responses have been uniformly mixed to negative: it's slow, it has an unimpressive passel of features, and it's so hopelessly tied to its roots as an OS X application that it doesn't even exploit basic Windows UI conventions (like being able to resize a window from all four corners / sides).

When I first heard about it, I wondered: why even bother?  To tempt people to switch to OS X?  I courted the idea that iTunes was ported to the PC for the sake of such a thing (with PC compatibility for the iPod being the major justifier), but every version of iTunes I've dared to install has suffered from the same problems -- the program is bog-slow and clumsy, requires the presence of QuickTime to work at all, and there are better media players for Windows -- one already provided with Windows by default, come to think of it.  The only Apple program I have at all is the bare installation of QuickTime, and that's mostly because there are more than a few sites out there that won't work at all without QT (like, say, Apple's own movie trailers site, which I visit regularly); it's more a matter of needing it than actually wanting it.

One of the reasons bandied around for bringing Safari to Windows which I find halfway plausible is developers: this gives a website designer the ability to test his site in Safari without having to drop cash for a Mac or bug someone who already has one.  But let's face it: if there are enough deviations between the way Safari renders a given page and the way Firefox / Mozilla, or IE, or even Opera render a page, whose fault is that, really?

I'm probably going to give Safari a shot within the next week or so, if only because I maintain a site elsewhere where cross-browser issues are fairly important.  But from what I've seen and heard so far, I remain unconvinced it'll even make a dent in the browser market -- and unconvinced that Apple is introducing it for the PC to even accomplish that in the first place.

Ed Bott made a point that I have a hard time disagreeing with: Where are the Vista Ultimate Extras?  Nowhere, evidently.

Part of the reason he has been unhappy about the Extras thing is because they, in theory, represent a fair part of the pricetag for Vista Ultimate -- not BitLocker, not the Vista backup tool (which despite having full-system backup and restore is annoyingly crippled in wholly arbitrary ways that have nothing to do with withholding features from lesser-paying customers or anything like that), but the stuff that MS hasn't even published yet and which they are charging Ultimate users a premium for.  Heck, I'm an MSDN subscriber and I get to use Ultimate in my lab without having to shell out for the full price, but even I can see this is disingenuous.

So where are they?  I have a few theories.

1. They're still in the process of being doped out, and Microsoft is being as secretive as possible about them.  Somehow, this does not square with what I know about Microsoft -- they have a harder time keeping secrets than almost anyone else in their position that I know of.  Not because they're bad about doing so, but because they want to generate buzz.  (I'm willing to believe they have an easier time keeping their silence about this than something truly major like Windows Home Server, but it still doesn't square with what I know about them as a whole.)
2. They just haven't been written yet.  Sadly, I have the feeling this is the most likely theory.  They simply do not yet exist in any form -- or they had earlier editions of Extras that were discarded because they simply didn't meet their own expectations.

For me, right now, the Extras that do exist are wasted.  Hold 'Em Poker -- well, I'm no poker player, so strike that.  Dreamscene?  My machine's video hardware can barely deal with it (part of the reason I'm getting a new machine next year).  BitLocker?  On my notebook, it's useful, sure but not my desktop -- and on my notebook it's a terrible pain to work with in the first place since my notebook doesn't support booting from USB (which is mainly how it's implemented on a non-TPM system), so I have to punch in this massive PIN number to boot it each time if I want to use it.

Maybe they're waiting for Christmas.

One of the reasons I loved Creative Computing, when it was still being published, was the magazine's fearlessness of the future.  Whatever would come, technologically speaking, we would not only find a way to deal with it but prosper from it.  It was okay to be cautionary -- in fact, it was a good idea to be cautionary -- but it was just as good to be enthusiastic.

I had great fun reading the magazine back in its heyday, and I had one blast from the past after another reading through the archived texts of the magazine at the Atari Archives site.  Consider this piece, published in (I think) 1979 or so, which essentially predicates portable computing as we know it today.  If anything, we've so far surpassed what was considered "possible" then that it's downright scary.