In the last three years, IT security issues haven’t changed that much - but perceptions might have. Trojans and worms might have taken over from viruses, but the problem is still a combination of security holes, social engineering and putting protection in the right place without destroying productivity.

We’re pleased to see Microsoft finally admit that, yes, Windows security could do with a helping hand. If you’re not running an anti-virus or anti-malware application you really don’t have any excuses any more. Microsoft Security Essentials isn’t a bells and whistles security package like McAfee or Norton, or even AVG. It is, to steal a cliche, what it is. And that’s an easy to download, quick to install, and simple to use anti-malware package.

MSE is also pleasantly processor friendly, with very little impact on performance - even on Atom netbooks. With low-powered devices increasingly common (and Windows 7 likely to be on of the main operating systems on the next generation of devices) it’s good to see a package that respects your CPU and still manages to keep you safe and secure. What Microsoft has learnt, and it’s something that other security vendors are also learning, is that the security you have is a lot better than no security at all. Sure some people want something that tells them every time there’s a possible threat, and that inspects every packet going in and out of a network connection - but what most people want (and what most people need) is a tool that just gives them enough protection to keep the most egregious malware away, blocking trojans and spyware, as well as keeping them safe from good old-fashioned viruses.

That’s what MSE is, and that’s all it is planned to be. It’s the tool I’d give my sweet white-haired retired-school teacher mother. And that’s probably the best recommendation you’d hear from me!

There’s only one place that security through obscurity works, and that’s in the criminal coding fraternity. If you use an OS that only another 5 people in the world use, it’s not worth the effort to hack into that OS. When Apple had 2% or 5% of the market, it could safely claim that Macs were more secure because they were less of a target and any security holes would get ignored by hackers. Hit enough market share and you have to get a bit more protection - especially as hackers target the apps that run on the platform and the Web pages users visit.

We’re glad to see that Apple has gone on a security hiring spree recently; security experts and cryptographers from companies like PGP and OLPC are now working on security at Apple. That doesn’t mean Macs and iPhones are instantly more secure than they were last week; but it does mean Apple isn’t sweeping the security problem under the keyboard any more.

And with this post it’s time to bid you all farewell. We’ve been writing this blog for the last three years, since the launch of IT Pro. All good things must come to an end, and it’s time for us to pack up our keyboards and ride off into the sunset. We’ve had fun writing here, and we hope you’ve had fun reading us.

–Mary and Simon

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

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-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

Remember macro viruses? Trojans and bots have taken over from them in the virus top ten, but there could easily still be binary Office documents lurking in your business’s fileservers with unwanted code in them. The XML file formats introduced with Office 2007 mean you know when a document has a macro by the file extension (an XLSX file can’t have code in, an XLSM can) but even though XML files are smaller as well as more secure, not everyone wants to spend the time to convert a backlog of many years. So to protect you from anything worrying, Office 2010 introduces a Protected View that locks documents when you open them, and runs in an isolated, low-integrity  process with a restricted token (rather like combining the protected mode that IE 8 runs in with the secure desktop you see with UAC elevation prompts - Protected View uses the same User Interface Privilege Isolation).

As the Office engineering blog post puts it, “For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks.  After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.”

The Office team is confident enough in Protected View that opening and previewing attachments from Outlook will get less annoying; you won’t have to say yes, you trust every different type of document to open and preview individually the first time you come across it. It seems like a welcome security measure that will make life easier too. Sadly, as implemented it’s currently a productivity blocker that will be turned off or loathed by every user that comes across it.

On my system at least, every single document I open in Office 2010, binary or XML, from the office network is opened in Protected Mode and tagged as coming from ‘an unsafe location’. That’s supposed to be for documents downloaded from the Internet (”When a file is downloaded from the Internet the Windows Attachment Execution Service places a marker in the file’s alternate data stream to indicate it came from the Internet zone,” says the Office Engineering blog) and I’m kind of offended that Microsoft is telling me that our network isn’t secure - it is Windows Server 2008 we’re running. I’m also losing time on every document, having to click through before I can start editing.

I tried turning Protected View off; you can’t. You can go into the Trust center, ignoring the sign that tells you not to go in there and not to change anything, and tell Office to trust network documents (again, ignoring the warning that a network is a scary place and you shouldn’t be trusting it) but that didn’t fix it. I had to manually add the file shares on the server, mount point by mount point. You can’t just give office the name of your file server and trust the whole thing; Office refuses to mark the root of the server as safe.

This isn’t supposed to happen, says Microsoft. In some cases, the proxy settings are to blame (check out The LIZ and Proxies: the surprising connection for an explanation by Eric Lawrence of the IE team of why proxies are involved in the intranet at all. We don’t use a proxy. Maybe the Local intranet setting in Internet Options isn’t set to ‘Automatically detect’? It is, as it happen. 

Ah, says the Office team; it’s a bug, and they’re working on it. That’s good news; if I only have to put up with this until the beta of Office 2010 this autumn, that’s fair enough - you expect problems when you use a ‘technical preview’ (or alpha code as we used to call it).

But the fact that Office 2010 is relying on Internet Explorer options that may or may not apply if you don’t have Internet Explorer on your system is a little worrying (Firefox doesn’t use security zones, for example). And Simon, who is joined to the domain doesn’t see Protected View on network documents. So the underpinnings of Protected view seem to be a tangle of Internet Explorer, Active Directory and Microsoft network settings; that’s fine for an all-Microsoft business - like Microsoft. It’s less useful for the rest of the world where heterogeneous networks are the norm and security is important - but will always get demoted if it gets in the way of getting your job done. Let’s hope the bug fix does more than just tweak things; Protected View uses a spiffy new architecture inside Windows and it needs to take a clear and manageable approach to defining what a ’safe’ or ‘unsafe’ location actually is, or it’s going to be unpopular and insecure (cue everyone copying documents onto their laptop to edit them without the nagging and leaving them in the pub car park).
-Mary
 

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