Since converting to Vista and its sidebar, I've always missed something I had when I was using the Yahoo! Widget Engine on XP - the TV guide. It just isn't the same having a web browser window open with the TV guide up all the time, so I took it upon myself to create one, using the data from the nice people at the Australian Community-driven TV Guide.

More info available on the project page, no point repeating it here. Check it out - Vista Australian TV Guide Gadget.

Here's some nice pictures to make it worth your while

 

UPDATE (31/08/2007): It seems that the Australian Community-driven TV Guide cache XML servers are down at the moment, as they look for and organise someone else to host it. It's in the works, but not sure how long it'll be. I'll post an update here when it's back up. In the mean time, the gadget is well, pretty useless.

UPDATE (1/9/2007): Looks like it's all fixed - the servers are back up, and I can get data again. If they go down again, you can download the gadget anyway, and it'll automatically keep trying daily to get data. Any downtime should be temporary only anyway - there's no suggestion of removing the XML service by the TV Guide guys; they're just reallocating servers.

I've been sitting on a copy of Vista Business for a while, but although I had Vista RC1 installed to play with, I never really found anything that enticing apart from the fact that it looks a lot better than XP so I never made upgrading a priority. Had some time over the weekend, and I was upgrading a few other things as well anyway so I took the plunge and upgraded my Toshiba M200 tablet (using an external DVD drive).

Everything went very smoothly, but it took ages, and I actually mean ages. Vista's upgrading process itself took over 4 hours! After that I had to download and install all the additional drivers and stuff for my M200. I wish Toshiba would provide a single download and install process for all the drivers - would make the process a lot smoother.

Tip: remember to uninstall all your TOSHIBA (or other laptop specific) drivers before you upgrade to Vista, otherwise some of the crappy uninstall programs won't work.

First impressions - like the new look, and it seems more responsive, if not faster. And I can see why people like the search so much - it actually is very fast, efficient and easy-to-use, searching your programs, files and documents all inside the start menu. It does mean your HD spins more than usual because it needs to continually index your data, but it doesn't seem to degrade system performance. You can even adjust its intensity when you're on battery power. The tablet panel now peeks out from the left side of your screen (and cleverly hides when you call up the Start Menu so it doesn't cover it), and works pretty much as good as the XP one. The new pen flick feature is nice too.

All my laptop features work fine, including wireless LAN, Bluetooth, accelerometer and the tablet buttons (only the Fn key shortcuts, not the pen buttons on the side of the screen). Many of the Toshiba utilities have been vista-rised as well, and there are some new ones like the Windows Mobility Center tiles, which gives you quick access to laptop-specific functions. I think it's designed to replace the old CrossMenu which doesn't have a Vista version.

Tip: if you don't want to use the Toshiba Bluetooth stack (which I find is less efficient and more processor/memory-intensive), do not install the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack download. Just install the Toshiba Bluetooth Monitor download, and you'll see a 'Bluetooth Devices' option magically appear in your control panel. The Toshiba Bluetooth Stack however better supports devices, so if your Bluetooth devices don't work with the Windows one, try the Toshiba one - just install the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack download instead, not the Monitor download. The Bluetooth adapter is the 'unknown device' that Vista keeps asking for drivers when you first boot up, so install one of the options above to get rid of that.

All my apps work so far.  I have also dumped Yahoo! Widgets in favour of the new Windows Sidebar, which seems a lot more efficient and less memory-hungry. Unfortunately, there's no TV Guide gadget available though (unlike the IceTV Yahoo! widget).

What I'm liking the most so far are the tiny changes that they've added into Windows Vista, like the new hints that pop-up when you drag and drop files, or the new 'you still have programs running' dialog that pops up when you restart/shutdown. These small touches make a product good as much as the big-title features I reckon.

As for UAC, I'm over the worst of it as I'm pretty much done configuring it, but it's just as annoying as the prompts you get on Linux and Macs, which are a bit more annoying as you have to enter in your password. On Linux and Macs however, you can do more before you have to enter in your password - for example, you can view your printer settings without entering in your password.

The most disappointing thing is that I can't use Aero Glass because the nVidia GeForce Go 5200 chip in the M200 is not powerful enough (only rates a 1.0 in the performance scores). You can switch it on, and it'll work, but when you open a few more apps, it'll switch back because of performance. The video driver from Toshiba is fairly old and because nVidia doesn't support laptops in their official ForceWare driver releases, there's no official way to update it.

The unofficial way is to hack around the limitation using the resources at a great website, laptopvideo2go.com. It's nothing difficult - just download the driver and the modded INF from their website, extract the driver to your desktop and replace the original INF file with the modded INF file. Then double-click setup.exe and you're away.

I'm currently using v100.65 because I've found it the most stable, especially for multiple display support (see this thread). Version 100.65 is available here.

Tip: if you want to use multiple monitors, remember to go to Control Panel -> Toshiba HWSetup -> Display tab and select "LCD + Analog RGB" then restart, otherwise you won't get any video on your second display even though Windows knows it's there. Things may seem funny when you reboot, but they usually work out after you log on. It is still a bit iffy sometimes and you can only have it in the primary-left, secondary-right position, otherwise funny things will happen when you resume from hibernation/sleep; definitely not as smooth as it was in XP. Maybe SP1 will fix this, or when nVidia delivers decent drivers.

I guess I don't have any excuse for not helping people with Vista problems now, damn it

UPDATE (4/7/2007): I read a tip on the net that the Microsoft drivers for the nVidia cards were actually better at supporting multi-monitor setups than nVidia's drivers, so I tested it out - so far they're much more stable, and can handle setups not in a primary-left, secondary-right position without a problem (I have a primary-right, secondary-left setup). Not sure if it means no Aero Glass or games though, or if the performance is any worse - it doesn't seem to be, but I don't use Aero Glass (as the graphics chip isn't good enough) and don't play games on my laptop much anymore.

To force Windows to use the Microsoft drivers for nVidia cards instead of the nVidia ones, right-click on your desktop, and click on Personalisation. Then click Display Settings, then Advanced Settings. In the adapter tab, under Adapter Type, click Properties and allow the action. Then click on the Driver tab, and click the Update Driver button. Select the 'Browse my computer for driver software' option, then the 'Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer' option. When it finishes searching for drivers it'll come up with a list of drivers. Chances are the Microsoft drivers aren't there, as Vista prefers the nVidia ones, so untick the 'show compatible hardware' checkbox then select NVIDIA as the manufacturer. All the Microsoft drivers are listed at the top of the model list, and have a '(Microsoft Corporation - WDDM/XDDM)' ending. Find the Microsoft driver for your model - if there's a choice between XDDM and WDDM, choose WDDM (XDDM uses the legacy XP display platform which still exists in Vista; WDDM uses the Vista display platform). Click Next, complete the installation, click Yes to restart and multi-monitor setups should be much more stable on reboot.

UPDATE (5/7/2007): Went to MODM 3 last night (great night), and while talking to Michael Kordahi from Microsoft about UAC, we thought - wouldn't it be good if UAC worked like firewalls do now, so you can permanently authorise certain applications launched in a certain manner (e.g. by user by double-clicking desktop shortcut) until the application's executable/library changes, in which case a new confirmation would be needed. So if I permanently authorise Device Manager when launched from the Control Panel, then the next time I launch it in that manner, I won't get a UAC prompt. However, if another app wants to launch Device Manager I would be prompted to prevent the other app doing unwanted things through Device Manager without my authorisation. Likewise, if Device Manager was updated or hijacked, causing the executable/library to be changed, the next time I load Device Manager I would be prompted by UAC and again given the option to permanently authorise it once more. I'm sure this probably isn't a new idea, but one that should be given more thought.

UPDATE (8/7/2007): As you can see, I'm still fiddling with my Vista setup. I realised today that the Microsoft nVidia drivers I recommended in UPDATE (4/7/2007) actually don't work with the Toshiba Rotation Utility, so when you flip your screen around on the M200, the pen surface changes, but the screen orientation doesn't, so not only is it not in portrait mode, but your pen cursor os out of whack. I've now gone back to the nVidia drivers, using 97.59 as recommended here. On occasion, these drivers do not restore the screen display when resuming from sleep/hibernation, so to fix that, just press Fn+F6 or Fn+F7 (i.e. change the screen brightness) or plug/unplug the power to wake the display up, see here.

I've also discovered the point of the Toshiba Flash Card utility, installed as part of the Value Added Package download. Not named very well, but it actually is the software behind the Fn key shortcuts on your keyboard, so install it and make sure it's enabled by going to Start -> All Programs -> TOSHIBA -> Utilities -> Settings for Flash Cards, and unticking the Disable the Flash Cards option if it's ticked. It's called Flash Cards because the shortcuts can also be accessed by mouse (enabled by default in the settings dialog) - just move your cursor to the top (or bottom if you changed the default setting) of your screen, wait and the 'flash cards' will appear (see the screenshot below). Click on them and you can see further options, allowing you to change brightness, mute etc. Very slick animations I must add - nearly looks Apple-esque.

One disappointing thing though is that the pen buttons at the side of the screen don't work, and I haven't found anything to make it work, yet .

Had a mate bring his brand-spanking new HP laptop, which came pre-loaded with Windows Vista. Most things worked, but one vital thing didn't - Windows Live Messenger. No amount of uninstalling or reinstalling was able to fix the problem, which was that apart from the first time, every subsequent time he signed in, it would crash.

He emailed the Windows Live support services, who told him to delete the registry keys at HKLU\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger and at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger. That worked, for the next time he logged in, before it started crashing again.

Feeling stumped, they wanted more info, so they sent him a list of instructions. The instructions include getting a list of running tasks using the tasklist command in the command prompt. Silly thing was, they forgot to tell him he had to run command prompt as Administrator first (its a Vista thing, but been on Linux systems for ages). Come on, this is Microsoft here and I'm sure that info collecting email was a standard issue - you'd think they'd have updated their own stuff by now.

Anyway, so I took a look at it, too various stabs in the dark to no avail, before some googling helped. Thanks to the great guys over at the Whirlpool forums (something good actually came out of the crappy Telstra service outages a few years back ), it turned out that Java Runtime Environment (JRE) was the culprit, partly. I'll explain why in a sec.

The problem was that Sun Java Runtime Environment Release 6 was incompatible with Windows Live Messenger 8.1. The first time you sign in to Windows Live Messenger, you're shown a screen welcoming you. That works fine. From then on though, instead of the welcome message, you get a cut-down version of your local MSN website. For Australia, that happened to be ninemsn, which also happened to be one of the few MSN sites around the world to utilise Java on its webpages (for statistic collection purposes). So because of the incompatibility, when Windows Live Messenger came to load that ninemsn page containing Java, it crashed.

Uninstalling Java fixed the problem, but then Windows Live Messenger complained that it was missing it. Reports say that installing the previous version of Java didn't work either.

The solution? Uninstall Windows Live Messenger 8.1, reinstall Java Runtime Environment Release 6, then download and install Windows Live Messenger 8.0 (that's right, not 8.1) which Microsoft has helpfully left up. Windows Live Messenger 8.1 apparently fixes Vista incompatibilities, but obviously not this one. Which is why before we go bashing Java (which is notorious for having buggy and slow runtime environments though getting better), its necessary to wonder whether Microsoft introduced the bug in version 8.1, or JRE Release 6 is incompatible with Vista.

It's worth noting too that the reason this problem doesn't seem to garner much attention globally is because the majority of worldwide MSN sites do not have a Java requirement, usually only a Flash one. For example, my friend also had a dummy MSN HK account, which worked perfectly fine (dumbfounding us originally). So, there's no indication when this will be resolved, which sucks because some of the 8.1 features are pretty cool, including the ability to carry your display picture around, no matter which computer you log on with.

<rant>

This 'bug', among other things makes me wonder about the preparation that went into Vista. Yes, it's a complex project, and yes it takes a monumental effort to complete something that tries to please everyone and anyone. But it seems that the effort was lost when it came to compatibility and communication with 3rd party vendors, with missing Vista drivers for many components, most prominently, Creative audio cards, and incompatible programs. Dell has delayed sending out their Vista upgrade CDs because of this too and so have other companies, pissing off customers. In fact, what shocks me is that Microsoft itself has incompatible products, e.g. Visual Studio 2005, whose Vista compatibility patch is still in beta testing - er hello, aren't developers vital to the success of Vista? (that said, on the few times that I've actually used VS2005 in my Vista RC1 version I haven't had any issues).

They haven't made the 'express upgrade' very express or easy either. Both Microsoft and the 3rd party vendors are guilty on this one. I have another mate who bought a Sony laptop earlier this year in HK, not pre-loaded with Vista. So I thought ok, to redeem that all I have to do is check out the HK VAIO site - confusing as all hell, and they don't seem to mention anything of the like. Ok, fine, Sony has flashy but non-updated, crap, sales-only websites. I thought maybe Microsoft could lead me to the right place via their global technology guarantee site. I get all the global links for claiming the upgrade if I bought a boxed version, but when I get to the OEM page, they redirect me to the Sony USA-only redemption site. What the fuck! We don't all live in the bloody states you know. Sony sucks big time too for stating the obvious, "Note: The Registration page is only for the United States." Tell me where to find the others goddamn it! I managed to find it in the end, but I can't find it anymore (it was a while ago) - the only mention I can see is this absolutely useless one on their crappy AP support site.

Sony's not alone either. Toshiba (my uncle's new laptop - its new laptop season methinks), while they didn't fair as badly - there was a clear link to the express upgrade on their Australian website, had a non-working site. It kept throwing up an 'unexpected error' message when I tried to confirm the quantity, then kicking me back not to the Australian Vista upgrade site, but the US one. For fucks sake! Get your head out of your arse and stop this US-centric nonsense! Its like the old days again, when websites forced you to enter in a US State and ZIP code to sign up, with no country field or a country field but still requires a US State and ZIP code. How fucking insulated or up-yourself can you be?

3rd parties power the Windows ecosystem - is it any wonder Vista isn't taking off as Microsoft predicted? Sure its a great product, and worth the upgrade, but when people's day-to-day apps aren't working, promised upgrades are a pain to apply for and if you do manage to apply its late, and software vendors are telling their customers not to upgrade as their products don't work yet, how can it possibly sell? I'm not sure who to point the finger at, because both Microsoft and 3rd party vendors are to blame. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to communicate and get things through to them, and vice-versa. I mean, its not like 3rd party vendors haven't been able to get their hands on Vista early enough - its had the biggest beta testing program of any version of Windows to date! And its not like a new version of Windows hasn't come out before.

I don't remember much about the launch of Windows XP, but you'd think they would have learnt their lesson then. It just seems like Microsoft was just happy to get it out the door before crawling back into their little unrealistic but protected cocoon and start work on the next version of their aging cash cow, never to appear again until then.

And what's the net result for consumers? We lose the one OS out there that has the best community (online & offline) support and the widest fit across the spectrum of computer users. There is no viable alternative out there for most people who just want to get on with their lives - Linux still doesn't get the average user, and Mac OSX is still tied down to Macs only. If either picked up their game, the outcome could be very different.

</rant>

Microsoft just frustrates me so much sometimes. There's so much talent, so much potential, so much cool stuff in there waiting to be unleashed but they just seem to be unable to pull everything together and make it work, so the coolness and buzz just dies. The Zune's one example, as is the backwards HTML email support in Outlook 2007; there's many more. The only exception here I reckon is the Xbox team and ecosystem, who actually seem to listen and respond their customers and make their experience as good as they can make it. But for the rest of Microsoft, maybe they have lost their mojo...

I moved my digital TV card from my HTPC to my desktop recently after my HTPC died again . The card was detected and working fine in XP. Booting into Vista RC1 however, the driver installation was a mess because Vista first tried to install drivers from Windows Update but some how that went sour. The device drivers weren't installed properly and it didn't work. Rebooting Vista brought up the detected new hardware dialog again, so this time I tried the drivers from the card's website. These didn't install properly either, with Vista telling me that 'the system could not find the file specified'. Wow, how helpful. Attempting to update the driver didn't help - same issue, so I went digging.

It turned out that as soon as you use a driver, it gets stored into Vista's driver store. This store is protected so you can't go fiddling in it, even though its visible at c:\windows\system32\driverstore. I hate it when it shows me something but I can't edit it - opening Explorer.exe as Administrator didn't help. What I needed to do was remove the driver from the store so it would copy it again from where I downloaded the driver to (Yes, even if you specify update driver, if it thinks its the same as the one in the store, it will use the stored one).

I think I went the long way to solve this issue. The short way is to simply uninstall all the devices in Device Manager that relate to that physical device (e.g. the Tuner and crossbar devices for TV cards), and the driver should be removed from the driver store. In case that doesn't work however, I'll document the method I used below.

1. Open up c:\windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log in Notepad. This file is very useful as it logs everything that Windows does during the driver installation and tells you more specifically what the problem was if it fails. By default, Windows doesn't show absolutely everything, but you can change that using the instructions here.
2. All driver installations are logged here, so scroll down to the bottom of the file for the latest driver installation. Every time a driver installation is initiated, the following line is first written:
   

   >>> [Device Install ... followed by where the driver comes from and the device ID.

3. Find the line in this section that starts with !!!. This is where the error information is. I encountered the following error. If yours is different, this may not solve your problem, but there should be no harm in trying.
   

   !!!  ndv:      Driver Package import failed for new device...installing NULL driver.

4. If its there, find the following line in the section (where # can be any number) and make note of that path:
   

        inf:           Published Inf Path: C:\Windows\INF\oem#.inf

5. Go into your c:\windows\inf folder and see if you can find that inf file. If it doesn't exist, find a line in setupapi.dev.log in the section you located before that starts with:
   

        inf:           Driver Store location: C:\windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\(inf file name and random string)\(inf file name).
   

   Make note of that path, find that file and copy it into C:\windows\inf. Rename it to oem#.inf where the # is the number you found in step 4.
6. Go to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories, right-click on the Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator.
7. Type in pnputil -d oem#.inf and press ENTER, replacing # with the number from step 4.
   

This should remove the problem driver from the driver store. Now try reinstalling the driver for the device.

This trick is useful for fixing issues if you try to install alternate drivers (e.g. unofficial drivers from another source) or drivers from Windows Update which do not install successfully. Its also good if you want to force Windows to use a certain version of a driver, instead of letting it pick for you.

When actually updating drivers (i.e. newer versions of the driver) though there shouldn't be an issue - assuming that the driver writer updated the version number Windows should realise that its newer and use it instead.

I've been fiddling with my computer recently, trying to get it to all work nicely after I inherited some new parts. I have a seperate partition on my hard drive for the purposes of testing Windows Vista RC1. After having to repair my XP installation due to a change in motherboard chipset and CPU (AMD to Intel), I realised I could not boot into Vista anymore - the Vista Windows Boot Manager no longer came up.

To fix this, I decided to try the Vista recovery process. It worked, restored the Windows Boot Manager, but I was no longer able to boot into Windows XP nor Windows Vista. Attempting to select the "Earlier version of Windows" gave me a message that essentially told me /ntldr was "missing or corrupt". Choosing the Windows Vista option gave me a BSOD, which was understandable given Vista didn't have the drivers setup for the new motherboard and CPU. So I had to reinstall Vista from scratch, as I could not find an option anywhere within the recovery environment to repair my installation (system and image restores were useless as I needed Windows to re-detect all my hardware again). Luckily it was just a testing OS and there was nothing important on it. It does make me wonder though, what should I have done? Maybe it was fixed before Vista RTM-ed.

Anyway, reinstalling Vista gave me access to Vista again, but still, I could not get into Windows XP; the same message appeared.

After some digging around the internet, I found the solution:

1. Boot up Windows Vista, and navigate to Start (the Vista orb)-> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt, then right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Adminstrator. Either enter your password if needed or just press continue. The new window should be titled "Administrator: Command Prompt".
2. In the command prompt, type in bcdedit /enum active and press Enter.
3. Locate the sections titled "Windows Legacy OS Loader". Note the identifier (all of them if there is more than one matching section); my identifier was {ntldr}. If the problem is the same as mine, the device property should be currently set to unknown.
4. Use the command bcdedit /set (ID) device boot to change unknown to boot, that is, the partition that is active and is booting from. By default, Vista does not change which partition boots, so if your XP partition is set as active, it will add the new booting code to that. Therefore assuming your XP partition is set as the active (boot) partition, the above command will be correct. Apply the above command for each identifier, replacing (ID) with the identifier itself, including the curly braces, e.g. bcdedit /set {ntldr} device boot. Press Enter after each one - it should report that the operation was completed successfully.
5. Rerun the command in step 2 to check that the changes were applied correctly.
6. Test!

That should fix the problem. I assume that when the device was set to unknown, the boot manager didn't know what to do to boot that partition, hence the message.

Microsoft has put up a handy reference for bcdedit too: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/85cd5efe-c349-427c-b035-c2719d4af7781033.mspx?mfr=true

Note that for basic booting option changes, such as the default OS or timeout, you can run msconfig or the System Properties, Advanced tab.

If you discover that there is no "Earlier Version of Windows" option in your boot manager at all, try these instructions (also repeated on the above Microsoft site): http://www.nukeation.net/2006/07/05/5456+Update+2++XP+Goes+Missing+After+Installing+Vista.aspx

UPDATE (6/12/2007): Clarified some steps and fixed a few spelling errors.

Ever since Microsoft gave me one of their fingerprint readers, I have never used it for anything more than logging on and off on my computer (which is quite convenient), even though it can be used for authentication on websites, programs etc. Why? Because the software doesn't work with Firefox. Ok I thought, Microsoft is the big aggressive monster that consumes everything in its path, and Firefox is an obstacle. After all, I got it for free anyway - I'd be returning it if I had bought it though as Firefox is probably the most used app on my computer. Interesting, it didn't even work with MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, which I thought was odd.

Just recently however, to coincide with the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft released version 2.0 of the fingerprinting software which included Vista support. They also made an effort to make sure Mozilla Firefox worked well with Windows Vista way before this, to the point where they invited the Firefox developers to their campus to work on issues.

Guess what - the fingerprinting software still doesn't work with Firefox 2.0. It works perfectly fine with IE7 (which is a great leap from IE6 - and by the way, please upgrade if you're using IE6, for one, my site will look much much better ) but again refuses to see the Firefox window as a login screen.

Where was the hardware division when the Firefox team visited? Or was it really all just a show...

What makes it worse is that apparently before Microsoft re-branded the fingerprint reader from DigitalPersona, the software actually worked with Firefox!

There is a workaround however - the FingerFox extension, which detects the login forms on websites and re-exposes them in a seperate window so the fingerprint reader's software can work with it. This is ridiculous however - great initiative and solution shown by the extension developer - but it's still clunky and nowhere near as smooth as the IE7 implementation. As the second most popular browser out there, its a shame that the hardware division didn't see it as imperative that their devices worked with it - maybe Microsoft hasn't changed that much after all...