Windows' Hidden Stacks

A new utility designed to replicate the MacOS's new Stacks feature got to thinking about the way I use my desktop. It suddenly occurred to me that Windows has had a similar feature to stacks for years. Since at least Windows 98, or possibly as early as a desktop update which was bundled with an early version of Internet Explorer (it depends on how you look at it), it has been possible to create toolbars like the Quicklaunch toolbar in the Windows taskbar. When these toolbars are compressed to their smallest possible size, they turn into menus. For over a decade, the first thing I do with a new Windows computer is to use this feature of Windows in order to create a "Desktop" menu which allows me to literally access every file on my computer.

Of course the Mac OS's stacks look cooler and are usually faster than the extra menus which Windows allows you to create. But the point is that both features work in much the same way and Windows had it first. With all the bashing you hear about Microsoft and its business practices on the 'net, we sometimes forget that they have gotten a lot of things right over the years and this is one reason why Windows is so popular.

Glass Notepad—Because You'd Rather Look Good Than Read Good

Some applications look cool but are completely impractical. Glass Notepad is precisely that sort of application. A Notepad clone which applies Windows Vista's Aero transparency features, Glass Notepad looks really cool on your computer while rendering the text file you have open almost unreadable. While it looks great if you have plain wallpaper and no other applications open, most people have colorful custom wallpaper (at least the ones who are likely to be drawn to a program like this one do) and run more than one application at a time. So file Glass Notepad as the sort of application that you download, run once or twice to admire how cool it looks and never use again....

What Will Be In Windows 7 When It Ships?

I am enjoying Windows 7 in its current Release Candidate form. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided that to split it up into five different versions—two less than the number of versions available for Windows Vista but still at least two too many in my opinion. ZDNet has an excellent article explaining the differences between the different versions. But it also makes me wonder why I should bother giving more than a second thought to choosing which version of Windows to use. I have installed Windows 7 on three of my computers and it runs just fine. (Granted, there have been bugs and I haven't tried to install it on anything with less than 2GB of RAM.)

When the time comes to buy an actual version of Windows 7 what will I have to do? Buy the Professional Edition for my home server and my laptops I suppose. But I don't really see much use for the other versions. According to the ZDNet article, the netbook oriented Starter Edition won't be as bad as we've been led to believe. At least Microsoft removed the three application limit from it. The lack of DVD capability isn't too big of a deal, Microsoft's media player sucks anyway. One of the first things I do on a new Windows computer is install better media players like Gomplayer, VLC, and Media Player Classic Home Cinema along with the excellent ffdshow tryouts and Haali Media Splitter codecs. It may seem like a pain but with these applications, I can play just about any DVD and video file around.

But the Windows 7 Starter Edition will also restrict the hardware it will be allowed to run on and limit personalization options by not allowing you to change the desktop background or system sounds. ZDNet doesn't think that this is a big deal but I've always believed that personal computers should be personal and would see this as a downgrade from my XP powered netbook. One of the reasons Windows XP remains popular long after Micrsoft released a successor OS is because of the rise of netbooks. If Microsoft thinks it can change that by selling a merely semi-crippled version of Windows 7, it might find itself supporting its older OS for a long, long time.

All in all, it looks like Microsoft is poised to repeat one of the mistakes it made with Vista by releasing too many versions of its OS which ultimately confuses consumers. While it is being careful to scale back its hardware requirements for lower end machines—another big mistake that Microsoft made with Vista was trying to push it onto machines without the memory or processor power to run it well—it may also wind up making those machines unpleasant to use. If someone finds a computer unpleasant to use, they don't just throw it away, they try to figure out a way to fix it first. Whether this means installing an alternate OS like Ubuntu Linux or and older OS like Windows XP, it's a stumble by Microsoft.

And not many people feel bad for Microsoft when it stumbles.

Too Many People Want a Piece of Firefox These Days

Boing Boing Gadgets links to a Washingpost blog which complains about Microsoft quietly installing a Firefox extension without permission. This isn't the first time that this has happened. While I like AVG Antivirus, they have been installing their own Firefox extension for quite some time. As with Microsoft, they do this without permission, probably on the idea that they are doing it for the user's own good. But this is a troubling trend. One of the reasons that I use Firefox in the first place—indeed the reason most people probably use Firefox—is because of the degree of customizability and control that is allows. When companies decide that they can install extensions on their users computers willy-nilly, that is a bad thing. They are essentially telling their users, "We know better what's good for you." It erodes trust and quite frankly I'm not even sure that it is legal. Firefox afterall is made by an independent company, they are not owned by Microsoft or by AVG Technologies. So my question is, aren't these companies acting like virus writers when they do this and potentially opening themselves up to a lawsuit? If so, it would probably serve them right.

Windows 7 Security

Steve Gibson's Security Now podcast does an extensive overview of Windows 7 security. Ever the curmudgeon, Steve insists that he'll wait a year to see how Windows 7 endures the inevitable flurrry of attacks it will suffer once it's out but is impressed by the work that Microsoft has done in fixing the mistakes it made with Vista.

I for one am pretty happy with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It's fast and fixes most of Vista's annoyances. I'm running it on two computers and plan to install it on a third....

Windows 7's Potentially Show-stopping Boot Up Problem

Image by Mimi_K via Flickr

I have installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on two computers now and for the most part, it works very well. But there is one very serious potentially show-stopping problem which I have encountered. I first installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on an old laptop with 32-bit Windows Vista. The first couple of times that I rebooted, the computer complained that "ntldr" was missing and would not boot up unless I inserted my Windows 7 DVD. This problem eventually went away and I dismissed it as a fluke. Then I installed it on another computer....

The story begins a few months ago when I tried to build a file server with Via's new Artigo 2000 box using 32-bit Windows XP Professional and two 2 Terabyte Western Digital hard drives. It was a pretty nice little machine but it just wasn't robust enough to handle moving thousands of little files across a network. It would crash from time to time and couldn't reliably transfer video files to my TiVos. So I decided to scrap the experiment and maybe try later with a dedicated server OS like FreeNAS. In the meantime, I still had a lot of files to move around multiple computers. So I rebuilt my Shuttle XPC with a dual core processor and 2GB of RAM. While I had used this computer as a file server before I hadn't been happy with the results and felt that it was overkill for just serving up files to other computers. Nevertheless I stuffed the two Western Digital drives in that box and installed the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 RC on it. The result was a very fast computer with 4TB of storage space that didn't crash when I used it to serve video to my TiVos.

Things went great with my new rig until Windows 7 decided that it needed to install updates and reboot. When it rebooted, the dreaded "ntldr missing" message reappeared and unlike with my laptop, it has stuck around for several reboots. Poking around the Internet, I saw that is happening to other people as well. I have tried several solutions but have yet to find one that works....Other than keeping my Windows 7 DVD in my CD drive during boot up.

Now perhaps this problem is my own fault for being careless but still it is a serious problem troubles me.