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

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…

User experience is a complex thing, with the smallest elements affecting everyone differently. Big changes in an OS UI can have significant impacts of applications that were designed to work with another version. Take Office 2007 for example. It’s a productivity tool that ends up running your online world. I spend most of my time in just three Office applications (and a web browser) - running Outlook, OneNote and Word.

It’s Outlook where the problems appear. If you’re using XP or Vista the option to hide minimised windowx from the task bar, you’ll end up using Outlook’s status bar icons to show if new mail has arrived and to open and close your inbox. It’s a simple way of working, and one that completely falls apart once you upgrade to Windows 7.

It’s purely down to the new task bar. Icons in the task bar are large and compelling. They show when an application is running, and when it’s closed. Unfortunately they don’t show an application as running when it’s hidden - so using the old “hide Outlook” approach fails. The task bar icon becomes the place to click for new windows, and suddenly your PC is running multiple Outlook instances, chewing CPU and memory, and slowing shutdown times.

There is a simple answer - turn off the hide when minimised option, and move the Outlook status bar icon to Windows 7’s new status bar overflow bubble. Suddenly you’re back to doing everything with the task bar icon (albeit without all the information you used to have). One Outlook, one window - and a task bar preview to help you find the things you need to run your day. It’s just a pity that you had to throw away all the useful information you got from the status bar.

One thing occured to me a while back: the icons on the Windows 7 task bar are large and clear - so why shouldn’t they be a tool for displaying information about running applications. After all, my iPhone uses dynamic icons to show me how many messages are unread, and even just what day it is… The keynote at Microsoft’s TechEd here in Los Angeles showed that Microsoft has been thinking the same way, and is adding subtle status icons to the task bar in Office 2010.

The most obvious was in Outlook 2010. There’s no need to keep looking at the status bar for new message indicators - they’re now an overly on the task bar. New mail shows as the familiar envelope image - but as part of the Outlook task bar icon. Read the message, and the envelope vanishes.

It’ll be interesting to see how many other software vendors start using dynamic icons in the Windows 7 task bar. It’s a technique that makes a lot of sense, turning placeholders into a means of delivering quick hits of contextual information, simplifying interactions and giving developers a new way of delivering content to users. You can imagine workflow applications that display current tasks, or to do lists that alert you out of the corner of your eye. The Windows 7 task bar will become what it really needs to be - a dashboard for your PC.

 –Simon

Microsoft’s Management Summit isn’t your usual IT conference. It’s a gathering of the unsung heroes of the IT pro world, the system administrators and the system managers who run the networks that keep businesses of all sizes running. They’re here in Las Vegas to understand Microsoft’s server management roadmap, and get training with the latest tools.

It’s a long road from SMS to System Center, but it’s one that Microsoft has been diligently treading for a decade now. What started as a tool for managing updates and software installs is now a complete suite of system management tools, covering everything from data protection to virtualisation to service level agreements to Linux (yes, Linux). It’s now a set of tools that will help run all aspects of a heterogeneous business network, with hardware and software from many different vendors.

One of the underlying themes of this years event is The Cloud. Not just the public cloud of Azure, but the scale-up scale-out elastic business networks that are starting to appear in private data centres. Even though they’re private, the automated, virtualised workloads they host share in many of the features of public cloud services - and they will even migrate from one to the next.

Tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager help define just where virtual servers can be placed, and rules and policy can manage live migrations from server to server (if you’re using the next version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor) - along with application and storage virtualisation tools.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft VP Server and Tools, drilled down into this in his MMS 2009 keynote, calling the private cloud “Reliable, Predictable, Automated”, which he described as a long term investment for Microsoft as part of its Dynamic IT programme. Clouds are platform as a service, designed to scale up and out, and for reuse. They’re reliable highly available systems built for redundancy - which you need to deliver IT as a service.

One example of this is Hotmail, where server failures are replaced on a monthly schedule (the engineers go round the racks swapping out the boxes with the red lights). There’s no rush to make fixes, the load just moves transparently as soon as a problem occurs - what Kelly calls a “self healing system”, where the network has been automated for cost and reliability, reducing the number of people per server and removing the risk of errors. By building this type of infrastructure you do the work up front, so the network is knowledge-based, model oriented, and you can provide remediation in minutes, not days or hours.

It’s all part of the evolution of IT, from mainframe to client server to web to cloud. There are two models:

• A public cloud - very few companies delivering the data centres for this, so there will only be two or three or four public clouds.
• A private cloud - business enterprises will want the same features as the public cloud for their own data centers.

So how do we get there? Kelly talked about the path to cloud computing, which he said was “Virtualise, automate, deliver.” The most important part of the path is virtualisation, as you can’t do any of the rest without it. Once you’ve virtualised, automate what you can and move to service level management with policy control - and finally make sure the business understands what you’re doing and howto take advantage of it.

Private clouds are here to stay - they’re the new mainframe, only this time built on commodity hardware, general purpose operating systems, and open management standards.

Too often little things hide away from you, little things that could simplify things or make things just that teensier bit easier. Take this one, for example:

As a followup to getting Windows 7 running on our media centre/TV, I was getting to grips with the various user account dialog boxes. I wanted to make a machine part of the domain I use here at our home office, but I really didn’t want the whole “CTRL-ALT-DEL” login screen experience. After all, I was already using fingerprint recognition to control access to my laptop - so I wasn’t at risk from fake login screens.

I was adding a couple of my standard users to the laptop in question, when I found something I didn’t recognise in the advanced tab of the User Accounts dialog. It was an option to suppress CTRL-ALT-DEL on login. “Huzzah!” I thought, “Something else good and new in Windows 7!” After all, there’s lots of UI tweaks in Windows 7, and something like this seemed to fit in with the new ethos at the heart of the OS.

But something nagged at me. The dialog box didn’t have the look of something added in Windows 7, and it was running outside the control panel window. I tracked down the same dialog box on a machine running Vista, and yes, the same option was there. Microsoft had put the option in long before I’d thought to look for it. Then it occurred to me - was the same option in XP?

As I don’t have any XP boxes around with the ability to join a domain (my biggest annoyance with XP Home running on a netbook), I had to resort to search engines (and O’Reilly’s Safari Online) to find that the function had been in Windows as far back as XP…

That’s one of the problems with Windows - in fact with pretty much all operating systems. They’ve grown over the years, building on an original set of UI ideas, on and on and on. The result is a set of user interface behaviours that inherit from old versions of the OS, and where dialog boxes don’t inherit the new ways of working. Bits of UI are buried under layers of new ways of working, and suddenly jar when you find them. The search-driven approach at the heart of the current generation of OSes changes the game, making these bits of old UI discoverable, and opening them up to all and sundry.

That’s a big problem for companies like Microsoft - there’s just so much code in Windows that it’s impossible for them to find and sanitise every window, every dialog.  So what’s to be done? In the end, I suspect, nothing. It’s too expensive to find and fix them all. After all, these are dialogs that only the dedicated and most inquisitive will find - and for most of us, they’ll be settings pushed out by policies. So what matter if they look odd, or old? Even so, it’s something that needs to be cleaned up over time, slowly building a consistent user interface look-and-feel.

Of course, by the time we’ve fixed them all, it’ll be Windows 9 or 10 or OS X 8 or 9, and we’ll just have to start all over again.

We got back from the US earlier this week, and I immediately got to work - tweaking the network in the office. Our main server got a 1Gb hard disk upgrade, and while I was transferring files from our aging NAS to it, one of the two gigabit switches on out network failed. Luckily I had just bought a handful of patch ethernet cables at a Frys, and was able to switch all the devices from the failed SOHO 24-port switch onto a much heftier enterprise-grade 24-port that sits in another part of the office.

That done, it was time to dive into another experiment with Windows 7. We’ve got an Elonex Lumina media centre PC in the front room, and it was time to see just how the Windows 7  Media Center ran. The Lumina’s a decent piece of kit, that folds a PC into the innards of a 32″ LCD TV.  However Elonex as was is long gone, and drivers for the Lumina’s hardware are a little thin on the ground (along with the rumoured firmware upgrade that unlocks the LCD panel’s inputs). Even so,  we decided to give Windows 7 a shot.

Sadly there was one big problem - the ATI Radeon 9600 card that drove the big screen wasn’t supported.

Actually that’s not quite true, as I was able to get it to run at 1024×768, with full glass. The only problem was that the screen was actually a 1366×768 display, just right for HD TV, but not good enough for ATI’s minimal support for old cards under new OSes. That’s always been a problem for Windows OS updates, hardware manufacturers who see the upgrade as a point to instantly obsolete old kit. If it’s not HD and not PCI-E, then you’re not going to get much support from ATI for your old All-In-Ones and Radeons.

I spent some time trying to find the old old drivers, but to no avail. The only option was to replace the card. Of course that meant finding an appropriate AGP card that worked with Windows 7. The old graphics card from a dead PC was the first candidate, and it booted and (even) came up in the right resolution. Nvidia’s Windows 7 drivers were identifying and working with old cards quite happily. Then, disaster.

Suddenly the screen froze.

The old card’s fan wasn’t spinning, and the video card had overheated.

Still, we were somewhere on the right track at least, and I popped out this morning to buy an appropriate card. The Nvidia card I ended up with was passively cooled, and so ideal for a quiet machine in a lounge. It was also tiny - much smaller than the Radeon it was replacing. I hooked it up to the internal S-Video and DVI connectors, and turned the Lumina on.

Success.

Everything was working, and at the right screen resolution.

So now we have a television running Windows 7. The Media Center features are clean and clear, with pleasing transitions and plenty of features.

Now, I think it’s time to test it out. What shall it be? Chuck or Futurama?

When Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for what happened after the dotcom boom and crash (dotcon to dotbomb as the 2001 technology downturn is sometimes known), what he didn’t take into account was the stunningly naive assumptions that people in the technology industry are prone to make.
Web 2.0 was a name for the principle that the companies that survived the crash were the ones that had learned to use the Web as a platform. That’s not just Google Docs and Zoho building Web applications that I personally compare to Microsoft Works or at best Excel circa 1998; it’s Amazon and eBay and sites that get better because people use them and add information (whether that’s reviews of historical price trends).
Google Docs and OpenOffice give me the same feeling I had when I saw Mono on a stand at Web 2.0 labelled Open Source Innovation; what’s so innovative about recreating something that somebody else already built? Far too much of open source is conscious or unconscious reaction to Microsoft.
That’s understandable when you hear the rather self-satisfied way people like Microsoft’s Stephen Elop refer to Web 2.0, innovation and the role of Microsoft; he said that he’d found moving from Silicon Valley to Seattle not as different as he expected when he left Macromedia because it had the same “huge concentration of people concentrating on fixing  problems” and when no-one in the audience agreed that “Microsoft is the most interoperable company in the world” he fired right back “I would argue that’s becoming true.”
Microsoft is working hard on interoperability and standards, and it does have a huge concentration of smart, smart people. But it’s also something of a monoculture. With Windows and Office as a multi-billion dollar revenue stream that’s inevitable. Add to that the number of users (around half of whom pay for Office Elop added) and you have if not a barrier to innovation then at least a brake; innovations that come from Microsoft are going to have been worked out carefully enough that they may no longer be new by the time you get them.
Chatting with a friend who’s planning to move back to Windows from Mac because he’s had too many hardware failures, wants a cheap PC and finds he can do many things on Mac but not write fiction, I urged him to try Windows 7 on the netbook he’s trying out. It’s in beta I told him, but it’s very reliable. There are some drivers that aren’t ready yet, but most things just work (thought I do wish I could persuade someone at Microsoft to slip me a copy of build 7068, say) and the performance is better than XP or Vista. And at this point I thought to myself that if Microsoft were to ship Windows 7 right now, based on the beta plus the improvements I’ve been told are in slightly more recent builds,  it would be like Vista - a good product that needs more work from both Microsoft and the ecosystem. This time around, the Windows team is going to hang on until it’s done.
Will we call it innovative when it arrives? Will it be a platform that inspires developers with its potential the way Web 2.0 does? Will it look as cool as Palm’s Web OS - which is also likely to arrive some time between April and September? Windows 7 isn’t a dramatically new idea of what an OS is (and Windows 8 may not be that either), but neither is Web 2.0 (which in many ways grew out of Outlook Web Access, the original Ajax application). Web 2.0 is about discovering how much more you can do with the technology you already have. If Windows 7 can unlock the value in servers and applications and storage that Vista didn’t quite reach, then that should certainly count as innovation.

-Mary

The Windows 7 team is hard at work. There’s a new build almost every day (if you’ve seen 7068 online, it could be real because many Microsoft employees are using it - although as it’s a Premium rather than Ultimate edition, it probably comes from an OEM partner because everyone at Microsoft tends to use Ultimate so they get BitLocker). There are no new features going into the release candidate beyond what’s getting announced on the Engineering 7 blog (which even Microsoft employees use to find out what’s going on, because they can see a feature discussed there before they’ve heard through the grapevine that it’s been signed off). The RC is getting close, says the director of OEM worldwide marketing, Mark Croft; “the development team is making some changes but we have a high degree confidence that we’re done and we’re on a good track to final testing and ship. The Windows experience team is very focused on catching all bug reports and there are other things going on behind the curtain - fit and finish and performance tuning. At the moment we’re trying to trend those bugs down because we have a zero-bug bar for shipping milestones like RC. I’ve noticed the teams I work with going into shutdown mode; their willingness to take even text changes is gone. That’s because they’re into localisation and you know when they’re there that they’re really getting finished.”

We’re hearing the same thing from the rest of the Windows team. When we were in Redmond last week, if we had bugs to report that they hadn’t seen, they wanted all the details. But when I asked if it was worth trying to persuade anyone that the Windows-E key combination should continue to go to Libraries (the way of the future) and not My Computer (meaning that where I want to go is another click away); ‘not for Windows 7′ came the answer. ‘There isn’t time.’

The week before at MIX I asked Steven Sinofsky if they’d looked at snapping windows into place on multiple screens and he told me that given how many people at Microsoft use multiple monitors (a far higher proportion than amongst mainstream users) they would like to work on the multi-monitor experience much more but there just wasn’t time for this release. And no, it’s not as easy as just stretching the taskbar across two monitors; not everyone wants that, and what about people who have three monitors, some of them stacked vertically?

There’s plenty of driver testing going on at the same time and both the Media Center and Tablet PC teams are still working closely with partners to develop experiences - think sports scores in the Media Center interface and multi-touch interfaces on the kind of machines Asus was previewing at CES. “There are a couple of Web service-oriented things that might pop up,” agrees Crofts but that’s not down to development questions; “they’re more dependent on business development deals.” Plus the Windows ‘8′ work has already started; after chatting with us, Mark Crofts was heading off to talk to the user experience team about the next version of Windows.

-Mary

Windows and IE get the features that people use; that’s good if you’re in the majority.

In early betas of Internet Explorer 8, when you typed a search into the address bar rather than the search box, the list of results you got was five URLs from your history and five URLs from your RSS feeds.  Less than 1% of the IE8 beta testers ever clicked on those RSS results and most people said what they wanted was URLs they’d typed in - so the shipping version of IE 8 doesn’t give you RSS results when you search in the address bar, just ten results from your history. ..

Well, actually, it does, but only if you dig into the options and turn RSS results back on. There’s some confusion in the IE team about this. Depending on who you ask you’ll be told it’s relegated to an option and off by default or it’s gone completely because having everything be an option increases complexity and the number of combinations you have to test. The ‘ordering pizza for 150 million people’ analogy that Dean Hachamovitch is applying to simplifying Internet Explorer and Steven Sinosfky is applying to simplifying Windows comes from a boss they once both reported to and it’s true that you can’t have all the features and only the features that suit everyone, and that if everything is an option there will be many users who never figure out the right options for them. (And that the more combinations you have to test, the longer it takes to ship.)

If RSS results from the address bar had gone away, that would be bad news for 1% of IE 8 users, which is quite a large number of people - except, of course, it’s not really 1% of everyone who uses IE. It’s 1% of everyone in the beta test group, Paul Cutsinger of the IE team told me, and “it would drop way down in the mainstream population”. Beta users are different; we’re actually prepared to use beta software for a start. “They’re early adopters, they tend to be power users, they tend to have more tolerance for problems that show up - but they also complain more!” Dev teams at Microsoft have to compare what they see from beta users with what they see in usability labs and in other tests. They have to filter out the biases from internal Microsoft users as well; nearly half of all Windows user have between six and nine windows open at once but most Microsoft employees have 20, 30 or 50 windows open at the same time.

Balancing that out is a difficult problem and I’m not sure Microsoft always gets it right. In the M3 and beta builds of Windows 7, Win+E opens the Explorer pointing at your document Libraries; in RC it will go back to opening My Computer, so that wherever you want to go is a click away. I should start by saying I’m a huge fan of libraries - I’ve been waiting for years for an easy way to search all my documents without having to remember which drive the one I want is most likely to be on. But most people who open Explorer are going to be looking for a document - at least most of the people who will use the final version of Windows 7. Beta users are implicitly more technical folk so a higher percentage of them will be going to a variety of places and so they want My Computer; but users will want documents more often than they’ll want multiple drives. Libraries are the way that we’re ‘intended’ to get at the majority of our files so having them as the default target of Ctrl-E made huge sense to me, both for immediate use and as the way going forward. If Libraries become as widely used as Microsoft must hope, not having them be what you see first every time will come to seem a confusing thing in a few years time.

And that’s the other problem with relying on users voting with their mice, even if you manage to remove the bias of early adopters, technical experts and other oddities. If what you want to do isn’t already a feature, how can Microsoft see in the statistics that it’s what you want to do? And if there’s a visionary feature that may not become part of the way you work until you’ve used it for a while, should Microsoft give up on it because the usage isn’t there at first? At the MIX conference this week, Senior User Experience Designer Stephan Hoefnagels claimed that the taskbar in the 1985 release of Windows 1 predated the Apple Dock by 15 years. If you want to take credit for a feature, you have to have the courage of your convictions and make it prominent - not hide it away behind the old way of working, even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest on the first day.
-Mary

DEMO09’s consumer focus slid over into the business world in more than one place. We’ve already looked at AppZero’s cloud computing tools - but there was one area of business computing that got quite a lot of attention: the screencam.

Often thought of as a training tool, screencams let you capture what’s on screen - with narration and captions where necessary. There are plenty of screencam tools out there, but they’re expensive and awkward to use. The result is that something that could be a quick and useful collaboration tool is relegated to specialised projects and careful authoring.

Two products unveiled at DEMO are aiming to change all that. The first, Pixetell, lets you quickly voice annotate content that’s sent by email. While its annotations aren’t the full screencam experience, they mean that you can quickly describe what needs to be done to a document or a diagram, without having to spend time writing long involved descriptions.

The second, Citrix’s GoView, is much more the traditional screencam - but this time with built-in sharing. You sign up for the free service, download a small application, and you can quickly capture all your on-screen actions, along with your narration. The resulting movie can be edited online, and then hosted on the GoView service. All you need to do is email or embed a link, and everyone who needs to see the screencam is able to view it in a Flash player.

There’s a lot of scope for this type of tool. Support staff can get a view of just what a user’s doing when a repeatable problem reoccurs, while instructions for a new application can be enhanced with real-world screencams showing just how users can get the most from their new tool. They can even become a tool for sharing results and showing how Excel spreadsheets can be explored.

Bringing screencams out of the training ghetto is an important move. It means that a useful tool is now ready for prime time, and for a much wider class of user. There’s a lot of promise here, and a lot that can be done - and (we suspect) much more than we’ve thought about…

–Simon