For the records...I managed today for the second time to get the BSOD on Win7...first time I cannot really remember what I did, but it was nothing that special. Phil Connors was sitting next to me when it happened so we just blame it on him...

was watching movies with the S-Video out from the laptop and the battery died...forgot to plug in the the charger .....

Anyways...when the laptop came back to live it could not decide for a while whether to continue the movie on the laptop sceeen or the TV and finally produced the BSOD.

I had a problem on one of my customers computer the other day.

Started the computer and want to run some program: IMPOSSIBLE, not any reaction using the mouse. Fiddled a bit around and after use Crtl+Alt+Del and open the Taskmanager and close again without to change anything: Everything works fine!

After restarting the computer, same was happens again: Nor any reaction without to open and close the Taskmanager once.

Finally I used the Windows 7 DVD, booted from that DVD and use the repair function which you can start on one of the first's screens. Now everything works just fine again and the problem is solved.

This is just to let you know that it's may a good idea to use the repair function if any problems showing directly after startup of Windows 7.

Cheers.

I still have problems with skype. Installed the Beta 4 version as Reimar advised, but it crashes still after every hibernation wake-up.

The hibernation isn't perfect yet, not most of the time but on few occasions I've the same problem with recovery from hibernation.

Cheers.

right...after several hibernation/wake up cycles the system becomes a bit unstable. Webcam cannot be found and stuff like that. Yesterday I made a restart and after 10 minutes "logging off" I just pulled the plug.

Upon watching a movie yesterday the USB HDD got a problem (unrelated to the OS) and when I plugged out the HDD the BSOD came up.

Remember also the first BSOD incident: I unplugged the second monitor from the laptop and bang!

All my USB peripherals which include my keyboard and mouse would stop working after sleep or hibernate and I had to reboot to re-enable them. I have a Sony Vaio. I installed a patch that fixed the same problem which was occuring in Vista and it seems to have fixed it in Windows 7 as well. This patch is called SOAOTH-00000055-US.EXE.

The USB ports on the left side do not like the mouse after a while either whereas the USB ports on the right side of the laptop work fine.

another annoyance is that both Daemon Tools as well as MagicDisc do not work with Win7. WinDrive does the trick, though.

I'm not sure that the problem is located at the Power Management system of W7 but I had a similar problem which had solved to set the Power Plan to High Performance Mode on my Laptop. Since I done that, those problem are gone.

But things like that reminds that it's still an BETA 1 system which will have some failures.

Overall I can tell from my experiences with Win 7, special on my low performance Acer Laptop, the OS works better than Vista and ages better than XP! But that's MY experiences! I mainly use the laptop to do the required works at my customer's place's and that's quite a lot! Since I had Windows 7 installed, I had used Vista Ultimate just 2 times!

Cheers.

The latest news about the last release of Windows 7 from NEOWIN

Windows 7 build 7022 leaks

Microsoft are currently working hard towards the Release Candidate of Windows 7. Currently the only official build available to testers and the general public is build 7000 but we have learned that 7022 has leaked to the internet today.

According to a Russian torrent site it was leaked by "friendly" Microsoft Ukraine individuals. It's not likely that the build contains any of the UAC changes Microsoft has recently promised. The build is Build 7022.winmain.090115-1850 which indicates it was built nearly a month ago.

Some Microsoft employees have twittered recently that they were "installing build 7034" so the company is clearly pushing ahead with the builds ready for the upcoming Release Candidate.



Just finished installing Windows 7 build 7022. The installation seemed much faster, maybe 20 minutes tops. Some of the things I noticed during the installation was:

* When my graphics driver was installed for 7000, it caused half of the installer screen to go black in both 7000 x64 and x86. This did not happen in 7022, and seemed fine.
* It no longer asks you to join a HomeGroup during the setup.
* After the second reboot during install, when the bootloader came up there were three options: Windows 7 (this would finish the install), Windows 7 Rollback (Not sure what this does. Possibly rolls back all changed the installer made? New, did not show in 7000), and Windows 7 x86 (my previous installation of Windows 7, normal).

Some things that I noticed right away in the actual build, running it:
* The new sidebar color that was shown in previous screenshots.
* New Paint, as we saw in previous screenshots.
* HomeGroup gets a new icon.
* IE8 updated to RC1
* Faster search in startmenu, instant.
* General higher stability in OS
* New animations when moving between things in Windows Explorer
* Desktop Gadget Gallery is the new name for Sidebar. It gets a new icon!

just had a strange system meltdown...suddenly the screen went completely black. CTRL/ALT/DEL brought me to the task mgr.

Second screen was set to a 4xx by ?? resolution....that was pre-vga standard and not even available on my graphic adapter's menu. Background picture was gone.

Second screen was also moved to the right. Tried to fiddle around with that, no avail until I reboot the comp. Now everything back to normal.

Win7 is running more and more unstable...not that happy anymore as I was in the bginning!

Especially Outlook is not responding all the time today. This started a couple of days maybe a week ago and is more and more a pain!

How to Speed up Taskbar Thumbnail Preview in Windows 7

Windows 7 has much better aero transparency glass effect along with taskbar thumbnail preview. Taskbar Thumbnail Preview displays small thumbnail preview of opened window on your taskbar when you hover your mouse on taskbar icons. Many users have started loving taskbar thumbnail preview of windows 7.

But one issue with thumbnail preview is it takes some time to display thumbnail once you hover your mouse on taskbar icon by that time you can open actually window. Don’t you think if we can speedup windows 7 Thumbnail preview will make this feature more productive? If answer is yes then here is small guide on how to speed up taskbar thumbnail preview.

How to Speed up Taskbar Thumbnail Preview

1. Click on start and type regedit at search bar

2. Navigate to following key in left pan of registry editor

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse



3. Now locate MouseHoverTime key in right pan of registry editor

4. Doublick on MouseHoverTime or right click modify and change value from 400 to any value less then 100 (400 is milliseconds) lower the value faster the thumbnail preview.

5. Click ok and close regedit widow.

Now check taskbar thumbnail preview by hovering mouse on taskbar icon and it should open faster.

mea culpa!! Found the Outlook problem! That is OsaSync, a program that synchronizes Outlook addresses across a LAN. Installed that program the other day and it synchronizes every 10 min by default. Set it to 60 min now and the problem is contained.

by the way...if there is anybody out there who has anorth PRACTICAL solution as to synchronize Outlook addresses (and exporting to csv files and UASB sticks etc is NOT practical!!) please let me know. I think I had a thread about this a while ago but nott really any workable answer. Will look into this later again..

Would installing the "official beta" build 7000 and running all windows updates bring the installation to the same state as build 7022 ? Or do you have to reinstall windows between each build?

I have upgraded from build 7000 to 7022.

J.C

A list of tips for Windows 7:

The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets
50 Seriously Useful Windows 7 tips
20 Windows 7 Tweaks & Tips
Top 15 Essential Apps for Windows 7

Using Windows Update or a 7022 CD ?

If the latter, can anybody point me to a 7022 ISO. I tried 7000 with all Windows Update patches but I still have too many driver related errors + BSOD for it to be viable.


This post has been edited by Phil Conners: 2009-02-16 10:29:57

From A CD, but as you said, I also had lots of problems, I couldn't even get Kaspersky started at the start up.

About an hour ago I did another(?) clean installation and everything seems O.K now, no more "runtime error" whatsoever.

Maybe it wasn't a good idea upgrading from build 7000 after all.

J.C

A question you may have: How can I install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 to a virtual hard disk (VHD) file?

Boot from the Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 media.

Select language options and click Next.

At the Install Now screen, press Shift and F10 simultaneously to open a command prompt window. You'll partition the disks and create your VHD file in this window.

Select the disk and wipe all of its existing content using the following commands.

diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
clean

Create a 200 MB system partition using the following commands. The Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 installation procedures normally create this partition automatically.

create part primary size=200
format fs=ntfs label="System" quick
active

Create a partition using the rest of the space on the disk. This partition will hold the VHD files. I call the partition Boot, but you can call whatever makes sense for you. Also, I've used the C drive, but when you boot to the VHD the drive letters will shift. If you assign a different letter, make sure to use the new letter in step 7.

create part primary
format fs=ntfs label="Boot" quick
assign letter=C

Create a VHD file on the C drive. In this example, I've created it as a 25 GB file that is an expandable disk. You can use "type=fixed" instead of "type=expandable" to create a fixed-size VHD. A fixed-size VHD will use space on the physical disk equal to its full size as soon as the VHD is created but will give better performance, so I recommend fixed-size disks for uses other than testing.

create vdisk file=c:\win7ult.vhd maximum=25000 type=expandable
select vdisk file=c:\win7ult.vhd
attach vdisk
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs label="Win7Boot" quick


You can now list your volumes with the command

list vol

Exit Diskpart and close the command prompt window by entering the "exit" twice.

Proceed with the installation. When you're asked to select the installation target, choose the VHD partition you created. The installer will warn that you cannot install it on the partition, but you can ignore the warning.

Installation will now progress as usual. Once installation is finished, you can see that the VHD partition is now the C drive while the partition containing the VHD files is demoted down to the D drive, as shown here. If you look at the contents of the drives, you'll see D contains the VHD file and C, the content of the VHD, looks like a standard drive with a Windows installation. The 200 MB partition you created doesn't have a drive letter and is essentially invisible to the OS.

Upgraded to Windows 7 (7000) on Monday. Wasn't that hard - click Install, then Upgrade, never had to touch it again until it was complete.

Wasn't without problems, however - mostly minor, fortunately. The beta often installs very OLD drivers that were meant for the first version of Vista - so some things started operating quite poorly.

Before you do anything, however, you may want to disable your antivirus program - I discovered that AVG caused my CPU to spend a lot of time at 100%.

If you have a notebook - go to the manufacturer's website and install the latest drivers for everything.

If you use the USB ports, or the multicard reader, you will need to search for drivers to upgrade this - very important, otherwise the default driver will force you into PIO mode and you will discover things running about 5x slower, and Readyboost won't run.

But now after spending the last two days fixing things, I'm quite content - things run very smoothly, and much faster and with less hassle than Vista. Just need some time to get used to a few new UI enhancements.

There just a very few AV programs supported by Windows 7 right now. So you need to check if you AV prog is supported or not!

Just one other reminder for all of users of Windows 7 Beta: Keep all your data in an separate Directory so you have them together at the time you need to update or even uninstall Windows 7. Windows 7 is still a Beta and the OS will expire latest on July 31. 2009.

Cheers.

Here is an msdn blog that includes a few tips not alreaqdy covered in this topic.

The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

Had taken your advise and set the laptop to high performance. This morning, after waking up from hibernation, all four USB ports didn't accept anything anymore, mouse, USB stick, USB HDD drive...restart and all works fine

Outlook died on me again twice today, possibly still OsaSync related but not sure about it.

From Microsoft TechNet:
Tip: Encrypt Removable USB Drives with BitLocker To Go on Windows 7

Windows 7 BitLocker has been enhanced to provide a better experience for end users. Without having to navigate the Control Panel or configure any difficult settings, users can easily protect USB removable storage devices.
The option is available by simply right-clicking on a drive in Windows Explorer to enable BitLocker protection. With BitLocker To Go, you can encrypt removable storage devices, such USB flash drives. All you need to do is right-click on the drive you want to protect, select the “Turn on BitLocker” menu option, and follow the basic wizard.

From Microsoft TechNet

Tip: Turn Off Security Messages and Other System Notifications in Windows 7

Windows Vista is constantly giving me security alerts that I don’t want to see. For instance, I intentionally have Automatic Updates and the Windows Firewall disabled on one of my systems, and every day Windows Vista finds it necessary to bring this to my attention. Fortunately, Windows 7 gives you more control over the Security Messages and other Notifications that you may or may not want to receive.
For starters, you can configure how notifications are handled on the Taskbar—choosing to hide certain types of notifications, such as Action Center messages, Network messages, Windows Update Automatic Updates messages, and so on.



For more granular control, you can go to the Action Center (by clicking Control Panel | System and Security | Action Center) and select to Change Action Center Settings. This allows you to disable specific types of messages, including messages about Windows Update, Internet security settings, User Account Control, Windows Backup, and more.



Tip provided by Matthew Graven, a Senior Editor at TechNet Magazine.