Windows Insight

Control Panel Suddenly Inexplorable

2007-12-03T18:04:05Z

Here's a weird problem: At one point I switched Control Panel from the Category view to the Classic view (i.e., icons). After that, Control Panel wouldn't load any more -- it would crash Explorer instantly.

Turned out the problem was a corrupt folder-view entry in the Registry. I went to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell and deleted Bags and BagsMRU. All was well again.

Avoiding the WPAD Exploit

2007-11-29T16:31:13Z

CRN (among others) have posted word about an exploit in Windows -- including Vista! -- that uses the Windows Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) function. This is one of those features that most people never use anyway and which should be disabled by default, so you're probably better off turning it off completely as a pre-emptive measure. See the 2nd link for instructions on how to do this; the whole thing takes maybe 30 seconds.

When Silicon Image Won't Image CDs

2007-11-22T19:03:45Z

I ran into a problem with a solution this weekend while preparing to burn a DVD to bring to my parents over the Thanksgiving weekend: Seems that CD/DVD burners attached to a Silicon Image SATA interface aren't recognized as burners in Windows Vista.

The good news: Microsoft knows it's a problem and has a hotfix available for it immediately. (They've had this hotfix out for some time, as a matter of fact.) Said hotfix will also appear in Vista SP1, but you can grab it now from the download link listed here.

Start Me Up ... Faster!

2007-10-17T16:12:09Z

I recently noted that Vista has some interesting new behaviors regarding applications that are launched from the Startup folder. By default, their I/O priorities are throttled back for a total of one minute from launch. This is a good idea to keep lots of smaller or background-use applications from all starting up at once, but it doesn't seem to be such a good idea if you try to boot an application like Outlook, which is by nature I/O intensive, by putting it in the Startup folder.

To that end, I tried a few experiments. I wrote a batch file to start up several major applications -- Outlook, Word, Windows Live Writer, AIM and at least one or two other things -- and put it into the Startup group. Between each program launch, I instigated a forced seven-second delay by using the CHOICE command (a sneaky trick I picked up from somewhere). I wanted to see if this would cause any difference in the amount of utilization or responsiveness.

When I used this to launch the programs in question, all of them were launched at the Very Low I/O priority -- and the end result was that they were all fairly difficult to work with during that low I/O period.

I then took the same batch file out of the Startup group and ran it from the desktop after a cold boot. The programs in question all started up quite snappily and I could choose between any of them without difficulty -- and they were all running at Normal I/O priority, too.

So here's my tentative recommendations for what to put in the Startup group. Much of this advice may be redundant but I'll elaborate where needed.

Include programs that run by default in the background and are not things you typically work with directly after logging in. AIM, for instance, is a good candidate for this sort of thing.
Don't include major applications like Word or Outlook. Launch those manually so you can benefit from those getting the maximum I/O priority. (My above script seems to work nicely for group launching, although I had some minor window-focus issues that I think I can solve relatively easily.)
Don't include applications that will block other things until they complete heavy I/O operations. Since they launch with very low I/O priority, they'll essentially be stuck until that bar lifts.

PowerMenu

2007-10-16T19:16:07Z

I love all-in-one utilities that do a bunch of things in as little space as possible. Aside from allSnap, I recently bumped into another tool that I use as a regular adjunct to my Vista installs: PowerMenu.

PowerMenu adds four things to every single control menu for a window: a priority control, a transparency control, an "Always On Top" function, and a "Minimize to Tray" tool. That's three or four separate utilities packed into one, and even though PowerMenu was originally written back in 1998 (!), it still runs extremely well with Vista. Obviously I'd like to see it brought up to date whenever possible, but it works well enough right now that I can recommend it with little hesitation.

A New Update In Town

2007-10-11T16:03:27Z

Today after I switched on my computer, Vista pinged me and let me know there was a download available that solved some previously-logged system issues. Said download is detailed in Knowledge Base article 941649, and the rundown of items in it is extremely interesting. Here's some selected quotes.

"Extends the battery life for mobile devices." This has been a common canard for Vista users, hasn't it? My own experiences with battery life, through my Sony VAIO TX series notebook, have been very good, but I know the mileage has varied enormously.
"Improves the stability of wireless network services." I take this to mean it addresses the common issue people have where Vista has trouble locating a wireless network for a minute or so on end when you first boot up or after you come out of sleep mode.
"Shortens the startup time of Windows Vista by using a better timing structure." This hasn't been a huge problem for me, but I'm curious to see how it plays out across multiple systems.
"Improves the reliability of Windows Vista when you open the menu of a startup application." I wonder if this is a cousin to a problem I wrote about elsewhere before. Vista does try to mitigate resource usage between multiple applications that boot through the Startup folder (read this article on the Microsoft Vista Compatibility Team Blog for more information), but they could still do a better job with it.
"Shortens the recovery time after Windows Vista experiences a period of inactivity." I think I have experienced this problem myself before, mostly when coming up out of a screen saver (another fix explicitly described in this package).

All in all, it's heartening to see these things being addressed before Vista SP1. I'll have another report later about how these fixes play out on my machines.

I Prefer To Call It QUACKTime

2007-10-10T23:43:30Z

For the last month or so, I've been trying to track down a problem I've been having with Apple QuickTime on Vista, and I suspect the whole thing may simply be a fool's errand.

At first, I thought the problem was related to something I've seen reported in a number of circles: QuickTime has not played well on systems that use Intel SATA RAID controllers as the medium from which the content is played back. Most of the symptoms revolve around playing back HD content: on my end, if I try to play back full 1080 HD content on my system, it drops frames and skips like crazy, and the CPU utilization tops out. This, by the way, is on a dual-socket Opteron with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB AGP 8X video card.

On a whim, I browsed Apple's QuickTime support forum and encountered a couple of other people having the same issues. Most of the folks polled were running NVIDIA graphics or disk controllers (my video's ATI), and the one generic suggestion was to switch QuickTime back into "safe mode" (i.e., no DirectX or Direct3D acceleration). Not one of the changes to that setting made the slightest difference. Another workaround was to copy the playback media to a non-SATA drive, but this isn't always a possible option. If you play back QT content in the browser, for instance, it's copied to your local QT cache -- which is by default in your user profile and as far as I know cannot be moved somewhere else.

The problem was reported most egregiously on certain Intel disk controllers (and there's even been a fix supplied for it), but I'm starting to wonder if the same thing goes for other manufacturers as well. My own system uses a Silicon Image brand controller and has the most recent drivers provided by the manufacturer, so barring a fix from Apple or Microsoft, nothing's going to change. Actually, Microsoft has already rolled out a pre-SP1 patch for Vista that addresses a problem vaguely related to this. I requested the patch and applied it, but it made no discernible difference. I tried QuickTime Alternative to see if that made any difference, and as far as I can tell it didn't accomplish a thing.

Then my suspicions started to really ramp up. Maybe the whole disk issue was a red herring. I downloaded a number of HD clips in other formats--MPEG-2, VC-1--and guess what, they played back perfectly in Nero ShowTime, in full-screen, with barely 30% CPU usage and no frame drops. And when I saved the QuickTime file to disc and played it in Nero, it worked perfectly there as well (albeit with higher CPU consumption). Copying the file to an external IDE drive and playing it back that way didn't make it work any better in QuickTime, either -- but it STILL worked perfectly in Nero.

The only other thing I can think of is that somehow QuickTime is having trouble detecting how to work properly with DirectDraw (despite there being free video players that have absolutely no trouble figuring this out), which would sure explain why changing from DirectX to GDI ("safe") mode didn't accomplish a thing. Maybe it's stuck in GDI mode for keeps.

For now, my solution is simple: anything I need to play in QuickTime, I just dump out to disk and play through Nero -- at least until Apple bothers to write something for the PC that's halfway viable.

Mozy Along

2007-10-08T16:14:32Z

Man! How could I get this far and not mention Mozy?

Mozy's an online backup service that I profiled for InformationWeek earlier in the year. I dubbed it the pick of the pack, not just because it works well and has a generous storage policy (2GB for free, and only $5 a month for essentially unlimited storage), but because it's invisible. You install it, you point out what you want to back up, it runs silently in the background at designated times, and that's it.

I still use Vista's own backup tool to make local offline backups of a lot of stuff, but I use Mozy for the most crucial things: email, documents, etc. And so far it's saved my bacon at least once.

[Full disclosure: The link I listed above is an affiliate link. If you sign up with it, I get a little more storage added to my own account. Everyone who signs up can create such a link to spread the love a little.]

Snap To It

2007-09-18T16:00:38Z

Windows doesn't seem to have (at least not anymore) the native ability to allow windows to snap to the edges of the screen, or to snap-align windows to the edges of other windows. I like having this feature; I'm a bit of a neatnik when it comes to window edges. Windows used to have a function that enabled a snapping grid on the desktop, but it no longer does anything. (It's possible to align desktop icons to that grid, but not window edges.)

Now, the solution: allSnap. When run, it does exactly what I want: it snaps windows to the edges of other windows, to a predefined grid, and to the edges of the screen. I love being able to grab a window and stick it somewhere off in a corner and not worry about accidentally having it hang partway out of sight.

The bad news is that allSnap doesn't seem to know how to hook into all applications. For instance, if I move a Word 2007 window by grabbing and dragging it by the top edge, allSnap doesn't kick in -- in fact, when I use allSnap's handy debug window, it doesn't even have any messages in there, so I can only assume Word's hooking into a different window-management function call than the one allSnap is assaying. But if I grab Word's window edges and drag them around to resize, it works fine. Ditto for resizing a Firefox window instance from the grab bar at its bottom right corner, but if I just resize from the window edges it works correctly.

I'm currently running the most recent beta of allSnap, and barring this feature it works wonderfully. I've also looked at a couple of other programs that do roughly the same thing and will talk about them separately, but this is one of the best simply because it does the one thing I've needed the most, does it unobtrusively, and doesn't cost a dime.

Virtualize This!

2007-09-07T16:10:17Z

I should drop a quick note about the 1.5 update of the free-as-in-open-source-and-beer virtual-computer application VirtualBox, now in revision 1.5. I tried it out before as a possible replacement or parallel installation for VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC, and I ultimately wound up using it instead of either of those programs. Version 1.5 sports some handy performance improvements, has guest additions for both Windows and Linux, and did I mention it doesn't cost anything? (There's also a Mac OS X version in beta-test now, so you folks in Appleland can try it out shortly.) Highly recommended.

Service Pack'd

2007-08-29T18:29:28Z

We know Windows Vista SP1 was going to come down the turnpike at some point. Now we have the first strong hint as to when that will happen: 2008.

Over at the official Vista Blog, there's a post that talks about what SP1 is and what it's designed to address. I went over it and spied a few things that I found worth noting:

"Windows Vista SP1 will deliver improvements and enhancements to existing features that significantly impact customers, but it does not deliver substantial new operating system features." In short, don't expect a new shell or anything visually different, just better under-the-hood performance.
"Organizations do not need to wait for SP1 to deploy Windows Vista; they are encouraged to begin their Windows Vista evaluation and deployment now." Well, you can say that until you're blue in the face, but the simple truth is that people are hesitant to make a leap that big. And rightfully so. Me, I made the leap early and haven't looked back, but I'm one guy with only a few computers in his house -- I'm not a corporation with 2,000 desktops. Just because the "tools and guidance" exist doesn't mean they can be implemented effectively by just snapping fingers.
"Microsoft uses Windows Vista instrumentation to learn what issues affect customers most and then address the issues." This is actually one of the things I have genuinely liked about Windows: if something goes wrong, I can generate an error dump and send it along to MS in the hopes that they can use the information to figure out whether the problem might be one of theirs. It's not an instant-gratification kind of thing, but it's apparently helped MS identify a good many issues that otherwise might have slipped past them. (I'm fairly sure the two recent pre-SP1 reliability and performance updates were helped along by this kind of feedback.)
"...[SP1] enhances BitLocker Drive Encryption (BDE) to offer an additional multifactor authentication method that combines a key protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with a Startup key stored on a USB storage device and a user-generated personal identification number (PIN)." This was not the biggest complaint I've heard about BitLocker, to be honest. The biggest two I've heard so far is a) how come I can't use the BitLocker GUI to encrypt non-system drives (actually, see below for more on that), and b) what kind of disaster-recovery options do I have if I can't get a BitLocker-encrypted drive to boot? (The latter is really thorny; the only way I can think of offhand to stave off disaster in that department is to back up to an offline drive that's also encrypted.)
"BitLocker Drive Encryption encrypts extra local volumes. For example, instead of encrypting only drive C, customers can also encrypt drive D, E, and so on." THANK YOU.
"Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying." THANK YOU. (Yes, I did have this problem - I think it's a cousin to the issue of the consistently long delay I get whenever I log on.)
Many notes about network and disk-to-disk performance issues (although nothing explicitly about the network issue that appears when playing media files on some systems; maybe it's just too early for them to say anything about that yet). A lot of people have been grousing about this, myself included; the recent performance updates to Vista did help out a great deal, though, but any more they can do in this department is welcome.
The defragmenter is still being kept in its stripped-down (read: brain-dead) mode. The only word I saw so far about the defragmenter is "Administrators can control the volumes on which to run Disk Defragmenter", but this isn't the same as having more interactive control. Ah, well -- there's always the command line, or JKDefrag.

Now, as far as SP1 being a 2008 item, that puts it in line to be released alongside with the long-in-limbo XP SP3. I had the feeling Microsoft would take many of the things they would learn during the Vista SP1 process and roll them into SP3 as well, and while I have no evidence they're doing exactly that, it would make sense for them to want to learn as much as they can from Vista.

Why I Don't DIY (Anymore)

2007-08-20T22:20:00Z

Ed Bott's post at ZDNet about the counterproductivity of whining about Vista (and its follow-up) got me thinking about something I've been asked about a number of times. If I'm concerned with getting the best possible PC for my money, why don't I build one myself instead of relying on a manufacturer?

This whole topic got sparked off when I mentioned to a friend that I had bought an Alienware machine (which I have been very happy with overall) instead of going the white-box route. Out came the justifications for going the DIY route: Oh, but you could save a lot of money; it's better if you build it yourself; you know exactly what you're getting that way; etc.

Well, I've gone the DIY route myself before, and it proved to be no better than going the pre-built route. In fact, it was a good deal worse for a variety of reasons.

Warranties. When I buy a computer, I'd like to have at least some guarantee that the machine I get will last me for the next few years. If I buy a pre-build, I have some degree of assurance for that in the form of a warranty. If I cobble my own machine together, it's that much harder to deal with things if any one piece fails, because then I'm at the mercy of many different hardware makers, not just one.
Integration. It took four tries before I finally got memory that worked properly with my original DIY machine. And this was after matching specs repeatedly; I wasn't just buying memory blindly. I spent two weeks playing Musical DIMMs when I should have been working. With a pre-integrated PC, what comes out of the box has a far better chance of working out of the box than something you put together yourself, and it's almost always possible to swap things out after the fact, anyway.
Hassle. I'm no longer enamored of the romance of building and tweaking a system on my own. And as Ed suggested in his articles above, tweaking is something of a 99th percentile-of-performance sort of thing: the gains you get from doing so are incremental and not overwhelming. (The single biggest performance gain I got out of my PC was by changing video cards, which I doubt counts as a "tweak" per se.) It is simply not worth the trouble, and if you need to be constantly tweaking to make your system run well, then either there's something fundamentally wrong with the system or there's something wrong with your expectations.

Hm... By all rights, I should be a Mac user. And at some point, I probably will add a Mac to my hardware arsenal, if only for the sake of familiarity.

Still, when it comes to the PC, I'd rather spend a little extra money to get something that I know will work tolerably well out of the box now. I don't buy PCs to impress my friends; I buy them to get work done.

Know the Symptoms

2007-08-12T00:59:13Z

Over at David Moisan's blog (courtesy of Ed Bott), there's a fine, detailed post about how to sniff out one of the more insidious things that can go wrong with a computer, Vista or otherwise: a failing data cable for a hard drive. His troubleshooting techniques are right on the money, too -- take out everything that absolutely does not have to be there, and see if the problems persist. And the way he discovers the tip-off -- via a timestamp that Windows writes to the Registry every five seconds -- hinted that whatever was going wrong was causing Windows to get "mugged" (to use Ed's inimical expression).

On my previous computer, when I had a hard drive go bad on me (it was well within warranty), changing data cables was the first thing I tried. When that yielded nothing, it was RMA time.

Said article also has some news about a set of USB rollup fixes for Vista, which are right now only available on request. I'll probably have more to say about that in a bit; I've put in a request for said rollup.

A Quick Fix-Me-Up

2007-08-07T22:35:57Z

Remember those Vista hotfixes that were circulating in beta form? They're now officially available: the Windows Vista Performance Update and the Windows Vista Reliability Update.

I strongly recommend reading the accompanying articles (especially the sections where the fixed issues are described) so you can get an idea if you need this right now. If you'd rather wait, I suspect it'll be offered via Windows / Microsoft Update before long.

I've stuck my neck out and added them to my production system. Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but I'll yelp if anything breaks.

Dealing With Vista's Not-So-Secret Garbage Dump

2007-08-07T18:28:41Z

[Note: An earlier version of this tip had some inaccuracies which were brought to my attention. Thanks to Ed Bott for his keen eye!]

[Note #2: Ed's published a blog entry about this issue, and some additional notes that are well worth reading -- including a super-useful link to a tip on how to customize the way the Disk Cleanup tool runs.]

This is actually not an indictment of Vista alone, but something I've seen in Windows for quite some time now: the user profile \TEMP directory. It fills up with the most amazing amount of trash imaginable, and over time it can cause programs to malfunction left and right in ways that defy analysis.

Vista does have a way to deal with it: the Disk Cleanup tool. which purges the \TEMP directory on demand. However, as a safety measure, it doesn't delete anything newer than one week -- for instance, temporary files created as part of a program's installation process.

If you want to manually purge the \TEMP directory without the date cutoff restriction -- just blast everything in there -- here's one way to do it. Copy the following into a text file with a .BAT extension:

rd /s /q "%localappdata%\temp" && md "%localappdata%\temp"

(That's all one line, by the way.)

When run, it'll erase the entire contents of the TEMP directory and then recreate it anew.

Two caveats:

If there are any files that are in use in the directory, they will not be deleted.
As hinted above, do not run this command when you're in the process of installing software, such as before a reboot to finalize a program installation. It may delete components of the installer that are needed after the reboot. (Note that if you attempted to install a program and the installer failed and left garbage in the \TEMP directory, it might not be a bad idea to purge all of that before attempting to re-run the installation. Just make sure the installer is not actually running before attempting this!)