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

You might think it’s just a font, but it’s not really. It’s a statement of who you are, what you mean, and why you’re doing something.

Pretentious?

Perhaps - but it’s still true. There’s an underlying meaning and message in the shape of the type face you’re using. Serif fonts can be serious, with plenty of gravitas just like The Times used to have, while sans serif are direct, quick to deliver a message. Bold fonts emphasise, while italics rush you along. Then there are the many millions of speciality fonts, which give your message a spin that only they can. And then, of course, there’s Comic Sans - but there’s always a runt of the litter (or in this case, a runt of the letter).

It’s a matter of semiotics. There’s meaning to the symbols we use, meaning that we all interpret in slightly different ways. Some if it comes from the way those symbols are used in a cultural context, while other comes from the very shape grammar of the symbol - angular shapes are disturbing, while smooth lines are pleasing. We can go on: circles encompass, arrows point, while lines join things together. The meanings in symbols touch users and viewers in visceral ways, and a poor choice can be the difference between a customer saved and a customer lost.

Last week there was a disturbance in the force, as if a million designers had suddenly cried out in shock and anger. Ikea had changed the font used in its catalogue. It wasn’t a big change,  a switch from Futura to Verdana. Both were similar sans serif fonts, though with one big difference: Futura had been designed as a modernist font, with distinct political intentions - while Verdana, well it had been designed by Microsoft to look good on screen and on print. To most of us it wasn’t much of a change - and one we barely noticed. Even so, there’s a change. Ikea’s edginess has become replaced with a comfortable, everyday look. It’s part of the background now,no longer out on the cutting edge. What’s more, it’s also cheap.

That’s the sort of message we need to consider in the fonts we use on our web sites and in our applications. Design is important in conveying the message behind a brand - just look at how the fonts BP uses have evolved over the years to carry the company’s corporate message. It’s a subtle process, but one that works well, and one that can increase user engagement with applications and services as well as with online properties. Yes, it’s easy to use one of the default fonts in Windows or OS X - but is that the message you really want to give?

One thing that’s changing are the limitations of screen fonts. Complex ligatures and the like just don’t work well when you’re laying out a page on screen. Computing the positions of letters is hard enough, let alone trying to deal with flying lines and curves.

If you’re running Windows 7 (and Office 2010), why not  play with Gabriola. It’s a new font with a difference - now you’re able to use those complex design type effects no matter what you’re doing. It’s the first font with the hints needed to build on new screen layout features that come with the latest version of ClearType. It’s an impressive feat - and something we hope that other fonts will support soon.

After all, good design really does matter.

–Simon

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

When you install Windows 7 with IE 8, you’re usually going to get Bing as the default search engine - at least until you change it to Google. If you install Windows 7 on enough machines, you’re probably not going to get around to changing the search engine on all of them straight away. Sure it’s on the list with installing Office, and your favourite blogging tools, and ‘can’t live without them’ utilities like ClipMate and SpeedFiler (and in one case, downloading a 114MB NVidia graphics card driver file to get Aero Glass and flashing the BIOS on this Dell XPS M1330 to stop the display driver spinning the fan up to the speed of a jumbo jet); but between importing my extensive AutoCorrect definitions from my last PC and remembering the IRC addresses to put into Trillian, I’ve not got around to changing the search engine on a couple of my PCs. And when I have, I’ve actually considered changing back.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got most of my exposure to Bing through a game that used to be called Club Live Search (so yes, I do spend time at Club Bing, groaning at the pun). They’re fun little word and puzzle games that earn tickets you can spend on air miles (or donate to charity). And when you ask for a hint or fill in an answer, you see a Bing search in the bottom of the browser window. And over time, you start to get used to seeing related searches and your search history down the side of the page, and being able to hover over an orange dot next to a link to see the first few lines of the page previewed and being able to choose image results not just by size but by whether they’re in colour or black and white, a photo or an illustration, a picture with people in or not… You notice that, hey, Bing has a couple of useful features.

The kind of searches you do when you’re playing a word game don’t relate to the kind of searches you do for work (unless your job is writing word games), so it isn’t until you forget to switch your default search away from Bing that you also notice that, hey, Bing doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to. I’m researching Windows 7 deployment tools and I accidentally ran the search on a newly 7-ized PC that still defaulted to Bing. I found what I was looking for on Bing, but I checked Google for comparison. Many of the results were the same, but Bing had more results about Windows 7 on earlier pages of results; Google had more results about a range of Windows versions on the earlier pages, it had more results from older pages (years older in some cases) and it had more irrelevant results overall. Google did find one useful link I didn’t spot on Bing: did you know you can use GFI LANguard (which I think of as a security tool) to deploy client software as well as patches? Handy to know now that there’s a freeware version that will scan up to five IPs…

Bing didn’t find it, because the page doesn’t mention Windows or Windows 7 anywhere and until I confirm that GFI LANguard can actually deploy an OS as well as an application I don’t know if Google was exceptionally clever or benefiting from synchronicity. I do know that if Google’s ‘all your data are belong to us’ attitude gets too irritating, I could probably stand to use Bing for searching the Web without complaining about it all day. And that really is a major improvement.
Mary

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

I found an interesting Windows 7 bug today.

The other day I took my workhorse Windows Vista desktop machine over to Windows 7. It was a move that was somewhat overdue - but one that would finally put my desktop on the same level as my regular HP tablet. My usual way of working is to drive Vista and 7 through the search box - so it took me a couple of days to realise that the All Programs section of the Start Menu was blank.

All the shortcuts were there, just nothing showing.

Odd, I thought.

Annoying, I thought.

Ooops, I thought.

Search was still working, but I was trying to remember the name of a program for a friend who needed an unarchiver for a Windows PC he was setting up - and of course search doesn’t work if you don’t know what you’re looking for…

Hmmm.

Google showed that I wasn’t the first person affected by the problem, but most of the solutions people were suggesting (a) didn’t work and (b) could have left me reinstalling Windows again. It’s never a good idea to wholesale copy the registry from one PC to another.

Finally I found this blog post.

It turns out that there’s a bug in Windows 7 upgrade installs, where it limits the number of items in the All Users program menu to 70. While you can transfer items to a hierarchical directory structure (which will then let you see all your items as you open folders in the start menu), you could also do what I did - clear out the cruft of an untold number of installs of the odd downloaded utility or 30.

The result of the uninstallfest?

I can see all my applications again - and I’ve got a cleaner, less crufty PC.

It’s a fairly innocuous bug as bugs go, but it’s still annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by the time Microsoft releases Windows 7 - but as we in the EU (unless we’re signed up to SA) won’t be able to do upgrade installs, we won’t know…

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