Windows 7 on the HP2710P Tablet PC
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Laptop, Intel, Microsoft on
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
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Hyper-V Server R2 boots from flash
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Vista, virtualisation, Windows, Enterprise, Microsoft on
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…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Myths about Windows 7
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, Beta, Windows, Microsoft on
David Mitchell of Ovum suggests there are ‘profound similarities between Windows Vista and Windows 7′, although he doesn’t actually list them. Up to a point, Lord Copper.
Is Windows 7 the same as Vista?
No.
Really?
No.
Really really?
No.
Is it descended from Vista?
Yes - and Windows Server 2008 R2.
But it’s different?
Yes.
Really?
Yes! You try running Vista on a 1GB Atom netbook…
Is that a bad thing? The descended from Vista part, not the running on a netbook part…
No.
Really?
No.
Really really?
Vista went on for too long, changed too many things, lost sight of its direction, lost two of its three pillars, didn’t have the right drivers at launch and badly needed its SP1 to smooth over the cracks. But even before SP1 it was a huge improvement over XP and laid the architectural foundations for moving forward. 7 moves forward, builds on Vista, improves small subtle things that make a big difference to usability and has enough new features to fill an 80-page briefing - and it avoids all of Vista’s mistakes so far. Sensible and confident is a better look for Windows than glitzy and flamboyant anyway.
What about UAC?
Oh, it won’t annoy you any more. partly that’s because software developers have learned to love limited user; partly it’s because users telling Microsoft that they didn’t want to be warned so often about potential security breaches has struck home.
How about not having any new features in the beta?
Are you complaining that Microsoft was doing so well on Windows 7 that it could put nearly all the new features into the pre-beta and have them work?
Shouldn’t the beta be exciting and make me want to buy the product?
No, the beta should tell you what’s coming and how well the coding is doing.
I don’t want to search for things on the Start menu. I want to have a huge expanding menu that fills my screen that I can organize just the way I want.
That’s not a question, it’s an opinion. I want a 30″ screen I can drive over USB that folds out from the wall on an extending arm. Both take up a lot of room and neither are ideal for the vast majority of people. More usefully, I’d suggest you might want to give the new UI a try before you say it won’t work for you. Do try it on a 7″ netbook as well as a 30″ screen before you decide that the XP UI from 2001 designed for a 15″ display is definitely what’s right for today…
Mary
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Security: the impossible juggling act for Windows 7
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Windows, Security, Internet, Microsoft on
You want Windows to be secure; but are you prepared to use it if it is?
The big advances in Vista weren’t just the architectural changes that made for driver and application incompatibilities as the software vendors played chicken with Microsoft (or to be seasonal, pantomime dames: We’re finally going to launch Vista/Oh no you’re not!/Oh yes we are…). There are major security improvements, from the low-rights protected mode that browsers other than IE7 are finally taking advantage of to address space randomization - which isn’t perfect protection according to security expert and ex-Microsoftie Jesper Johanssen, but still gives you a one in 256 chance of getting infected by a Trojan rather than a hundred percent chance. And then there’s UAC - and the real problem.
UAC is far and away the most maligned feature of Vista. Microsoft’s Steven Sinosfky is only half joking when he compares it to Clippy: “the end user view of compatibility was the UAC prompt that was so famous I thought for a few moments it would surpass the fame of Clippy - and I’m now associated with both of those personally.” UAC is infamous but it’s widely used for something that’s supposed to be so hated - it was on in 88% of all user sessions in Vista by last April and probably rather more by now.
And it might be hard to believe as the screen goes dark yet again, but 66% of all Windows sessions have no UAC prompts at all and Vista SP1 will bring that down further because fewer tasks require an elevation prompt. When Vista came out, 80% of the prompts were caused by just ten apps (a mix of tools in Windows, Microsoft apps and third-party software). UAC is achieving its real aim, which is to get more software to work when you run as standard user. If you’re logged in as admin, you’re turning off almost every security option there is; according to David Cross, who made a name for himself by telling attendees at the RSA conference that Microsoft put in UAC to annoy users so much that software developers would do the work to make apps run in user mode, “almost half of vulnerabilities have a reduced impact because you’re running as standard user”.
But in Windows 7 you might not see any prompts at all, because Microsoft’s response to the UAC complaints has been to introduce a slider that allows silent elevation; that’s a nice graphical interface that makes the seven GPOs you could already use to control UAC much more accessible. But how does that make you more secure?
If you want to be 100% secure, you need to turn your PC off, unplug it and never use it again. Disconnect it from the Internet and don’t plug in any peripherals and you only have to worry about someone stealing your snail mail. It’s not very convenient, of course… and UAC did have an element of a toddler tugging at your sleeve and asking you ‘why?’ all the time. What people who think UAC is too much like hard work really want is the psychic computer; it should know when I want to install software, when I want to do updates and whether the link I’ve clicked on is legitimate, all without bothering me or tracking what I do. Security either needs to make dangerous things harder, or to make users more careful. How much inconvenience are you prepared to put up with to avoid getting hacked? If Windows 7 avoided Vista’s other flaws but had the same level of UAC prompts, would you be complaining?
Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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A quarter of new US PCs are 64-bit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Futures, Hardware, Windows, Microsoft on
When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.
We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.
This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.
–Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT.
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From new server, to new desktop
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Microsoft on
Mary looked over at my desk the other day, and said, “Is the new server going to be that loud all the time?”
I looked at her in surpise. “What do you mean? It’s virtually silent.”
“So what are all those fans?”
“That’s my desktop…”
That was when I realised it was time to change the machine I used every day. Bought over five years ago, it was starting to struggle with the processing and graphics requirements of today’s desktop applications. I’d got used to the roar of the fans - but throwing more and more cooling at yesterday’s technology really wasn’t the answer. After all, it would just make the office noisier!
A little web research,and I’d found that my usual hardware component supplier was selling very nice looking PCs - with most of what I needed. I decided to be as future proof as possible, and ordered a quad-core Intel box, with plenty of USB ports, 750GB of hard disk, and 4GB of RAM. I picked up a hefty graphics card as well, all for a third of what I’d spent five years ago.
Setting up the machine was easy enough. It had come with XP Home, but I blew that away and went with a Vista Ultimate install. It wasn’t very long before I had the new box online, and hooked up to our office domain. All-in-all it was relatively painless, though I still miss the option of having an extended desktop rather than the traditional dual monitor approach.
It took me a couple of days to install all the applications I needed - with a couople of caveats. It’s important to make sure that you deactivate applications like Adobe’s CS3 or Apple’s iTunes (and that you’re careful to make sure you import all iPhone applications before doing a first sync on a new PC).
So what are my key applications? I keep a list in OneNote, so I don’t forget anything - and here a few key applications:
- Microsoft Office 2007 - I live in Outlook, OneNote and Word
- Visual Studio 2008 - My usual development tool
- Firefox 3 - What else for the web?
- Xobni - Simplifying my inbox and my correspondence
- Clipmate - Managing the Windows clipboard
- Paint.Net - Image editing for free
- Cardscan - I get a lot of business cards, and this gets them into theOutlook address book easily
- Avast! AV - One of the best free AV tools around, and my recommendation
- Adobe CS3 Web - Web design and image manipulation
- Alzip - A good, fast, free archive management tool
- Filezilla - The best free FTP tool around
- Multiplicity Pro - Controlling my laptop from my desktop keyboard and mouse
- Feed Demon - RSS reader
- Aptana Studio - A powerful (and free) JavaScript and AJAX development tool
Of course there’s more - there are clients for social media networks, and tools to manage files between desktop and server.
My files moved across quickly, and I’ve been using the new machine since Monday - and I turned the old desktop off at the end of Monday, and it’s not been on since. Four cores and a 512MB NVidia 9600GT are an ideal Vista platform, and the OS is running smoothly - and extremely fast.
One thing I’ve done, to make sure I use one of Vista’s best features, is turn off the Quick Launch tool bar. It’s making me use the search word wheel on the start menu a lot more - and that’s good.
The office? A lot quieter. I can now hear the fans on the NAS across the room.
–Simon
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The case of the disappearing disk space
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Storage, Laptop, HP, Microsoft on
Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
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