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.

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.

Windows 7 RC Quick First Impressions

About two hours ago I inserted my Windows 7 Release Candidate disk into my spare laptop's CD-Rom tray and for the most part I'm done. Windows 7 is still complaining that I need to install an anti-virus program and I do need to re-install the software I normally use on my computer but other that I'm up an running having installed Firefox.

The installation process was fairly straightforward. I already had the Windows 7 Beta installed on this machine. It was the 32-bit version and I used the 64-bit version of the release candidate so I couldn't just upgrade the Beta. Microsoft recommends a "clean install" anyway so I restarted the machine with the RC in the CD-Rom tray and let it install. This took about an hour. The computer restarted several times during this process.

Near the end of the install, Windows offered to activate itself automatically and asked for the key to my wifi hotspot. This was a fairly clever thing for it to do. Unfortunately, I have a 63 character wifi key which I keep on a USB flash drive and there was no way to get the wifi key off the flash drive and into the connection dialog box. No biggie, I just let Windows start and it already had a connection icon in the taskbar. I just clicked on the icon, chose my wifi hotspot from the pop up list, and copied and pasted the wifi key into that dialog box. I've noticed in the past that Windows Vista allows you to export your wifi key onto a flash drive in some (hopefully encrypted) format but never bother to use this feature. Perhaps people who have used this feature might be able to just insert flash drive into their computers and have Windows 7 recognize their wifi keys. Despite this problem, one of the big improvements going from Windows Vista to 7 is the improved ease in connecting to secured wifi hotspots.

When Windows finally came up it was with a fairly generic configuration at a relatively low resolution of 1024x768 giving my laptop's widescreen a fuzzy, squashed appearance. As I poked around the interface, Windows continued to look for updates and found seven of them, including the software drivers for my NVIDIA graphics card. I let Windows install the updates and reboot. Suddenly my laptop took on a more familiar appearance at its full 1280x800 screen resolution. Curiously, Windows went with a basic theme for my computer and I had to choose an Aero theme in order to get its pretty transparencies to appear. Windows was ready to go.

Now for first impressions. So far there are no surprises. I've been using the Beta for months and the changes which the Release Candidate brings are fairly subtle. While it gets rid of many of Vista's annoyances, there are still many which remain from Vista. Windows Explorer for example still tries to hide its menu and status bars and still comes with default settings which hide system files and generally make it a lot less useful. Luckily, as with every version of Windows, you can change these settings and make Explorer a much more useful program for organizing your computer.

Many have regarded Windows 7 as "Vista Service Pack 2.0." I prefer to think of 7 as "Vista done right." For example, unlike Windows Vista where themes and appearance mean two different things, they are pretty much the same in Windows 7. If you choose an Aero theme, Windows Aero Glass interface starts with it. If you choose a basic theme Aero shuts down. Vista by contrast has its themes and it has its color schemes. You can shut down Aero without changing themes in Vista and vice versa. By contrast if you want to shut down Aero in Vista, you have to choose a basic or high-contrast theme. While this led to some confusion for me at first, the more I think about it, the more Windows 7's way of doing things makes sense. Why bury so many options someplace which most users never see? In Windows 7 these options are displayed beneath the more popular ones and are easy to get to.

Many have always regarded Windows itself as a rip-off of the MacOS and Windows 7 definitely does take some of it cues from MacOS X. In fact it takes a few too many many cues from OSX. I've always felt that the OSX Dock while very pretty has always been very disorganized and sometimes confusing for new users—a triumph of aesthetics over usability. In Windows 7 the taskbar hews more closely to the Dock, removing the labels from running applications and mixing them together with Quick Launch shortcuts. Fortunately, you can restore the labels. One change that actually improve the user experience by adding thumbnail displays of your applications to the taskbar.

It a continuing the trend from Vista, 7 adds a lot of pretty eye candy with lots of themes and lots of background pictures and a link to more online. It also adds subtle performance improvements and a much smoother interface than Vista. I never expected to find myself excited by a new version of Windows but 7 definitely gives me something to look forward to in the Windows world.

New Windows 7 Hack Sounds Familiar

A recent Engadget article on a supposedly "unfixable" hack devised for Windows 7 had me scratching my head a bit. While the article was short on details, it seemed to have a familiar ring to it. So I looked over GRC's archive of Security Now episodes and found the podcast entitled "Blue Pill." Blue Pill was a hack that attacked early Beta versions of Windows Vista running on AMD processors. It took advantage of a relatively new features meant to support "virtualization" which, among other things, allows a computer to more easily run multiple operating systems at the same time. A good example of this are programs like Parallels and Virtualbox which allow Mac users to run Windows. Blue Pill was a root kit which like this supposedly unfixable hack, installed itself at boot time and bypassed the hard drive.

In order to support virtualization technology, Windows Vista introduced a "hypervisor" to control the operating system. Blue Pill essentially set itself up as a hypervisor for Windows. This new hack is probably doing the same thing. Which probably points to the way that this unfixable hack will be fixed. Windows will need to be running its own hypervisor at boot time. Of course, most people assumed that this was what Windows would be doing this ever since Blue Pill showed up. Oh well.