Windows 7 Videos

Here are some Windows 7 videos that I found useful and educating. They are all from Microsoft’s own Channel 9.

Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7

This one is a real gem. It is hard to pinpoint subject since they go all around Windows 7 topics, but if you are a developer or just guy who likes to know technical details - this is video to look. If you are searching for some more details on startup/shutdown workings, there is another video (from Chittur Subbaraman) for you also.

Windows 7 New Taskbar - An Overview

To get a grasp on how exactly new taskbar works, you may wish to see this. If you like this check other videos of same series. They additionally deal with its design, internals and jump lists.

A lap around Windows 7 new Scenic Ribbon

Introduction to ribbon interface. Nothing new for those who already worked with Office 2007. For more technical details, you may want to watch this also.

Larry Osterman: Windows 7 Audio - What’s New

Some changes in area where nobody seemed to have a problem. :)

Windows 7: Find and Organize Part 1 - The User Experience

This one is about new way of organizing things inside Windows 7 (libraries and such stuff). If you are developer, part 2 may interest you.

Averatec-Intel Classic 2008 Season 2 - Finals

Well, GOM TV tournament is done for now. I will not say who won, but I will give you a link to first game. If you like Starcraft, you will like this final.

P.S. For those who like intense game play, here is one gem from the same tournament.

Microsoft Access X64

As many of you, I am a sinner. I have been using .mdb as database of my choice for small projects. I knew even then that there are better choices out there but .mdb was easy accessible over OLEDB, in need you could use Microsoft Access to edit database (yes, I did ugly “just this time” fixes on data), it didn’t kill machines with small amounts of RAM and its network model was sufficiently fast on local networks (although someone may argue whether it had any network model at all).

Story of one bug

As I sometimes do, I got bug report for one of old programs. Since I like to confirm things first, I opened project in Visual Studio 2008 (of course, conversion was needed since that was 2005’s project) and started it. There was a strange error: “The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0’ provider is not registered on the local machine.”. Of course, reading is not necessary for my level of experience so instead of analyzing what was said to me, I decided to install Visual Studio 2005 and run the program without conversion. Same error.

Google

My blind faith in google forced me to try bunch of stuff. One wise guy said that Vista comes without MDAC so I tried to install it. Other one said that you need to manually register MDAC files. I did that also. After installing all possible updates (did you know that Jet 4.0 is at SP8?) I decided to search Microsoft’s support. First page offered was one with my problem. There is no 64-bit version of Jet. OLEDB provider. At that minute I remembered that I do run 64-bit Windows…

Solution

Once I finally knew what exactly is problem here, solution was easy. We just need to go back to 32-bit world in order for things to work.

In C# that is done in Project Properties, Build page. Just select x86 as platform target and everything will start working as it was before. In case you have some dlls that access database, you will need to convert them also.

In case you are working in VB, path is little different since you need to go to My Project then Compile tab and on Advanced Compile Options button you will find target CPU setting.

After that small change, your program is 32-bit citizen and loading 32-bit OLEDB is easy as it once was.

Life With 7

I played for some while with VHD installed Windows 7 and I enjoyed. After few boots I even selected it to be default. There were some small issues, but biggest one was unfortunate choice of .vhd medium. Booting was slow (few minutes).

Last night I installed Windows 7 on my first partition, overwriting Windows Vista, and thus making it my only boot choice. I do hope that I won’t be sorry for this decision.

Big change when compared with .vhd booting? Yes - I am back in sub-minute boot range.

Goodbye Geode

I am big fan of Geode processor. It is cheap, has low power requirements and heating is negligent. My home server is PC Engine’s ALIX1D board - you guess it - based on Geode.

That board is slow and it only has 256 MB of memory, but also requires no cooling (complete silence) and if you consider that all devices are connected over wireless, speed is good enough for file sharing which is its primary purpose anyhow.

However, market is wanting more powerful processors and Geode is going to history. They do say that they will produce it while there is need, but any company that still uses them will start searching for a replacement. The end is imminent.

Since only requirement for my server is low noise (passive cooling and 2.5" HD), I already see replacement - MSI WindBOX.