The only time I don’t want to hibernate my PC is if I’m walking from one meeting to another that’s two minutes away - like a conference where I use the ten minutes between sessions to catch up on my email before rushing off at the last minute to the next presentation. And with the much faster resume time on Windows 7 (15 to 30 seconds) I might remove my complicated hybrid sleep timer (3 minutes into sleep then 7 minutes into hibernate, in case I find a fascinating conversation and linger in the hall) and just hibernate all the time.

So many updates slipstream without forcing a reboot now that I can just keep going until I choose to restart (assuming Office 2010 sorts out its issues with making Word documents left open from the server during hibernation read only, which I’m working around by using Offline Files - although that has its own issue where the files can’t be saved when I’m actually offline; there’s always something with pre-release software).

But  when we first put the RTM code for Windows 7 on it, Simon’s HP EliteBook 2710p kept waking up like a child asking for a glass of water.  If you upgrade a machine from Vista to 7 and you find it won’t stay in hibernation, check the BIOS. Do you have Wake On LAN turned on? If not, check the disk partitions.

Like many OEMs, HP ships the 2710p with a recovery partition; it has a utility for fast booting and looking at email and contacts in a pre-boot environment and it has what you need to get the original version of Windows restored if you ever need it. That means it’s a system partition that the BIOS needs to know about and that means it ought to be marked as active, but then you wouldn’t be able to boot from the Windows 7 system partition. Sometimes that’s not a problem - but sometimes it means that when you try to hibernate, when the system hits a sufficiently deep ACPI power-off level, it all wakes up again because of the recovery partition - which puts you straight back into Windows. If you do an upgrade install to preserve your installed applications, that leaves the original - and now useless - recovery partition in place. You can remove that and add the disk space to the main partition; we’ve seen that fix some hibernation issues, and on a two-year-old notebook the 8-10GB disk space you get back is well worth it.

However, it didn’t fix the hibernation problem on the EliteBook. We had the same problem with our elderly Elonex media center, which has a new lease of life with Windows 7; with the Release Candidate it was so sprightly that about a minute after we hibernated the machine it would just start back up again, and that didn’t have a recovery partition. The EliteBook didn’t have the hibernation issue with RC, so it’s not a bug. In both cases, a clean install of the RTM code fixed the problem instantly - our suspicion is that it’s an interaction between a driver and an RC to RTM upgrade (which, although, possible, certainly isn’t recommended). In practice, you’re not likely to see this issue on any user machines when you roll out Windows 7, though you might find on your own test system. Bite the bullet and do the clean install; it’s going to give you a more reliable system.

BONUS HELP: if you have a completely different hibernation problem, and you’re looking on the Microsoft knowledge base, you might find a new tool called Fix It. When there’s a registry change that needs making, or some other simple-if-you-know-how fix that you wouldn’t want an end user to mess around in the system trying to implement, many KBs now give you a button to press to make the change for you. No copying keys into your own registry fixomatic scripts, no wondering if the advice site you’re getting a .REG file from is really safe to use. This has been quietly building up since last autumn and you can see all the fixes so far at the Fix It blog or keep them to hand for users with the Fixit sidebar gadget. Invaluable!
-Mary

Windows 7 is done, but the massive Microsoft machinery is grinding slowly through the process of localising it into multiple languages, burning discs, printing, stuffing and shipping boxes and getting the PC manufacturers on the starting line. Snow Leopard is done and it went on sale on Friday. Does that mean Apple is more nimble - or just in more of a hurry?

Since Snow Leopard went on sale there’s been a flurry of posts and questions - about application compatibility. We knew Snow Leopard itself wouldn’t run on PowerPC Macs because they don’t have the Intel chips that the new features rely on, but unlike Microsoft’s massive app testing and beta program Apple hadn’t been pushing out details about application compatibility. Running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system often causes problems. Apple was prepared for this; the reviewer’s guide says “During installation, Snow Leopard checks your applications for compatibility, and sets aside any incompatible applications that are known to create instability in Snow Leopard” and this page on the Apple support site http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3258 lists a handful of apps that are known to have problems. Most of them are the usual suspects; low-level storage and security software that has to be updated with any operating system release. But a wireless broadband card, or Adobe Director MX 2004? That’s down to a large number of API changes, designed to remove old bugs - but as Microsoft has often found, one developer’s bug is another developer’s feature and fixing it can break an app.

There was quite the snowstorm of discussion at John Nack’s blog about Adobe products and Snow Leopard. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/snow_leopard/ The official policy; CS4 is supported on Mac OS X 10.6, although Version Cue doesn’t work, CS3 isn’t supported. The unofficial line; CS3 “works fine” “to the best of our knowledge”; cue discussion about how long you should support old software on a new platform and whether you should delay creating the Cocoa version of Photoshop to go back and do the testing. But beyond the question of what resources Adobe could or should devote to supporting an OS update when it’s company policy not to put out updates to versions of software it no longer sells, is the question of how much time Apple has spent on testing third-party apps - and how much it could be telling users about potential compatibility issues. Apple certainly works very closely with the Photoshop team and would know about any problems they found (”If we found issues, we worked directly with Apple to get them fixed,” blogged Photoshop quality assurance manager David Howe) but there’s nothing about Version Cue on the support pages.

For Windows 7, Microsoft worked with 45,000 hardware and software developers, from IT departments inside businesses to one-man-bands to the big software and hardware names. There’s a long list of just a proportion of the devices tested at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/10/primer-on-device-support-and-testing-for-windows-7.aspx and when you can actually buy Windows 7, the Windows Upgrade Advisor will be out of beta (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15) - this checks the hardware and software you have installed -  the Vista Compatibility Center http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/ will turn into the Windows 7 Compatibility Center where you can look up that Photoshop Album needs a free upgrade to v3.2 and Corel makes you pay to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro X2. We’re still impressed by the range of hardware and software Windows 7 supports; at the end of last week our elderly Elonex Media Center PC picked up a new driver for the Hauppauge TV card that hadn’t worked for years and suddenly offered up 98 Freeview TV and radio channels.

Apple doesn’t give Mac users this level of detail (there’s a list of supported printers and scanners at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669 but nothing official for software), so they’re gathering it informally; check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ for a long list of apps that do and don’t have problems.

It’s unlikely that any of these application compatibility problems mean that Snow Leopard wasn’t ready to ship. But perhaps Apple isn’t able to test as widely as Microsoft does or perhaps it was so keen to get Snow Leopard on sale to deflate some of the Windows 7 momentum that it didn’t take the time to document the issues. Or is it the back to school market that Apple is chasing, now rather dominated by netbooks (which DisplaySearch now puts at 22% of all personal computers sold)? 
-Mary

My workhorse machine is an HP 2710P tablet. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and so it was the first machine (aside from my test PC) that I set up as a clean Windows 7 install, using the RTM build from MSDN.

First, the good news: As with nearly every machine we’ve taken to Windows 7 virtually everything works straight out of the box. There are Windows 7 graphics drivers for the Intel card ready and waiting, as well as drivers for most of the machine’s hardware, even drivers for the fingerprint reader and the SD card slot.

But there is some not so good news: Some of HP’s built-in tweaks and speciality hardware aren’t supported yet, and there’s some question over whether they will ever get Windows 7 drivers. That’s always a risk when hardware pre-dates an OS. It’s certainly a little annoying when the screen won’t autorotate, and the slider volume control on the keyboard won’t work - but there are workarounds using OS features such as Windows 7’s Mobility Center (call it up with Windows-X) which gives you rotation and volume controls.

Not to worry though, as as Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista, you can get all those functions back using the latest versions of the Vista drivers from the HP web site.

So far I’ve been able to get back rotation and special keys (including the volume slider and mute button), the accelerometer-based hard drive shock protection

You’ll need the following SoftPaqs:

SP43616 - HP Quick Launch screen rotation and special keys
SP38424 - hard drive shock protection
SP39734 - WiFi and Bluetooth manager

These will give you most of what you need. Some set up guides suggest using earlier You’ll also find a couple of devices without drivers in Device Manager. These are part of the Intel AMT device management suite, and aren’t really necessary for most users.

You can find the drivers for these in these two SoftPaqs: SP38312 and SP38313

The installers for these drivers won’t run under Windows 7. However the files will unpack into folders under C:\swsetup. In Device Manager right-click on one of the two unsupported devices, and choose “Update Drivers”. Choose to install from a local folder (and make sure the “use subfolders” option is selected). Pick C:\swsetup and let Windows install the device driver. Do the same for the other AMT device driver.

And that’s everything you need for a fully configured Windows 7 machine.

Enjoy.

–Simon

I found this forum thread very useful when setting up my machine

No, there isn’t.

Is there a bug at all? Maybe, maybe not. Several bloggers have noticed that if you run CHKDSK on a system with a lot of memory with the Repair flag turned on, it uses nearly all that memory. For an OS as undemanding about memory as Windows 7 this might seem like a bug; memory leak, shriek many of the reports. As it turns out, it’s by design. Microsoft assumes that if you’re asking a disk utility to repair your hard drive by marking out the bad sectors that you want this done as quickly as possible so that you don’t lose data and so it uses as much memory as is available to get it done faster; the other assumption is that you understand how demanding an operation checking every single sector on your hard drive it (and probably that you’re smart enough not to carry on working on a system with a hard drive that you’re worried enough about to be repairing in the first place). That’s not a bug, but it might be worth warning users this will happen.

What seems more worrying is that some of the testers had their systems crash when they tried the CHKDSK repair. Is that a bug? Again, maybe and maybe not; the problem seems to be with the drivers for the PC chipset and when those are updated, the crashes stop happening. That’s not a showstopper bug; that’s something that needs an update to warn you that you need to update the drivers before you run CHKDSK.
And even if the crash was down to Windows 7 RTM code rather than the drivers, that wouldn’t make it a ’showstopper’ that would ‘derail RTM’. In his usual hands-on manner (he once spent half an hour at a conference looking at bugs I was seeing in the beta build of 7 and trying out fixes on my PC), Windows VP Steven Sinofsky dropped by the original blog to calm things down and give a definition of showstopper; “Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.”

One, this isn’t that severe a bug, and two, if it hasn’t shown up in the telemetry that Microsoft gets back from system crashes then it’s not affecting that large a set of people. The Microsoft testers haven’t managed to reproduce either the crash or the drive upgrade solution; if they can’t do that with their extensive internal test network then it’s not likely to happen on the majority of machines - and it’s definitely not a showstopper by definition.

But ‘just another driver issue’ isn’t as good a headline as ’showstopper bug’, so that’s what you see.
-Mary

And do you even want them to? Yes, Microsoft is planning to offer Windows 7 with IE built in in Europe so users don’t have to jump through hoops to get a browser (and avoiding millions of CDs that go straight into landfill after one installation is a good thing).  It keeps the EU happy by popping up a ‘ballot screen’ that lets you pick from a list of browsers - here’s the sample screen Microsoft is showing off.

Incidentally, Opera - who started this whole debacle by complaining to the EU - still isn’t happy. Microsoft says the ballot screen will “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way display icons of and basic identifying information on the Web browsers.” Opera says that’s still biased, because the IE logo is just so recognisable. Newsflash: the reason Opera isn’t the most popular browser isn’t the logo (and making it harder for people who want IE because they’re comfortable with it to find it isn’t the best way to grow your market share).

And “Yes,” confirms a Microsoft spokesperson, “the proposals will also cover boxed copies of Windows sold in Europe”. Does that mean that we don’t have to have an ‘upgrade’ version of Windows that only does a clean install? After all, the reason for the E version is to offer a browser choice to people who have previously had a built-in IE; surely the upgrade install process could offer the same ballot screen and not force you to vape your system in the name of choice? (At least if you’ve got Vista; XP users are stuck with a clean install because it’s too different). Ah, says the spokesperson. “Everything’s just at proposal stage, so specifics of how the upgrade process would work would just be speculation right now.”

And actually, with the relatively low numbers of people who have Vista compared to Windows XP, the current plan of E versions Windows 7 that mean you can buy the full version of Windows for the cost of an upgrade may be a better bargain.  Yes, you lose the convenience of an in-place upgrade but a clean install will often give you better performance - and with a full version there are no restrictions on installing on another machine and you don’t have to faff around providing proof that you have a previous version of Windows first. That’s probably worth the time it takes to back up your settings and re-install your apps.

-Mary

Microsoft announced RTM today (Wednesday 22nd), but that doesn’t mean you can get the code right now. Depending on how you get Windows, you’ll see it anytime from August to October. Courtesy of the Windows Team blog, here are the dates. All dates are for the initial English version; other languages will follow by the end of October at the latest.

When                           Who

Right now                               Gullible downloaders risking malware to get a leaked version on Russian sites that appears to have significant problems.
now to 2 days after RTM      PC manufacturers
’shortly’ after RTM                IT pros who want the evaluation version from Springboard
August 6th                              software and hardware developers who use Microsoft Connect and MSDN
                                                 TechNet and MSDN subscribers
August 7th                              Volume Licence customers with SA
August 16th                            Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members who use the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal
August 23rd                           Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers
September 1st                       Volume licence customers without SA
October 22nd                         Consumers buying a boxed copy or a new PC

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.

Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.

That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.

We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.

Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.

I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.

The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.

It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?

Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.

Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.

The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.

–Simon

The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

I’ll admit it; I actually like IE. I’ve used it as my main browser for years because I know it will be the same on every system (although I have to supplement it with the IE7Pro tools to be really happy). I distrust Chrome slightly because of the Chrome teams’ initially disappointing attitude to user privacy and security (especially with Gears and the Gears features Google wants to see in HTML5). I would use Firefox, but almost everything I like about it is down to Greasemonkey, which is a security threat waiting to happen (and he author is now on the Gears team) - although Weave might change my mind. Opera can try to include every standard going, but there are too many sites that complain that I’m not using a ’standard browser’ - and the special pleading from Opera (to the EU in particular) doesn’t win me over either. Personally speaking, the way I see it is that thanks to the EU, when I install Windows 7 I will have to take longer to do the installation because I’ll have to take the time to install a browser; gee, thanks.

Professionally speaking, should I be pleased that the European versions of Windows 7 will be browser free? Not if you know what you’re doing. Organisations who want to install Windows 7 without IE can do it by customising their setup image; they’ll be doing that anyway and they can choose the components that go in the image, including whether they want IE 8 or not.
Have all the court cases forced Microsoft to clean up its act? Maybe. It always amused me when Netscape revealed their distribution figures as part of the DoJ case against Microsoft. Despite charging ISPs anything up to $20 per users to distribute the Netscape Navigator browser, Netscape distributed it to half as many people again as were online at the time (or to everyone online 1.5 times). Which says to me the reason Netscape didn’t succeed wasn’t lack of access to the market - it was lack of being a better browser than IE.

The counter-argument was that even though they got a copy of Navigator, IE users wouldn’t bother to install it because they had a browser they thought was good enough. Leaving aside the implicit criticism of users in that view, maybe a majority of people do use IE because it’s there and we’ll now see the true popularity (or not) of IE, but I think we’ll mostly see a lot more support calls. Perhaps Microsoft could suggest that some of the fines the EU is doubtless totting up could be ear-marked to pay for free phone support for all those users who are having trouble getting a browser installed?
-Mary

Getting virtualisation deployed just got a lot faster.

We’ve spent the morning with Microsoft’s Jeff Wooley, one of the team leads that helped put together Hyper-V, talking about live migration. However, one final thing he said was a bit of a scoop…

It turns out that Hyper-V Server R2, the next release of Microsoft’s standalone virtualisation platform, will boot from flash disk. That’s a big new feature that will help speed virtualisation deployments - all you’ll need to do is duplicate a set of flash drives for all your servers. All your hard disk space is working space for your VMs, and storage for your VHDs.

Oh, and it’ll be free.

That’s not bad.

While you’re thinking that way, flash drives are a good way of installing the latest generation of operating systems. It’s easy enough to make a bootable flash drive in Windows with just a few commands:

1. diskpart

2. list disk

3. select disk 1

4. clean

5. create partition primary

6. select partition 1

7. active

8. format fs=fat32

9. assign

10. exit

Then all you need to do is copy Windows Vista’s (or Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008) DVD ROM content to the drive. Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive: xcopy d:\*.* /s/

Just plug in the drive, and you’re ready to install - very quickly. If you’ve just got an ISO of an installer, this is a good alternative to burning a DVD…