When Windows 7 upgrades won’t hibernate (the solution)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, support, Windows 7, Power, Beta, Windows, Laptop, Microsoft on
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
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Don’t get irate, get ClipMate
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Software, Applications on
The next time you get some piddling small change to make what’s actually going to take you hours, put up your blood pressure and make no difference at all but you have to do it to comply with some idiot directive like ‘all the images in the CMS must have file names with Separate Words Starting In Upper Case’, you could start writing scripts with complex regular expressions - which is a little easier in Windows 7 because you get PowerShell and a simple little script IDE. Or - especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a user - you could turn to a tool that’s saved me hours of time over the years I’ve been using it: ClipMate from Thornsoft.
As the name suggests, it was originally designed to make the Windows clipboard more useful. You know how you see something interesting, like a URL or the instructions for fooling Windows 7 beta into upgrading to Windows 7 RC and you copy it, only to get distracted and copy something else before you get around to pasting the first clip anywhere…
Personally, I think that’s one of the main reasons that the Web page you’re most likely to open is the one you’ve just closed, but ClipMate saves everything you copy into a rolling list (mine goes back to May 30th). If there are things you paste a lot (frequent flyer numbers, your address, directions to your house that stop people taking what looks like a short cut, basic instructions for internal applications that don’t work the way users expect, a scan of your signature for pasting into that one fax a year you still have to send…) you can put those into a ’safe’ collection that doesn’t get cleaned out automatically and you can have multiple collections to keep handy scripts separate from Polite Responses To Stupid Requests.
But once you have something copied, ClipMate also has a bundle of tools for working with it. You get a word and character count at the bottom of the window, or the dimensions if it’s an image. You can see spelling mistakes (and correct them before you paste the text back). You can remove line breaks - ideal for fixing URLs that break apart in email. You can strip out fancy text formatting (very handy if you like to compose your blog posts in a real word processor and paste them in to the blog editor without worrying about getting weird fonts and weirder HTML codes in there). You can show non-printing characters like tabs and spaces to see why text doesn’t lay out the way you expect. Or you can just highlight HTML formatting and URLs in the clip, to make it easier to read. You can strip out any formatting - the >> quote marks on email inclusions or any other specific character that’s in your way (the icon for this is a magician’s top hat and wand). You can add macros and regular expressions to clips that activate when you paste them (ideal for scripts). And you can swap the case of the clip - not just by clicking an icon or a menu entry, but with a keyboard shortcut.
So you can iterate through your list of image names going click (select filename), click (rename file), Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Alt-C (open ClipMate), Ctrl-Alt-M (Change To Leading Caps), click (select filename that’s still live for renaming), Ctrl-V. It’s the kind of soothing repetition that you can speed through even while you fume about whoever decided Leading Cap Image File Names were a good idea in the first place.
ClipMate: it’s just so useful.
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No IE 8? No thanks (to the EU)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Windows 7, operating systems, Web browser, Internet, Firefox, Microsoft on
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
Rated: 40% (2 votes)
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Smartphones: how to manage the worst of computing and networking
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, support, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Wireless, Mobile on
If you think about it, whatever platform they are, smartphones are a horrible combination of complex networking and primitive computing, squeezed into a pocket-sized security threat. I wouldn’t be without mine, but whatever smartphone I happen to be using I always wish it worked better; at the moment I’m using an HTC Touch Pro and I wish I could tell why it sometimes runs so slowly it can’t rotate the screen when I slide open the keyboard. I might have got an answer to why an app I was testing kept giving me a blank screen rather sooner if I’d been able to show the software developers what I was (or wasn’t) seeing on screen. The problem was that they’re in California - and that week we were in Las Vegas. Your users might not travel that far, but they’re far more likely to have problems on their phones when they’re not in the office.
Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager is a good start for managing smartphones; but it doesn’t have a remote control option, which is a lot faster when you would rather check a setting or make a change yourself rather than talk the user through how to do it - and wait for them to take the phone away from their ear to do each step of the process and then tell you what they’ve done. Odyssey showed off its Athena mobile management software at the Microsoft Management Summit last week, which plugs into SCMDM and adds remote control and monitoring of everything from memory and processor usage to which applications are actually running. (Or you can use it to add mobile management to System Center Configuration Manager.)
Suppose you want to roll out a new version of the Compact Framework to all your Windows Mobile devices (or a line of business app that needs a new version); you can’t install it on a phone that’s currently running an app that uses the framework (like Live Search) so you can choose between having the update fail or rebooting phones that don’t need it (and upsetting any users who had unsaved data in a badly-written application). Athena can check registry keys, tell you what apps are running - and close them, or just terminate the key DLL for the Compact Framework.
Athena also has a range of ‘feature packs’ that you can add in to get everything from details of phone calls (so you can complain to the mobile operator with proof if users complain they keep losing the connection halfway through an important call) to how many text messages users are actually sending (so you know whether you’re on the best value tariff for what users actually do). One customer tracked data connection problems for some users down to a handful of mobile phone towers; it turned out the operator had forgotten to update them when it did a network upgrade. Because the problem you’re trying to track will probably make it hard to retrieve data from the phone at the time, the Athena agent on the phones can collect data up to every 15 minutes, although it usually only sends data once a day to stop it tying up the data connection.
The GPS pack tells you where a phone is - handy if a user doesn’t know if it’s lost, stolen or left in their desk drawer (and where it’s been - the historical data means at least you know where it was before it was taken inside and lost the satellites).
If you’re using Wi-Fi for a secure connection, Windows Mobile will happily switch to an open access point if it happens to be a stronger signal, taking the device off the corporate network - so users no longer have access to the resources they’ll be trying to use. One manufacturing customer had the rugged handsets workers were using in the warehouse randomly drop off the network; they set up an event in Athena to take a snapshot of the system when the network changed and send that to System Center Configuration Manager as an event System Center Operations Manager could trigger. Next time the handsets switched off the network, the reports came back with the SSID of the access point they were connecting to - revealing that one of the employees was hiding an access point under a desk so they could work in the break room (which suggests to me that the company needs either better network coverage or comfier desk chairs).
And before you say that iPhones don’t have all those problems, think about managing a device where you can’t run anything in the background - so your agent can only work when the user asks it to - and the only people who can retrieve a catalogue of what applications are on the device are Apple. Every smartphone platform has its problems; Athena can help on Windows Mobile (and the company is considering BlackBerry support next - handy as we’re going to be at RIM’s Wireless Enteprise Symposium).
You can get a copy of Athena packaged up in a VHD ready to try out from www.odysseysoftware.com (although you have to sign up for a sales email rather than just being able to download it). The price varies with what feature packs you want, but if mobile support is costing you a lot, Athena could be a bargain. Another customer had users shipping ‘broken’ devices to the support department, 90% of which turned out to have nothing wrong with them, which is a waste of time as well as postage. Giving the helpdesk Athena’s remote tools reduced the number of devices sent in by over 85% - and the percentage with no fault found went down to 5%. And instead of spending 40 minutes on the phone on the average support call, the support team were off the line with the problems fixed in around 8-10 minutes.
-Mary
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Troubleshooting 7
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Beta, Windows, Microsoft on
I’m writing this blog entry on a run of the mill Dell XPS laptop. The only thing that’s different from the laptop you can buy today is that it’s running the pre-beta build of Windows 7 that’s been distributed here at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA.
You’ve seen the reviews all over the web, and you’ve read the analysis of the effects on the Vista marketplace, and of Microsoft’s changing role in the industry. Let’s take that all as read, and use this as an opportunity to drill down into one of Windows 7’s more interesting new features.
One thing about the PDC, it’s an excellent place to meet Microsoft staff who rarely leave Redmond, and to learn more about the issues of programming and developing Windows applications. Unlike TechEd, it’s an event that looks at the future of Windows, and it regularly unveils new tools and technologies. We spent the week talking to people, and listening to all kinds of presentation.
Much of what’s been written about Windows 7 focuses on its consumer features - but there are a lot of things in the next Windows for the IT pro - many of which will make your lives a lot easier. New self service tools in the OS make it a lot easier to manage, as your users will be able to solve many common problems without having to call a help desk.
Windows 7 will identify and help solve problems with the new Troubleshooting control panel. Just type “fix” in the search bar to see a list of troubleshooting options. Alternatively you can use the new Solution Center to see where you need to start finding solutions.
The Troubleshooting control panel has 8 categories, each of which is full of the top issues that have been reported to Microsoft. If you look at the Programs section you’ll find tools for managing program compatability, along with quick fixes for Media Player and web browsing. All in there are over 100 listed root causes, with common solutions. There may be one or more solutions to a problem, and you’re given the option of trying them each individually or all at once. Just click OK and your machine should be running normally again.
The underlying technology is that old favourite, PowerShell, and that means it should be possible to write your own troubleshooting scripts for your own applications. It also means that you’ll be able to push management scripts to remote machines, pre-emptively fixing problems if you start seeing your users all accessing the same problem information.
I’ve already used it once, to enable the built-in bio-metric scanner on my laptop, as Windows didn’t come with drivers. The troubleshooter tracked down the Vista drivers, and gave me the appropriate download link - all in a single dialogue box, with no intervention from a system administrator…
With tools like this in Windows 7, you’ll be able to invest your time in developing new applications and services (and maybe investigating new platforms like Azure), rather than answering the phone. If your users need hand-holding, why not delegate that to Windows…
–Simon
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