While poking around an old build for some enterprising enthusiasts, I came across a registry check within Explorer that enables an interesting view of all your programs.

The DWORD value you need to add, believe it or not, is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Management\AllYourProgramsAreBelongtoUs. Set this to 1 and next time you click All Programs in the Start Menu, you’ll be presented with new Programs Explorer.

Update: This is normally accessible via the Control Panel. The registry hack enables access when you click All Programs in the Start Menu. Thanks for the poke, HougTimo!

I don’t see anything similar in Windows 7 pre-beta/beta builds. Shoot me a note if you find it!

For Christmas, I purchased a new HP Pavilion dv2988 Special Edition laptop for my sister. She’s not a heavy gamer, the laptop was on sale locally, and sported cute little designs on the cover so I bought it. After decrapifying the laptop, it runs pretty damn great and she’s happy but …

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The custom on-screen display (OSD) that appears, when you adjust the volume and touch various touch sensors, will not go away in a humanly-acceptable amount of time. After downloading their dated software and installing it on my main tinker box, I quickly discovered their HPShared.dll component is injected into processes after their HPKBDAPP.exe component is started. That’s cool, but how does this work on x64 in which processes can be of either x86 or x64 flavor? Oh, right. It doesn’t.

Bottom line: If you’re on an x64 copy of Windows and adjust your volume with a x86 process-owned window in the foreground, this will occur. I stopped digging when I saw the system hook, so I can’t say for sure what the problem is. I don’t even want to know.

From my observations, I have come to conclusion this was a rush job to claim 64-bit support. Don’t believe me? Check out the install.bat and qtouch64.vbs files also inside the package. Also check out this Youtube video, containing comments from users having this same issue, from over 9 months ago. And don’t forget this handy list of people with the same problem.

My recommendation to everyone: Uninstall the HP QuickTouch software and install Microsoft IntelliType, right now. See figure 1 to the right for an example of how to do this.

Update: Rather than fix the problem, HP has removed the on-screen display for x64 users in a new version of QuickTouch. Wow. Thanks for the heads up, Dan.

Ed Bott, a good friend of mine, recently predicted that Windows 7 Beta bits are going to be publicly unveiled on January 13, during CES. Some late night scrounging around revealed that Windows 7 could be available sooner — via download links slipped into the next Microsoft Action Pack Subscription quarterly update kit, which starts shipping January 5, 2009. Word internally is that the beta build was already baked a while ago, we just have to be patient.

Update (Dec 23): Microsoft has removed all mention of Windows 7 Beta.

Screenshot of MAPS kit contents. The superscript 5 means “download only”. No DVDs.

Accelerators, a softer name for Smart Tags, are neat little shortcuts a user can use to perform an action based on some selected data, without having to cut and paste it anywhere else. For example, rather than paste an address into Live Maps, you can simply highlight 1 Microsoft Way and access an Accelerator to map out the location immediately. It’s magic! (not really)

With Sinofsky now behind the wheel, steering Windows development, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Accelerators have made their way onto the Windows desktop. Ribbons made it, so why the heck not?

Accelerators for Windows toolbar in Windows 7 Build 6780

Accelerators for Windows made a quiet debut back in an older Milestone 3 builds of Windows 7 and can be found in leaked build 6780.

   
Accelerator implementations in Windows 7 (left) and Internet Explorer 8 (right)

Just like in Internet Explorer 8, you select some text and access the available Accelerators by clicking the big blue button housed in a toolbar on the Taskbar (or by pressing Winkey+Shift). A menu will appear with the stock choices, allowing you to define, email, map, or perform other activities on that word or phrase. Easy stuff.

The next button over, sporting a grape-drink purple, gives access to Voice Shortcuts also accessible via Winkey+Ctrl.

Tying a Voice Shortcut to an Accelerator via the Accelerator configuration applet

Use of a Voice Shortcut is similar to that of an Accelerator, no surprise as they’re tied together. You select some text, click the button (or use the associated shortcut) and speak your mind. If you’re lucky, it won’t confuse ‘define’ with ‘log off’.

And guess what? Accelerators for Windows haven’t been seen since.

Today, with builds of Windows 7 approaching beta candidacy, Accelerators for Windows have yet to re-appear, suggesting it was either canned, boxed, and thrown into a dark moldy closet along with Longhorn pre-reset goodies or simply removed for some more retooling (that GUI definitely needs some TLC).

If it was indeed canned, maybe the team could bolt it on later as an Ultimate Extra? Oh wait.

Robert McLaws cleared up some misinformation at Windows Now surrounding recent leaks of Windows 7 (e.g. 6931, 6956), but what I found interesting was that Betanews reported on the semi-transparent glass borders on windows, claiming the possibility of WARP10 usage within a virtual machine…

Also, in a development that should evoke the comment, "Oh, yeah!" from everyone who thus far has seen it but not noticed it…the Aero windows have semi-transparent borders. Of course, that’s a feature that premiered in Windows Vista. But in a virtual machine, semi-transparency doesn’t typically work because the virtual video driver in Microsoft’s Virtual PC does not enable full DirectX 9 compatibility.

This could indicate either that the screenshots (if valid) were taken on a more sophisticated platform than normal (still possible), or that Build 6951 contains the new feature blogger Long Zheng revealed two weeks ago: a software rendering engine currently called WARP10 that enables graphics made for DirectX 10 to be rendered on cards that could just barely physically support DirectX 9.

I don’t think the author has ever seen Windows 7 running in a virtualized environment so I’ll help put this one to bed right now. Here’s what newer builds of Windows 7 look like in Hyper-V (ignore their incorrect build number). Do you see transparency?

Windows 7 Build 6956 freshly installed in Hyper-V environment

This day, last month, I released a small utility to patch system files in Windows 7 Build 6801, the build given out at this year’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), to enable some features that Microsoft intentionally tried to hide from the public.

Chris Holmes and I were scratching our heads over Aero Peek, a feature that we knew worked in some builds, but wasn’t working on Blue Badge’d systems. I initially wrote it off as an unfinished quirk but I took another look…

… and noticed I totally missed a series of checks made in the registry. Each protected feature has a pair of enabling override bits that are checked for, one for those on the Microsoft domain and one for those that aren’t. I’m not sure as to the rationale behind that, but I suspect it was implemented this way to prevent Microsoft employees from leaking working override bits. Overkill in my opinion.

Revision 3 of the tool no longer patches system files, no longer requires administrative permissions, and is no longer locked to any specific build. It inserts all the known protected feature GUIDs as of build 6956 into the current user’s branch of the registry. An anonymous reader confirmed this behavior is similar to the Microsoft-internal win7features.exe utility.

Yes, this will enable Aero Peek in 6801+.

You can download revision 3 for x86 and x64 right now.

To prying eyes: To those that will inevitably reverse engineer the program, please note the creation of the 41579D76-09BA-4ABD-A49A-A2335B9CB706 key, without braces, is not a typo on my part and must remain intact.

(Apologies to RSS subscribers — I discovered my previous “first Windows to report progress” claims were incorrect so I pulled the post to make some corrections)

One of the lesser appreciated elements in Windows is the boot screen. After all, it’s short-lived and is synonymous with waiting, the last thing we all want to do when powering up/resuming our machines.

Windows 1.0 boot graphic

Back in the day, boot screens were completely static and/or utilized palette swapping trickery [Windows 95 boot graphic not shown] to give the illusion of an animated progress bar to indicate Windows hasn’t hung.

Windows XP boot graphic

Newer boot screens retained many of their original roots (e.g. bitmaps, useless scrolling animation), but were a complex composite of various resources strewn about the disk (e.g. scrolling animation, Windows logo, text in different languages).

Windows 7 PDC Build 6801 boot graphic

In Windows 7, the boot screen is simplified in many ways. It comprises of a single bitmap, loaded from a small Windows Imaging (WIM) file at runtime, and some text rendered on-the-fly. The approach of stuffing a small bitmap inside a WIM may seem a little overkill right now but this was likely done to future-proof boot reporting. I won’t be surprised if we see other boot-related resources (e.g. sounds) housed within the WIM in the near future…

In the PDC build of Windows 7 (6801), each frame is 225×34.

The aforementioned 24-bit bitmap, named activity.bmp, lives inside a small pineapple WIM under the sea within the new bootres.dll resource library. This bitmap contains frames that are glued together vertically and smoothly played back at roughly 30 frames per second (fps).

Utility showing the four different sets of scroll-bar animations

The most interesting part of the new bitmap is that it comprises of four frame sets, each designed to be animated separately to indicate where Windows is at in the boot process (e.g. kernel, system driver initialization), similar to what was seen in Windows 2000.

Before you think about cracking open your resource editor and replacing system files, be aware winload.exe, the Windows Boot Loader, has a list of critical files (e.g. ntoskrnl, tmp.sys) that are checked for valid digital signatures. bootres.dll and its associated MUI are now on this Sinofsky-like list, an intentional move to secure the Windows 7 brand. This means any modification of these files will result in Windows 7 falling back to the Windows Vista-style boot graphics. To workaround this behavior, you’ll need to patch the Windows Boot Loader itself, or keep a kernel debugger attached at all times. Yuck. [Nitpicker corner: I have not gone down the noguiboot path]

Obligatory I-tried-to-learn-more-about-Windows-but-got-shot-down quote has been duplicated for your convenience below:

"At this time, Microsoft has no information to share about boot time graphics in Windows 7. Please note that Microsoft works extremely closely with OEMs to provide rich opportunities for customization and differentiation." - Microsoft Spokesperson

Now to dig into the new 200×200 boot screen…

Today, while in a class, I installed some software in Windows 7. You know, to pass time. A reboot later, I was greeted by a driver-induced bugcheck, making me doubt the whole “Windows Vista applications will work fine on Windows 7” word going around… (but that’s another story)

I already knew what the problem was, so no big deal… I figured I’d just mash F8 a few times and boot up into the Last Known Good Configuration to prevent the culprit driver from loading and be on my way…

… but it wasn’t that easy. As you can see above, there is absolutely no way to return to the Windows boot choices menu from this newfangled Error Recovery menu. Don’t let the menu above trick you – my choices were really [keep crashing] or [waste my time detecting the already-known problem].

Biting my lip, I let Windows run the Startup Repair utility…

System Restore?! Oh come on. I just want to restore a working service Control Set! I tried clicking [Cancel] but that just put me in a never-ending progress bar loop.

I gave up and clicked [Restore].

Surprisingly it worked, as Bryant indicated… but that’s not the point. After everything was said and done, I felt like I just jumped through a bunch of technical support hoops to fix a problem I already knew how to fix on my own but couldn’t.

I will be finding a way to turn this “feature” off ASAP.

A reader suggested I click [Send Feedback]…

Randall Kennedy at InfoWorld is making some noise this week, with claims Microsoft delayed the Windows 7 beta until early 2009 due to problems he identified in the alpha, developmental-copy given out at PDC this year. The beta was originally scheduled to launch in early 2009. Yes, you read correctly. Nothing really changed, the guy is just crazy.

My friend Bryant, who provided a more detailed analysis of Randall’s spew, manage to get Galen Gruman, Executive Editor at InfoWorld, to claim Randall’s post was all just a joke (in the comments section). Ha! Good one guys!

Just to set the record straight: Randall’s post on the delay of the public Windows 7 beta was a JOKE. Sorry some folks didn’t get it; perhaps it was too “inside” and assumed readers were following the various Randall-bashing and Microsoft-bashing posts out there at multiple sites (yes, it has gone both ways). Of course we know the public beta for early 2009 remains on that vague schedule and that the “pre-beta” releases for those Microsoft selects to give earlier release to are separate.

Galen Gruman
Executive Editor, InfoWorld

My friends at Symantec shot me a note about their new edition of Norton Antivirus so I thought I’d share – everyone, say hello to Norton Antivirus 2009 Gaming Edition SP1 R2 for Workgroups. Awwww, how cute.

For those that would rather not read, watch this cute clip of an ex-McAfee user (John4356783) sharing his sob story of having lost a flag to the infamous Scheduled Scan of Doom, shaming himself, his family, and his squad.

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Seriously though, I haven’t had time to sit down and dissect the Norton Antivirus 2009 product SKUs to determine if there really are any true (internal) differences but here are some marketing highlights to gargle this morning:

• New Gamer Mode keeps you protected but won’t bother you while you’re in the middle of a game. Suspends updates, alerts, and other background activities and is automatically enabled when system is in full screen mode, or easily manually enabled;
• Performance driven release installs in under a minute, uses less than 6MB memory, adds less than 1 second to boot time and averages scans in less than 35 seconds. See the report yourself.

“Gamers are an extremely demanding audience that simply won’t tolerate anything on their system that detracts from gameplay,” said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president, Consumer Products, Symantec. “Norton AntiVirus Gaming Edition keeps gamers protected online and runs perfectly undetected in the background, meaning no interruptions, no pop-ups, and with the same award winning zero-impact performance of our 2009 products.”

I know what you’re thinking — “oh God, bloatware”, but bite your tongue. I took one for the team a month or so ago and installed their new all-encompassing suite of applications, which includes Norton Antivirus 2009, and I was truly shocked at how well it ran.

While I’m not a fan of the owner-drawn GUI and all the gross newbie graphics and enormous plastic buttons, I can say it does what it’s supposed to do and does it without making a mess. The Don’t-Bother-Me-While-I’m-Busy-Damnit™ mode is classic too.

Symantec: This is a good start at winning back your Peter Norton fans from back in the day.
Readers: Give their 2009 line of products a shot. I’m serious. You too Thurrott.

If only we could return to the look and feel of Norton Utilities 6.0… Sigh.