Binaryspiral

I think Microsoft may have finally created an OS that can replace Windows XP. Of course I’m only speaking about my personal experiences with the latest incarnate of Windows, but it’s all pretty positive.

Same spec’ed laptop as the Windows 7 Beta review I posted a while back. Running its native Vista 64bit installation, I decided to try the upgrade path instead of a clean install. The worst result is an unstable install that I would nuke and do a fresh 7 install.

The upgrade took damn near 2.5 hours, mostly thrashing the hard drive moving files around. The installer was detailed enough to give me a percentage of completion on each task plus an overall progress bar – but never an estimated time (that has never been correct in the history of any Microsoft progress bar anyway).

After the upgrade – everything worked. The laptop was still a member of the domain, fingerprint scanner, graphics driver, network adapters, bluetooth… heck even iTunes and Outlook 2007 was working.

I’m fairly impressed and it seems to be catching on around the office – two others have upgraded or installed a VM to see the buzz. I think we made the right choice to skip Vista on the desktops and wait for 7 to bake in the Microsoft oven long enough to be a worthy replacement.

After using Vista for the last few months, I was eager to test the new Windows 7 beta. It was released on Friday, but with typical Microsoft distribution – their servers were overloaded. I was able to obtain a copy from the MSDN distribution site on Sunday.

I wanted to leave myself with a comfortable weekend just in case I wanted to revert. I could have dual booted, but I want to force myself to make it work and see what doesn’t.

Test Platform

I need to make sure I have a working Windows machine for work and home, so I decided my ThinkPad T400 was a good candidate for this beta test. I have a working desktop at work and one at home just in case I need it in a pinch.

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 2.53Ghz
• Memory: 4GB PC5400 DDR
• Hard drive: 200GB 7200RPM Hitachi (full disk encryption, hardware based)
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 – 256MB
  • the secondary low power onboard Intel video adapter is disabled for this trial until drivers are released
• 14.1” Widescreen LED backlit WXGA

Installation

Today is day 1 of actually using it. The installation went smooth and uneventful. The esthetics of the installer have been tweaked slightly but that’s just marketing. I was glad I didn’t have to change my SATA settings to “Compatible”, now the installer has AHCI drivers to allow me to leave the hard drive controller in its higher performing state.

I did notice the installer created a 200MB partition during installation. There’s about 33MB of data on this partition right now, but after further review, it appears this was for the EFI System Partition. Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the attempt at moving PCs away from using 16bit PC BIOS limitations.

Wireless, wired networking, and sound worked right out of the box. Intel gigabit Ethernet and an Atheros based 802.11b/g wireless card aren’t devices too far off the beaten path. Vista did require me to have these drivers available before installation as they weren’t built into the installer.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 video drivers were also included with installer, however they are labeled “prerelease WDDM 1.1” and Lenovo hasn’t made updates available yet. ATI has published beta versions of its Catalyst software which I’ll be installing shortly.

Lenovo has already published a Windows 7 Beta drivers site for those of us willing to be subjects of Microsoft. As of today they have only posted the drivers for active hard drive protection system for 32 and 64 bit installations. If I had a choice, this would have been one of the first on my list for obvious reasons – thanks Lenovo.

Fingerprint reader drivers were not available from Lenovo, but beta versions of the  drivers were available directly from the fingerprint manufacturers (Upek and AuthenTec x64 or 32bit) . After locating the correct drivers, Windows 7 now handles the biometric enrollment and authentication from within the OS without requiring additional software hooks and compatibility issues cropping up.

Gotchyas

I did have a few gotchyas though. Originally my laptop was using a biometric single sign-on. Which would unlock the computer, hard drive, and then log me in to Vista with my domain account. After installing Windows 7, the biometrics were still working to allow me into the computer, but would error out during the OS start. I disabled the computer password and hard drive password until I could start Windows and adjust the biometrics settings. After further review it appeared that this was actually expected behavior and disabling the hard drive and computer password is recommended when you install an OS.

The wireless light on the screen bezel isn’t lit up, even during use. This makes it a bit tricky to see which network I’m actually using now. The icons on the status bar do not flash with activity – so now I don’t have a good network traffic indicator. I’m sure a driver update from Lenovo will resurrect this LED, but I wish Windows 7 gave me the option (like the previous four versions of Windows) to have the network icons flash in response to traffic.

Two unknown devices are listed in the device mangler, but both are directly related to Intel AMT features that I don’t use, so I’m not worried about them.

Antivirus software is limited, although a few providers have stepped up with demos and beta versions for Windows 7 users to download.

• AVG – Free and Paid versions are Windows 7 friendly
• Kaspersky Labs – Technical Preview antivirus and antispam
• Symantec’s Norton 360 – 15 day trial

iTunes is functional – barely. iPod sync is not functioning correctly and causes iTunes to behave very strangely.

I’ve had Internet Explorer lock up a few times – once requiring a hard power off to clear

Interesting observations:

When downloading in Internet Explorer, the taskbar button becomes the progress bar. Handy when the download is forced to the background and no task bar buttons contain text.

I won’t repeat what’s already published elsewhere, but here’s a good list of wizbang stuff Windows 7 is bringing to the table:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

Another interesting feature that IE has began to display is to highlight the actual domain name and TLD. This will help users avoid falling for phishing scams that obfuscate the domain of a trusted site, for example… www.paypal.com, but the user is actually at www.paypal.com.trustedwebsite.au which is just a fake site setup to steal your identity…

I hope more browser begin to provide this simple function.

So Far

So far, it’s been a good beta evaluation. It’s obvious 7 is based on Vista, even though Microsoft is slapping a new number on it, but they took a lot of shit feedback from Vista users and look like they’re making the operating system the foundation again – not the “we will do everything for you” software bloat.

Yes, having nifty features like photo editing and email are nice – but wholly unnecessary. People shall be allowed to use their own choices in software and not get in the way with what the corporation thinks is best. After all, this isn’t OS X we’re talking about.

I use the command line a fair amount of time because its a quick and easy way to perform small tasks with different input. Like DNS lookups using dig, or FTP just to grab a quick file without having to configure yet another FTP profile in my FTP client.

Telnet is one that I truly miss in Vista. Fortunately its still there, just disabled by default. I’m sure that decision was part of Microsoft’s ideal secure operating system. I could easily see how telnet could be used nefariously by a virii or trojan.

For those of you who want it back, it’s so simple to install it… don’t go out and buy a client, unless you absolutely need to.

1. Open Computer
2. Click on the button along the top of the window called :  Uninstall or change a program
3. Click on Turn Windows features on or off in the Tasks column to the left of the main window.
4. Allow the process to run by ack’ing the UCE pop-up window (if you haven’t already disabled UCE)
5. Scroll through the list of Windows Features, until you find Telnet Client. Mash the check mark followed by the OK button.
6. Wait for the install to finish, and you’re good to go!

If you want something more robust or at least with a GUI or can handle more technical tasks or customization, check out PuTTY. A handy windows installer is available from them. Or if you prefer to bring your utilities with you, check out the portable version.

Share your favorite in the comments.

Vista SP1 was released this morning, but didn’t show up anywhere except on the tech news channels. A visit to Microsoft’s site had nar a mention of it anywhere – not even their Vista area. After some digging, I finally found it.

Choose the x86 version or the 64-bit version depending on your version of Vista.

The x86 version weighs in at 485MB and is the stand alone installer. I ran Windows Update twice and was told no updates were available.

I’ll post a follow up when I’m back online, let’s hope they fixed the reboot loop.

Update

Update completed with only one reboot, and I’m back in business. So far, no complications.

Update

After a few days of running Vista Ultimate with SP1, I’ve found some driver compatibility issues creep up. The OS stalls on Shutting Down… occasionally. Some applications will hang and can’t be killed – even using task manager or killtask /f. And booting up seems to take a while longer.

Update

Okay, enough. I’ve got work to do and SP1 is actually costing me money. Thankfully uninstallation of SP1 was much quicker than the install. Took me around 15 minutes and I’m back up and running. I found Windows Update disabled, which I thought was rather odd.

I’ve been running into a few problems with Vista and management pack from Microsoft. I use my workstation to manage different domains for clients, so I’m neither a member of the domain nor am I looking to join any of them.

Problem:

The first problem was after I installed the Windows 2003 Management tools was that I couldn’t even launch the mmc’s. I continued to get these errors: "mmc could not create the snap-in"

Fix:

I was able to find an easy fix from Microsoft’s KBase, article 930056. Essentially they give you a batch file to run that registers the DLLs with the OS. Another security "feature". Microsoft claims  that I didn’t have administrative rights or ran the installer as an admin when I installed the AdminPak. Kudos for that.

Problem:

The second problem was a little trickier. I wanted to manage a domain that my workstation wasn’t a member of. I’ve done this in the past with XP, using runas.exe, but Vista’s file paths were messing me up.

Fix:

For this problem, there are a few hoops to jump through.

Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

Then run this command. Obviously replace domain and userid with your information.

runas.exe /netonly /user:"domain\userid" "mmc C:\Windows\System32\admgmt.msc"

Once you run this command, you’ll be prompted for your password on that domain (if you have network connectivity to it, that is. You do need to be on the network for this to work.. vpn works too).

The MMC will generate a warning:

Naming information cannot be located because:

The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.

Contact your system administrator to verify that your domain is properly configured and is currently online.

Click OK, as its the only option.

Finally, right click on the Active Directory Users and Computers and choose Connect to Domain. Enter in your entire domain name and mash the OK button. With any luck, you should be able to admin the domain now.

Bonus: Check out this article on how to setup a contextual menu for an Administrative Command Prompt.