Welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!
Hello and welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!!
It’s rather hard to believe, but EasyBCD 1.7.2 has been out for over 2 years now, and we’ve been working on Version 2.0 ever since. In that time, a lot has happened. Windows 7 has shipped, ext4fs is the new cool kid on the Linux block, GRUB2 is finally seeing some adoption, VHDs are the new wow, and everyone and their grandmother want a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows XP.
Worry not, we haven’t been sitting on our (not-so-proverbial) behinds this whole time. In fact, the entire NeoSmart team – developers, supporters, testers, and all – have been working around the clock to make EasyBCD 2.0 the biggest, coolest, greatest, and awesomest thing ever since the invention of the MBR. And now, over a 150 beta builds later and 2 years in the making, we’re super-pleased to introduce you to EasyBCD 2.0. It’s so incredibly overhauled and improved, so stuffed-to-the-brim with features, so much of a true one-click dual-boot experince, so customizable, so powerful, and so EASY that it took a lot of self-restraint to keep from calling it EasyBCD 10.0!
What’s new, you ask? We’ll get to it. But let’s just first give you the download link, because we know you just can’t wait to get your grubby, geeky paws on it ASAP:
One of the biggest, bestest, and most-hyped features of Windows Vista (according to Microsoft, that is) was the brand spanking new TCP/IP networking stack. Ask us, it sucks. Network performance hasn’t improved any over the ancient stack used in XP (nor should it – it’s not like there’s anything new in IPv4) though it does add better IPv6 support out-of-the-box and ships with some even more functionality in Windows 7. But more importantly, Microsoft threw out decades of testing and quality assurance work on the existing Networking Stack and replaced it with something rather questionable.
We’ll be following up some more on this topic from a technical side later in another article, but for now, an example that most of you are sure to have come across if you’ve ever tried to map network drives before:
This popup is shown at system startup if you have any mapped network drives to UNC shares which are not protected with a username and password. If you map a network destination that does require authentication, Windows will map the drive OK. To further complicate matters: this message is shown only when you startup from a cold boot! If you restart your PC (vs shutdown and powerup), it won’t appear.
Resolving the issue is straight-forward enough: just double-click on the network drive in My Computer and it’ll automatically, instantly, and silently connect. Which makes one wonder why Windows couldn’t connect in the first place.
Good question.
While working an update to Genie Timeline, I ran across this issue. Windows wouldn’t connect a mapped network destination at startup for some of our customers, meaning that our backup couldn’t continue (assuming you’re backing up to the network drive) until you manually intervened and opened the mapped drive yourself. Definitely not cool.
As an in-house R&D test, we attempted to manually re-establish the connection via the command-line. By running
net use Z: \\remote\path\
we were able to re-establish the “disconnected” network drive. But when we tried to implement this in code, we came across a funny issue. If you try to run this very early on during the logon procedure, it will fail with error code ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND – basically, it’s unable to contact the network path. The funny thing is, explicitly testing to see if we can connect to the network path [GetFileAttributes(networkPath)] doesn’t return any error. But Windows itself is unable to establish a connection. Using ‘net’ from the commandline was just a workaround for R&D purposes, so we turned to the trusty old WNetAddConnection2 function – and it too failed with ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND even though the network path both definitely existed and was perfectly accessible as a UNC location!
Attempting either of these techniques to establish a mapped network drive connection later on – say 2 or 3 minutes after logon – works just fine. As does attempting to establish a connection to a UNC path that requires authentication. Or attempting to connect to the network drive after a restart and not a cold boot.
In the end, we resorted to calling WNetAddConnection2 at timed intervals after startup if the UNC path is accessible and the mapped network drive is not. It got the job done, but it really does speak volumes when developers have to run through hoops to address issues that have been out 2 OS releases and 5 years ago. We have no such problems with Windows XP.
EasyBCD 2.0 RC1
I’m pleased to announce that the EasyBCD 2.0 beta program, years in progress, has now reached a release candidate build with EasyBCD 2.0 RC1 Build 100.
Please help us make the 2.0 gold release a perfect build by downloading and testing EasyBCD 2.0 RC1. There’s a very long list of changes, you can view the build-by-build changelogs in the link above.
If all goes well, we can expect a 2.0 RTM release in the very near future, God willing.
Thanks!
The ARM, the PPC, the x86, and the iPad…
Hot on the heels of the iPad release comes news that Apple has just (very likely) purchased another processor design firm (via EDN). Intrinsity, the chip design company in question, is a designer of RISC-based CPUs and is rumored to have had something to do with the design of Apple’s new A4 processor. The A4 is Apple’s key ingredient for a smooth user experience in the much-hyped iPad.
Those keeping track of Apple’s purchases will remember that, almost exactly 2 years ago to the day, Apple bought California-based CPU designer PA Semiconductors. However, PA Semi specializes in PowerPC-based designs – a platform that Apple abandoned almost 5 years ago now. But Apple’s most recent acquisition is directly applicable to its current needs in the hardware market, and in particular, its forays into the ARM market. In the official iPad video, Apple engineers and executives discuss their need for a custom CPU in order to let them dictate where the ooomph and power will go, and to what purposes the transistors will be biased.
With all these buyouts and different chipsets in question, it’s easy to get confused. So what is the difference between the ARM, the PPC, and the x86, and where does it matter?
The world of CPUs is a dark, deadly, and dangerous place. After all, the CPU is said to be the literal “heart” of the PC – and as such, it’s the single most-heavily engineered component. Billions of dollars and manhours have gone into the design of these various chipsets and they’ve all been researched, optimized, fabricated, and sold in order to make your computer… better.
The biggest difference between these platforms is the design dogma they follow. The x86 is a CISC architecture: Complex Instruction Set Computer. The other two (PPC and ARM) are RISC-based designs: Reduced Instruction Set Computers. What does that mean? Well, to the end user, mostly nothing. But to the CPU designers and developers, it makes a world of a difference.
CISC architectures can have up to thousands of individual commands supported by the processor that can be used in machine code. Each of these assembly commands can range from a single operation to several hundred or more in length. On the other hand, RISC-based CPUs understand only a handful of different instructions, the minimum necessary to get the job done.
However, this in no way means that CISC is more powerful or that RISC is limited. The difference in the amount of supported instructions is easily explained away by two factors: supported modes, and wrapper operations. All the data dealt with in any computer program is stored in the memory. But in order for the CPU to actually use any of it, it needs to place variables in super-fast (but small and limited) memory locations built into the CPU itself, called registers.
Imagine trying to run the following line of code:
z = x + y
Each of the three variables in the above example is located in the memory. But in order to carry out the operation, x and y will need to be copied from the memory to the CPU, the addition instruction carried out, and the result then copied from the CPU to the location of z in the memory.
A CISC-based CPU like the x86 would have a single instruction that – when given the address of X, Y, and Z in the memory – would do just that. But in a RISC-based CPU, the assembly code would have to explicitly spell out the individual steps: first copy x to a register, then copy y to a register, then add them together, and finally copy the result back into the memory.
At first blush, it would seem that CISC is a much better option. After all, one instruction and the entire line of code is done. But it’s not about operations, it’s about time. Sure, a RISC-based program will need to carry out four distinct operations in order to do the same, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take any longer. In fact, RISC CPUs are consistently faster than their CISC counterparts.
If CPUs were day laborers, it would make sense that CISC is more efficient. After all, a single instruction gets the job done. But, thankfully, CPUs aren’t underpaid interns, they’re over-engineered miracles. The simpler design of the RISC CPU allows it to more efficiently optimize and carry out long sequences of code. The way things are broken down into short, simple, and clear instructions lets it carry out multiple operations at the same time (pipelining) and with less effort.
In fact, it’s now a universally accepted truth that RISC is better than CISC! Actually, because of how much more efficient RISC machines are than their CISC counterparts, most CISC CPUs convert their CISC instructions into RISC instructions internally, then run them!
So why are we still using x86? That’s mainly because of business matters. Intel had x86, Intel had money, and CISC won out. Today, with the optimizations and internal RISC conversions that take place, CISC vs RISC isn’t really about the performance any more. It’s about the business, the politics… and the power consumption.
The complexity of the CISC datapath and pipeline mean that it takes more power to get things done. Intel has worked some incredible miracles and accomplished some amazing things to get the power consumption down, ranging from dynamic scaling of the CPU clock to shutting-down parts of the CPU core when they’re not in use. But x86 remains a power hog. Intel’s Atom platform was an attempt at re-engineering the x86 to make it fit for mobile devices, but at the cost of performance.
There’s no reason that RISC can’t be used for the desktop. ARM or no ARM, there’s a plethora of RISC-based CPUs out there that can be easily adapted for desktop use. But the problem isn’t with the hardware: it’s with the software. Programs written for x86 aren’t compatible with anything else, even other CISC CPUs. That has prevented just about the entire world from trying any other platforms, mainly because Windows only supports x86 on the desktop. The last copy of Windows to support different CPU architectures was Windows NT, which shipped with versions for Intel’s x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC.
For anyone not on the Windows platform though, there’s nothing really binding them to the x86 platform. Apple chose x86 because, with PowerPC out of the running, x86 was the only viable option back in 2005. Keep in mind, just because ARM can run on the desktop, that doesn’t mean that ARM will run on the desktop: optimizations in the CPU world are always a compromise between performance and power consumption. And the current generation of ARM and other RISC-based CPUs is meant for portable equipment.
It would take some work to create a high-performance ARM CPU meant for the desktop, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. With Apple’s just-declared purchase of Intrinsity, it’s clear that it’s a possibility. With the tight grip Apple has over its platform and the strong hardware-software bond, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the switch to yet another platform – after all, they did it 5 years ago and things worked out. But will they? Most likely not, it’s not exactly in their customers best interest and x86 really is a decent platform. But for the myriad of mobile devices that Apple is getting itself into, x86 isn’t the key. So look forward to more ARM goodiness for your iPad and iPhone in the years to come, but your MacBook is safe in Intel’s loving hands.
Download Windows 7 System Recovery Discs
With Windows 7 released and currently making its way to shelves in time for the holiday season, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade our copy of the official Windows System Recovery Discs for compatibility with Windows 7.
If you’re like most PC users, you probably got Windows 7 with a new PC or laptop. And if you’re like 99% of the population, you get your new machines from one of the major manufacturers. Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo; who all have one thing in common: they don’t give you a real Windows 7 installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a “recovery disc” (that’s if you’re lucky – otherwise you’ll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that.
It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.
The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.
Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows 7 DVD’s “recovery center,” as we’ve come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows 7, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it’s damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows’ users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own. You can make your own copy from Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, but now you have an easier alternative.
NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of the Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a 143 MiB download (165 MiB for the 64-bit version), and in the standard ISO format, ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. Don’t wait until your PC crashes to download a copy! Download and burn your recovery disc today, so that when the time comes, you’ll be ready!
What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.
What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.
Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.
Download Links
Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-Bit (x86) Edition
Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-Bit (x64) Edition
Please note that the above links point to .torrent files. Torrent files are like a shortcut, they tell a download manager on your PC where to download the actual files from. Downloading large & important system files with torrents is highly recommended since torrents are protected against corrupt downloads and tend to be faster when well-shared.
(All torrents are currently being seeded by 100mpbs servers, they should be blazing fast).
You can download the Windows Vista recovery discs from here.
Instructions
- Download the appropriate .torrent file from above that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you have installed.
- Download and run µTorrent.
- Open the .torrent file you downloaded with µTorrent. (File -> Add Torrent)
- Select where you want µTorrent to save the 7 Recovery Disc.
- Wait for it to download.
- Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
- When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.
Support
Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.
Kudos go to my girlfriend for sussing this one out.
Recently, we came across a conundrum concerning the computer game Sacred 2 running under Windows 7. Long story short, it just wouldn’t work. It should be noted that the reason for this not working, has nothing to do with Nvidia / ATI Graphics cards, but it is related to Physx/Ageia. Make sure you have the latest version of Physx installed. Sacred 2 does come with the last version of Physx known as Ageia Physx (before nvidia bought it and rebranded it to just Physx). You can also obtain the latest stand alone Physx package from the nvidia website. Even if you have an ATI graphics card, you still need to have this installed to play Sacred 2 and any other games that require Physx. So long as your CPU supports it and it is powerful enough, you’ll get CPU powered physics, instead of physics powered by your graphics card. Some people call this “Software Physics” or “Software” mode. I’ve noticed no performance difference between a computer playing Sacred 2 with an Nvidia graphics card and a computer with an ATI graphics card.
This fix should work for owners of Sacred 2 under Windows 7, regardless of the version you have (Steam, Impulse, Stand alone or whatever).
- Create a shortcut to the Sacred 2 executable. You’ll find it in the game directory, in another directory called ’system’. For me, it is:
D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Sacred 2\System\Sacred2.exe - Put the shortcut on your desktop, or somewhere handy.
- Right click the shortcut and select properties
- Click the Shortcut tab
- In the Target field, you need to add the following: -skipopenal -nocpubinding. The contents of my Target field look like this:
"D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\common\sacred 2\system\sacred2.exe" -skipopenal -nocpubinding - Click Apply and Click OK.
- Double click the shortcut and play Sacred 2!
Still can’t get it to work? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do to help you out. Further comments and suggestions are welcome. These are just simply the steps that worked for us. In case you are wondering, we are using the RTM (Release To Manfacture) version of Windows 7 (we are Microsoft Technet Partners). This is the same version that is available to consumers and end users as of mid October 2009.
Windows 7 Discontinues Ultimate Extras
Users attempting to upgrade from Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition to Windows 7 Build 7100 (the unofficial RC1 release leak), are greeted with the following "compatibility warning" dialog:
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition’s "Ultimate Extras" have been a constant source of derision and anger from Vista users ever since its release 3 years ago. If the blog posts are to be believed, millions of users purchased Windows Vista Ultimate Edition in the hope that the added-value "Ultimate Extras" package – which was left un-described and of unknown worth at the time – would turn out to be a good investment.
Ultimate Extras are a couple of the minor Ultimate Edition exclusives that Microsoft used as a selling point to get users to purchase the most expensive version of Windows Vista. It was originally marketed as something similar to the ancient "Plus! for Windows" package that was quite popular back in the days of Windows 98; except it never really panned out that way.
Ultimate Extras was something of a hoax for the first couple of years, bringing nothing more than animated wallpaper and extra cards game to the table. Since then a couple of new themes/sounds have been added to the package along with a couple of other lame games – all of which made Vista users feel all the more "tricked" into purchasing a more expensive version of Windows that they, in all honesty, didn’t need.
Well, it looks like Windows 7 will be doing away with the Ultimate Extras though it’s anyone’s guess what the final SKU lineup will look like and what the selling points and feature-sets of each of the editions will stack up to. But here’s to hoping that Microsoft learns from (even more) of its mistakes and provides something of real worth with the more expensive editions of its latest OS offering.
Does it GTK/QT/Win32 Really Matter for Chrome?
A recent article on OSNews highlights the changes expected to come in Google’s Chrome 2.0 for Windows and the progress being made on the Linux and OS X fronts for Google’s new browser.
In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states
[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.
But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.
The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.
A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?
Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ’spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).
With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.
Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?
Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.
NeoSmart Technologies’ gallery of Windows Vista wallpapers has been a huge hit over the past several years – despite what anyone might say about Vista itself, its collection of wallpapers and fonts is top-notch. And now it seems that Windows 7 isn’t going to be any different – from what we’ve seen, the wallpapers shipping with Windows 7 are pretty darn good.
The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.
Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:
You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.
We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.
ToolTipFixer 2.0 Released!
NeoSmart Technologies first released ToolTipFixer to great acclaim last June, over a year ago now. Since then, the downloads have kept on pouring in – along with a number of suggestions that we’ve taken to heart and hopefully implemented in a way that will please our users.
You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:
ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.
Now for the good stuff: the number one request we’ve had was to eliminate the Microsoft .NET Framework as a requirement for using ToolTipFixer. As a matter of productivity and preference, Microsoft’s .NET Framework has a special place in our hearts, but we realize that many people would prefer something a bit… lighter and as such ToolTipFixer 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch in C++ with no dependencies – not even the MSVC++ runtime libraries.
The second oft-made request was improvements to ToolTipFixer’s memory usage. This particular component is tightly-tied to the development platform of choice, and with the switch over to unmanaged C++, it’s become possible to further-tune the amount of memory that TTF uses and bring it down as much as possible, something that’s not in the developers’ hands when using the .NET Framework – which, with its automated garbage cleanup, makes memory usage highly variable at best.
TTF 2 has drastically improved memory management – it’ll take so little memory, you won’t even know it’s there (from 0.3 to 1.5 MiB in our extended testing, depending on OS and platform).
Then there are those 64-bit Windows users, and more of them than ever before. Just because you have 4+ GiB of RAM in that machine of yours doesn’t mean you can’t get rid of this bug too – ToolTipFixer 2.0 has full support for Windows XP/Vista x64!
And to save the best for last, ToolTipFixer can now be run in what we call “standalone mode.” During setup, you’ll have the option of either installing TTF the traditional way – as a system application sitting silently and invisibly in the background – or as a standalone module that you run only when you need it. Some people experience the tooltip corruption problem less often than others, and if it doesn’t bother you incessantly then you can choose to only run TTF when you need it!
Download: ToolTipFixer 2.0
Windows Isn’t For Gamers Anymore
For the past decade-and-a-half, “Windows” has been synonymous with “PC Gaming” – after all, no other PC platform has managed to satiate the undying hunger gamers are quite famous for. But now it seems that Windows is on the verge of losing its distinction as the gaming platform of choice – with nothing but Microsoft’s own machinations to blame.
Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.
But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.
When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.
The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.
A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…
If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!
But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?
The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.
-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment
Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."
Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.
It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.
But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.
The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.
But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).
Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.
Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).
And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.
At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.
Request_URI for IIS, NeoSmart Technologies’ compatibility toolkit for IIS on Windows, has been updated to version 1.1, with support for Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite 3.x
With this update the installation process has been simplified somewhat, in particular the need modify HTTPD.INI to set the server variables has been eliminated – you just need to install ISAPI_Rewrite 3, configure php.ini to load up request_uri.inc, and you’re set.
Request_URI for Windows 1.1 retains backwards compatibility with ISAPI_Rewrite 2.x for those of you who’d rather not switch to the new (and much-improved) version 3.x.
Download Request_URI for IIS 1.1
The full instructions for installing and configuring Request_URI for Windows can be found at the original posting. Please post any support questions in the forums.
NeoSmart Technologies is not affiliated with Helicon software in any way.
Don’t Forget About the Dual-Booters!
InfoWorld has an article out today wherein Randall Kenney of the “Windows Sentinel” team (a program used to monitor system settings and performance to provide aggregate data for analysis) trashes end-user uptake of Windows Vista by revealing that 35% of surveyed PCs that ship with Vista have downgraded to Windows XP.
While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.
If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.
Obviously not all of Windows Sentinel’s (only) three thousand subscribers are included in the numbers above (it’s highly unlikely that even 80% of the 3000 subscribers are using hardware that only comes from the OEM with Windows Vista installed). And of the percentage that are using late-model hardware, a hefty percentage dual-boot.
We don’t have any numbers as far as the number of dual-booters out there, but they’re certainly not few enough to be discounted. Keeping that in mind, it’s rather unprofessional of InfoWorld to claim that 35% of all Vista users will downgrade to Windows XP. Obviously big numbers make for better headlines, but this is the kind of stuff that can damage stocks and ruin jobs – you don’t want that on your conscious, at least, not without good reason.
Not that we’re suffering from any delusions or hallucinations with regards to Windows Vista’s relatively shoddy performance and stability, but you’ll agree that it’s a rather far cry to go from “a lot of people have reservations about upgrading to Windows Vista” to “a lot of people will take the time and effort to remove Vista from a PC and put Windows XP in its stead;” especially keeping in mind that Vista’s been out for two years now and there’s an (unfortunately) increasingly-large number of Vista-only products out there on the market.
More data from InfoWorld and the Windows Sentinel service would certainly be most-welcome in giving a clearer picture of what the actual numbers are and where end-users stand in this OS mess.
My last few days looked like this:
Unfortunately, I was away on “1 Day to Go”, so I wasn’t able to get a screen grab, but I think you get the idea. My days of using Windows Live One Care, were over! Trust me, I celebrated!
The inclusion of Windows Live OneCare in my 90 day stint, was most certainly a disaster, and also the cause of most of my stress during my use of Windows Vista. Just like other Virus/Spyware detection combo software suites, it too was always scanning in the background. Scanning so much infact, that it would often make reading my email near impossible. I would sometimes wait up to 5 minutes for an email to load into view. The Windows Live OneCare firewall was a pain in the butt, not to mention that Windows Vista itself, did not even acknowledge that it had a firewall installed. For the entire 90 days, Windows Vista was bugging me to enable Windows Vista Firewall, because apparently I didn’t have one installed! For some unknown reason, Windows Live OneCare continued to disable Windows Defender. I found this to be a pain, because every few days Windows Defender would make it to the top of the pile saying “Hey! I am disabled! Enable me Again!”. Of course after enabling Windows Defender, I would then have to do a spyware scan, even if I didn’t want to! “Later” I would click, only to see my CPU usage go way up as it started scanning in the background instead.
One very irritating caveat of Windows Vista, is physical memory usage. During my 90 days, I was unable to get Windows Vista to really function the way I wanted it too. For example, I have 2GB of DDR Memory. So I figure “what do I need a swap file for”. So I disable the swap file, and immediately Windows Vista complains that it does not have enough memory! It even performed sluggishly! Now, if I were to do this in Windows XP, the system would be forced to push as much as possible into physical memory. Which in the case of my laptop with 2GB of DDR Memory, was perfectly fine! I never exceeded 2GB and my laptop never skipped a beat. Come Windows Vista, and I am able to perform the same feat! The best I could get was a compromise, which was still horrid. I was able to push the swap file down to a minimum size of 200MB (instead of the “Windows Managed” 3.5GB). However, if a program on my laptop should use more then 200MB of Memory (Firefox for example, as I am sure many of you have experienced), I would still get the memory warning errors. Sure, I can ignore them, but eventually, Windows Vista would crash Firefox altogether, or whatever offending programs were “taking up too much memory”. As I said above, this was never a problem in Windows XP. Hopefully there is a work around for this out there somewhere. I share my HDD with a Linux Partition, so 3.5GB wasted on a swap file is a lot for me, especially since Fedora 7 is quite capable of running smoothly with no swap partition at all!
Overall, my 90 days of Vista has been fun, and for the most part, I have had next to no troubles. I have swamp of applications installed, and they all work fine, including the ones I had to install in “Windows XP SP2 Compatibility Mode”. Heck, I was even able to install Command and Conquer Windows 95 Edition. With an extra piece of software, I was able to battle against my younger brother.
The slick new interface is funky, and easy to disable when it gets in the way (like when it is sucking up too much of my 200MB swap file for example!). Windows Aero is handy, but it’s not the be all of Windows Vista, it’s just the icing on the cake.
I also opted to include Microsoft Office 2007 in my 90 day stint. The latest version of the Microsoft Office Suite, and boy is it something! Most of the applications have been completely re-written, others updated. If you haven’t tried Microsoft Office 2007 yet, you should give it a shot!
I am sure that Windows Vista has far more to offer then what I have experienced so far, and for the moment, I am going to stick to using Windows Vista and Office 2007, to get the most out of both of them, and broaden my knowledge. I am somewhat established here now, and it would be a shame to just leave it all. I miss using linux, however I think I will continue my use of Windows Vista, at least until Fedora 8 is released.
I will even continue to post my findings and discoveries of Windows Vista, and hopefully at some point, I write a “Windows Vista – The Perfect Setup” guide. Actually, I have one in the works already… so stay tuned!
Get Better Graphics Performance
So far I have managed to do a fair amount of complaining about Windows Vista. In particular, I have referred my quality of computer gaming, gone down the drain, due to the strain and drain that Windows Vista puts on my computer. Well campers, I found a solution to my problems just hours ago.
WARNING:
BY FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW, YOU AGREE THAT I WILL ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR DAMAGE CAUSED TO ANYONES COMPUTER THROUGH MISS USE OR MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW. PLEASE FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW AT YOUR OWN RISK. JUST COVERING MY ASS. FEEL FREE TO POST ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS 
Step 1 – Install TweakVista
Yep, download and install this baby. Once installed, customise to your hearts content. Try disabling lots of things. TweakVista won’t let you break your computer, so go ahead, disable stuff. In particular, disable any services or programs you don’t need running. You might need to visit the services list in the Windows Vista administrative tools (not a section in TweakVista). Once there, go through the list and stop / disable any services that you do not use.
Do yourself a favour. If you haven’t already, disable User Account Access Control. Windows Vista will fuss about it, so disable the annoying pop ups too. If you don’t have a home network, there are heaps of services you can disable that would otherwise be sucking up precious memory!
Step 2 – Disable Windows Display Manager
Yep. This is the fancy smancy applet/gizmo that runs on top of windows and gives you that funky glass (or not so funky glass if you have Vista Basic) look on your desktop. You can disable the Windows Display Manager in TweakVista. Alternatively, you can tune your computer for performance instead of looks. You can do this under Advanced System Settings, in the Control Panel, under System.
Your desktop environment will be reminiscent of Windows XP Classic, but heck, does it really matter?
Step 3 – Update!
Make sure you have all available Windows Vista updates installed. Also, make sure you have the latest graphics drivers installed. If you are like me and have an ATI Radeon 9800 SE (software modded to be an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) then make sure you have the latest modded driver.
Step 3 – Reboot and Play Games
I couldn’t believe the performance hit! Suddenly my games were fast, EVERYTHING was fast! My computer logged on to the desktop in seconds. It now also only takes seconds to shut down! Absolutely amazing stuff!
Summary
Install TweakVista – Customise your system for performance rather than features
Disable any unneeded or unnecessary services – Take your time, read the descriptions. Disabled as much as you can. If you are unsure – LEAVE IT!
Adjust your system for best performance – Disable Windows Display Manager (WDM). You won’t have your fancy looking interface, but you will be saving on that new graphics card you were considering purchasing.
Last Night, Windows Live OneCare informed me that I was now rounding the last corner towards the home stretch.
With the exception that mine said “30 Days” where the screen shot says 21 Days. I neglected to take a screen shot of my pop up (it was 11:30pm, and I was trying to watch the end of a DVD, while an automated system scan by Windows Live One Care not scheduled by myself in any way, was taking up 100% of the CPU time). I wonder if Windows Live One Care might actually start to do a better job, in an attempt to encourage me to purchase a subscription at the end? Some how I don’t think so.
Issues
The amount of software still not compatible with Windows Vista is becoming a problem. So far I have been able to install some software using the Windows Vista Compatibility Settings. Windows Vista Compatibility does work well, but it’s not the solution for every program. Some software applications just will not work.
I guess my biggest complainy is a result of the amount of times Firefox has crashed in the last 40 days. It crashes now at least once every 2-3 days. I applaud its ability to restore my session after the crash, but why did Firefox crash in the first place?
Windows Live One Care still continues to can my system every damn night! When 90 days are over, I will be removing Windows Live One Care, and installing a real firewall and anti virus software combination. It seems that the free 90 day trial, can’t actually remove anything from the system, it merely finds viruses and spy-ware and “quarantines” them. Want to remove the malware? Sorry, have to pay for a subscription to be able to do that! As for the monthly Tune Up. What Tune Up? I haven’t seen it once yet!
The installation of Windows Live One Care has probably been the worst caveat so far. The integrated firewall is particularly annoying. Especially when the pop messages for programs that require access to the internet, always manage to appear behind absolutely everything else. To make matters worse, they don’t flash on the task bar, like a new active window does. This then causes programs to function strangely, because they need access to the internet, which they don’t have, because Windows Vista failed to notify me correctly.
For some reason, Windows Live One Care also continues to disable Windows Defender. I have no idea why this occurs. Every time I go to run Windows Defender, or it is scheduled to run, I get a pop up message telling me that Windows Defender has been disabled, and that I need to re-enable it. The disabling seems to happen all the time, and is completely invisible to me. Sometimes Windows Defender must be disabled for days at a time, as it often needs to download updates, and than perform several scans. On My PC with Windows Vista, this never happens. My PC however, does not have Windows Live One Care installed either. In fact, My PC is running perfectly fine, with the exception of the degradation in graphics performance.
Pretty soon, getting a replacement AGP graphics card won’t be too easy. Better start shopping around on eBay now I think!
Power consumption is something that I feel Windows Vista does not take care of too well. When I was running Windows XP, I was able to use my laptop, on batter power for a couple of hours. With Windows Vista, set to “Power Saving Mode”. I am lucky if I am able to get 30 minutes out of my laptop, before the performance is so low that my system is unusable. I guess if I turned off Windows Aero, I might get a few more minutes, but wouldn’t it be useful if Windows Vista just reverted to the Basic Theme when the systems is running on battery? It’s not as if it is a big task to change to the basic theme. Just stop the Windows Display Manager server (WDM).
With all of that our of the way, Windows Vista has still been quite good otherwise. I have my complaints, but I haven’t been forced to go back to Linux. Oh how I do miss my Fedora! I wonder will I get to use Fedora 7 much, before Fedora 8 is released? According to the Fedora Release Schedule, I will get a month or so of use before Fedora 8 is released. I know I could just continue to use Fedora 7, but I like to live on the edge!
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