Windows 7 Beta & No MSDN Subscription

Yes, I like many others downloaded the Windows 7 Beta. For me this is a first. No, not the first time I loaded a beta of an operating system, but the first time I waited until the public beta.

Over the years at one time or another I have had a subscription to MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network), and this subscription would get me copies of the Windows OS in very early beta stages. I tested Vista long before it was a public beta.

For the first time in a very long time I do not have an active subscription to MSDN at the time a beta of the latest Windows is available. Mostly it doesn’t matter. Although I am a programmer, I have not done much with my MSDN subscription except play with it in recent years. My company is still running Windows XP and that doesn’t look to change anytime soon.

Times are tough, so my company let all the developer subscriptions laps. Darn, although I only played with it myself. My previous AVP believed that it was worth the cost for programmers to have it even if just to play. He felt, as I do, that having access to this and playing with all the new “toys” was worth it to keep programmers interested in new technology and have them looking for way to get that into regular work. I can’t agree more. If you are a developer you should convince your boss that this is something you need. Maybe you can get your company to spring for a copy that is shared amoung a few developers to help justify the cost.

Enough about MSDN, this is about Windows 7. I like it. I have not done any timed tests, but it does seem to boot faster. Maybe that will slow down once I load a bunch of software. I am running Windows 7 in a dual boot fashion. I do not use Microsoft’s boot manager. This is the menu that would appear when you first start your computer asking which version of Windows to run. I could do that, but I prefer a safer approach.

I have two hard drives in my computer, C: & D:. I go into the BIOS of the computer and set the second drive (D) to be the first drive to boot. This basically switched the drives and C: becomes D: and vice-versa. At this point I boot with the Windows 7 DVD in the drive and the OS starts installing. When I am done “playing” I reboot, get into the BIOS and switch the order of the drives. Instantly I am back to Windows Vista with much less chance of something going wrong.

Overall I like Windows 7. It is cleaner and a little more intuitive. Then again, it does some things different from Vista, so intuitive is a relative term. I like the task bar, but it takes getting use to. I have not loaded any application, but within using Explorer and Media Player and such it has been a very pleasant experience.

The main reason for installing Windows 7 is to see how well it works with the XBox 360 as a media extender. Vista’s Media Center won’t recognize MP4 files. I heard Windows 7′s Media Center was going to support any files that Media Player supported. Sure enough, I was able to play movie I ripped to MP4 format. This format is support by both my Zune 80 and my sons’ iPods. I am looking for maximum playability with the least number of formats. With Windows Vista Media Center I am forced to rip movies to WMV and MP4. MP4 for the Zune and iPods, and WMV for the XBox.

If you want to play MP4 files over your XBox 360 I suggest you look into TVersity instead of Media Center. It works well and supports MP4, AVI & WMV. It may do more, those are the three in my library and all work very well with TVersity and XBox.

I have not connected the Media Center in Windows 7 to the XBox yet, but it does work better than Vista stand alone. I was able to configure my TV Tuner card more easily than with Vista. Vista requires me to turn off my firewall to get updates to the TV guide. This is weird because Vista’s Media Center can reach out to the internet to offer me the choice of cable providers based on my zip code, but fails to update the guide. W7′s Media Center grabbed the guide with no trouble.

Media Player was very amazing on first launch. I used it to look at an AVI file and was pleasantly surprised at the super clean interface. Basically you get your video playing in a thin framed window. The player controls are superimposed over the video. Move the mouse away, or just don’t more it for a while, and the control go away leaving you with a completely uncluttered look to your video. It just doesn’t get any better than this. I will reserve final judgment until I see how it works with music, a library, playlists, etc. But first impressions are a good thing and I am impressed so far.

I will report more later after I get my stop watch out and time some operations and look for more things to like or dislike.

Mapping Printer Problem with Vista

A few months ago I wrote about the problems I had with my wife’s Vista laptop and trying to map network drives. That solution turned out to be creating a directory link (scroll to the end for the instructions on create a directory link to aid in creating drive mappings).

Yesterday I hooked up the boys new XBox 360 to the network and made it a media extender to my Desktop PC running Vista/Media Center. My wife’s Vista laptop notified her about the media extender (XBox), and then she could not print anymore. The printer is in the closet with my Windows 2003 Server.

I eventually found this thread that showed how to add a network printer as a local printer. Yes, I said add it as a local printer. You select the option to create a port and I put in the IP address of the Server with the name of the printer. It mapped perfectly. I used the IP address because of the previous issue above where we needed to use the IP address to get the drive mappings working.

I hope this helps someone out there some day!

Can’t Map Drives In Windows Vista

My wife took her computer to work. They are allowing them to hook their computers to the WiFi there. When she got home she could no longer print (to our networked printers) or access any network drives from my Windows 2003 Server. BTW, we are not using a domain at home.

I tried everything and everything I found on the internet pointed to a firewall issue. However I completely (and in many different places) disabled all parts of the firewall. I even uninstalled PC Tools Spyware Doctor (which also included anti-virus). No Help.

She could see shares on the Vista desktop computer, but no other computers were even visible to her Vista laptop. However, she could ping the router and the server by IP address.

Finally we found this posting that described using a Directory Link. Once we created a network link we were able to map all the drives and the printers using the IP address of the server (which happens to be a static address in my house). What I find weird is that I tried mapping the drives with the IP address, but it did not work. It only worked after creating the Directory Link.

Hope this is helpful to someone sometime.

Speed Vista Bootup With Dual Cores

I just came across this posting about speeding the boot time of Windows Vista by using both cores of your dual core system for booting. Normally Vista boots off one core until it is going. The change described here is very easy to implement.

I am going to try it tonight.

HBO on Zune Part II – The Success Story

If you read my last post, you know I was not able to watch any movies recorded on the analog HBO channel because Media Center put some kind of rights management on the file. This also prevented me from syncing a HBO movie to the Zune.

I used the WinTV Scheduler that came with my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card to record a movie on channel 14, the analog HBO channel. The WinTV software records shows in .mpg format, which the Zune software will not recognize. I loaded up a file conversion utility I have for converting files for the Zune  (Daniusoft Zune Video Converter) and changed the file to a mp4, which should work on iPods as well as the Zune.

Success! I was able to record Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from HBO and convert it to mp4. It took about 1:15 to convert a 2:30 recording. I then synced the mp4 file to my Zune 80 and all is working.

I setup about 6 or 7 movies to record over the next two weeks.

HBO on Zune

In the “old” days we used to be able to get HBO on channel 14, an analog channel, if you paid for HBO in the digital channel section. We do have HBO, channels 320 – 333. However, quite some time ago channel 14 stopped working on the analog TVs in the house. It said that if you still wanted HBO you should contact Time Warner and upgrade to a digital receiver (necessary to receive any channels above 99 anyway).

I tell you this story because Media Center shows HBO on channel 14 through my Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card. Cool!

Well, not cool. I recorded a couple of movies on HBO this way. When I went to play them in Media Player it claimed I do not have the proper rights to play, copy or sync the movies. Oops! I double checked Media Center, not Media Player, and sure enough it would play the movies. I tried playing the movies in the Zune desktop software and it gave the same message about not having the rights to play or sync the movie.

I checked the “guide” that Hauppauge sets you up with (really just a web site) and it did not list channel 14 like Media Center does, so I manually recorded a movie with the WinTV Scheduler.

I will update you when I get the results of that recording. I already know I am in for trouble as the WinTV software does not record shows in a format compatible with the Zune. I will have to dig out some conversion software for that.

Stay tuned.

Hauppauge HVR-1250 Not Compatible With Zune

I tried recording a TV show, this time with the software that comes with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV Tuner card instead of Media Center. A 1 hour show created a 2.7 GB mpg file. However, the Zune software does not recognize the file as a video. This means I am left with Media Center to record TV shows if I want to sync them up with my Zune 80.

I played around with the size, but I still have more to do. I wish you could save the 400 MB converted files without the space wasting originals from Media Center. I have an idea for that too.

I’ll keep you posted.

TV on the Zune 80

With my recently rebuilt desktop PC, complete with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV Tuner card it was time to use Media Center to start recording and syncing TV shows. So far I have come across two issue:

1. The file format and size from Media Center is unique and large.
2. The Zune software converts the files before syncing them.

At the Zunes highest quality it takes up 3GB of space for each hour of TV. Considering that I am recording 640 x 480 broadcasts this is a lot. More than a DVD. The unique file format is a problem because the Zune desktop software must convert it before syncing with the Zune 80 player. Consequentially, it takes a long time to sync Media Center TV shows with the Zune. Leave it to Microsoft to allow the Zune to sync with Media Center, but have to convert it first. Thanks!

There is a good side to it. Once converted and synced, the files get down to about 400 MB per hour. That means I can store a lot of TV shows in the Zune 80.

I may have to use the software that came with the Hauppauge WinTV to record shows. I’ll experiment with that and report about it in a later post.

Windows 7 – Yuck???

I just saw this “screen capture” on PCMag’s coverage of the new Windows 7. Yuck! If this is really what the desktop of Windows 7 is going to look like we are all taking a step backward. I am all for a clean desktop, but not one that removed the mouse. Notice it says “use direction keys to navigate.” What happened to the mouse? This looks a lot like Windows Media Center. The reason Media Center works well with the directional keys is because it is closely related to the directional buttons on a remote control. I can tell you from personal experience that Media Center is less than mouse friendly. Will Windows 7 be less mouse friendly? Hmm.

WinTV with Vista’s Media Center

I have my resurrected PC working with the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250. I went through the steps to setup the guide that comes with the device. This is really a web site that displays your guide with ads. Since it’s free this didn’t bother me much. You can select to record shows in the web site guide and it downloads the information into the WinTV Scheduler. A little kludgy, but it works. The one thing I like about WinTV is that is starts by showing you TV in a window. Since my monitor is 1680×1050 sometimes you just want to see the video actual size. I am only getting analog TV on the WinTV HVR-1250, which means 640×480.

I also setup Vista’s Media Center. This was a problem. All the steps were logical enough, if a lot of them. But when it came time to setup their guide it kept getting an error 13 (could not connect to the Internet). That’s amazing since it connected to the Internet in the previous steps to get my cable provider’s name and such based on my zip code. Anyway, I had to disable Windows Firewall to get the guide to setup. I tried telling the firewall to let “Media Center” and the executable itself (ehSched.exe, thanks to Aaron Stebner for this) to go through the firewall, but nothing would work. Only turning off the firewall worked. However, once I did that the guide came up and it is very nice looking and fast.

I did have just enough time before leaving for work to notice that you are very limited in recording a series. There is a global option for recording a series as new shows and reruns, or new shows only. There is a third option I can’t remember, but I don’t like that this option is global. What is I want to record all the episodes of a show that is new to me even though it is in reruns. Yet other shows I want to just record the new shows. This is something that should be available for each “series” you record. This would be fairly easy to add to the software. I know I am a programmer by profession.

BTW… the remote that came with the WinTV card works Media Center just fine. Cool!

I have not had time to play with it, but I setup my machine to record its first TV show through Media Center. I also installed the Zune Desktop application. I left my machine this morning to copy all my music from my laptop to the resurrected PC into the Zune folder. Tonight I will re-sync my Zune with this new PC and see how it gets TV on the device.

Stay tuned.

New PC Up and Running

My New/Old PC is up and running. All the parts came Friday, except the TV Tuner card which arrived on Thursday. I put the main computer together on my bed while I watched the season finally to Lost last night. I installed the TV tuner card this morning.

I don’t want to give away too many details on the components I purchased (I am saving that for an article on my main column). I hit some limitations with the motherboard. I went with the cheapest motherboard from ASUS or GIGABYTE that met my minimum requirements. These are two companies I trust, and I wanted a motherboard that could support gaming performance later. I got a GIGABYTE board and I realized why I saved money. For 1, there are only two memory slots. Not a problem yet because I bought 2 GB of memory with 2 memory sticks. Should I upgrade the memory I will have to replace my current memory. Not a huge deal, but something to consider if you know you will upgrade.

The next issue hit right away. The motherboard only has 1 IDE connector. And this connector only supports two devices. Damn. I was collecting all my hard drives and optical drives to install in this rig. I have a 100 GB SATA hard drive, a 120 GB IDE hard drive, a 20 GB IDE hard drive, a Plextor DVD/RW drive and an old ASUS 52X CD-ROM drive. I was hoping to use each hard drive as a bootable drive to play with other operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux). Well, I was left with only being able to install the 120 GB IDE hard drive and the DVD burner on the sole IDE connector. This not too bad, but it was kind of disappointing. I still have three SATA connectors left, so any future hard drives will go right in.

Overall the performance is very good running Windows Vista Home Premium. I have not activated it yet, because I have not made up my mind if I will stick with it. There is always Windows XP or Windows XP Media Center Edition (to go with the TV tuner card).

I’ll keep you posted.

Blog Stats

Well, WordPress has me at over 700 views a day for the last month. I peaked at 1096 on 11/12.

The search terms that still dominate my stats are people looking for information on the New Camaro and Outlook/Office 2000 info on Vista. I wish I had more to provide in those areas.

Like most of you I am waiting with baited breath for the new Camaro. Even though I will never get one. My wife is due for the next car and I am probably going to have to go four doors. My wife tells her 31 year old brother to grow up when he mentions the new Camaro. Oh well. I think I will try to push the classic daily driver and the next car that is just mine to drive. I am in the process of trying to trade my Mini Cooper in for a car that can carry four people (2 adults and 2 teenagers) that will eventually be used by those teenagers.

I expect it to be about 4 or 5 years before I can pick a car just for myself. I am thinking Cadillac CTS or a classic old car. If I have to finance it the classic will be a tough sell., but the new CTS would be really cool. With my Classic Car Watch column I don’t actually spell out what I would go looking for if I could. Maybe I need to do that in an upcoming article.

As for Outlook and Office 2000 on Vista. I have thrown in the towel and I am running Office 2003. I do not want to go to Office 2007, but 2003 is super stable and I highly recommend all Office 2000 die-hards upgrade.

Vista and Outlook 2000… Don’t Do It!

Checking the statistics on this blog I see that the vast majority of the vistors get here by searching for one of two things.

1. Running Office and/or Outlook 2000 on Windows Vista.
2. Anything to do with the all New Camaro coming in 2008 (probably as a 2009 model).

For all the Outlook/Office 200o people I have some advice. Don’t do it. I have written a step by step guide to getting this working, and dedicated that to a page in this site (see the link to the right called Outlook 2000 on Vista). I have not counted them, but I bet I have over 200 comments on this site about Outlook 2000 running on Vista. Even with all that I just can’t recommend doing it. Please, do yourself a massive favor and upgrade to Office/Outlook 2003. I would not go so far as upgrading all the way to Office 2007. It is so different that you will spend a lot of time looking for featured you always knew where they were.

For you Camaro fans… I can’t wait. I am a huge Camaro fan, but I don’t think I will be able to get one.  My wife keeps telling her brother to grow up when he mentions it, and I am 12 years older than him. Is a 44 year old too old for a Camaro? My main problem is that my kids keep growing and are going to have a harder and harder time fitting in the back of a Pony car.

Outlook/Office 2000 on Windows Vista

I have completed my step-by-step guide to installing (or upgrading) a computer to run Office 2000, including Outlook 2000, on Windows Vista. Just click here for all the details.

Upgrading Xp Pro to Vista Business

I am upgrading my Win XP Pro virtual machine with Office/Outlook 2000. One thing that was interesting was that initially I could not upgrade it. I entered my product key for Windows Vista Home Premium. When the screen that lets you pick between upgrading or doing a clean install came up it would not let me upgrade from XP Professional to Home Premium. So I started over and decided to use the product key for Windows Vista Business.

For all of you out there planning to upgrade Win XP Pro, keep in mind that to do an in-place upgrade (installing over your current version of Windows so your applications will still work) you will have to upgrade XP Pro to Vista Ultimate, Vista Business or Vista Enterprise edition.

Testing Office/Outlook 2000 on Vista

I am going to be testing Office 2000 (to include Outlook) on Windows Vista. I have created two virtual machines (vm) using Virtual PC 2007. The first vm started as a base load of Windows XP SP2, activated and fully patched but running IE6. I install Office 2000 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access & FrontPage… all part of my Office 2000 Premium disc). I made a backup of the vm at this point. I still need time to configure it to use an e-mail account and setup some contacts. I don’t have a bunch of e-mail accounts to test with, and I did want to test using more than one account. I need to do a little more research on this before continuing.

One the second vm I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on. I got it to the point of being fully installed. I will fully patch it very soon and take a backup of the vm. After which I will install Office 2000.

My plan it to upgrade the XP/Office vm to Vista doing an “in place upgrade.” An in place upgrade installs over your existing installation. I testing this in the past with my laptop and about 2/3 of all my applications worked. Outlook required some special steps, and I will document those again here. I will see what it will take to get Office/Outlook working and report that here and on my main web site.

Between these two tests I am hoping to cover the bases for those of you that are upgrading an existing computer running XP/Office/Outlook 2000 to Vista, and those that plan to install Office/Outlook 2000 on a new Vista machine with the Office install disc.

I will post my progress here, and will hopefully be able to make a good step-by-step article for my web site. If you want any particular feature tested please post a comment and I will do my best to include it in my testing.

Low Volume With Movies on Windows Vista

The friend that I watched a movie with on my flight to Las Vegas recently bought a Lenovo tablet PC running Windows Vista. He had the exact same problem with the volume playing a movie. Volume was low, and he found all the places to adjust volume, but it was still too low. Finally he tried installing WinDVD and it was able to play movies with volume-a-plenty.

Something to think about if you are having volume issues with movie on Vista.

The Final Upgrade to Windows XP

Well, I did it. After finding the fourth volume location while playing around with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, I reloaded Windows XP Professional. I just finished, and sure enough I found the fourth volume control. Unfortunately the movie I was testing with is in the hall closet. I am too tired to go on.

I have the base OS installed, the nVidia drivers, the audio drivers, and touchpad drivers, WiFi driver, Firefox and the codecs I installed on MCE.

I will do my usual setup stuff tomorrow.

At this point I believe I will stay with Windows XP until nVidia provides drivers for my GeForce Go 7 Series video card. Game performance with the drivers nVidai provided to Toshiba such. I guess Toshiba didn’t care about performance as long as nVidia gave them stable drivers.

So, nVidia… get those drivers out so I can upgrade back to Windows Vista.

Vista to Windows XP Media Center Edition

After some of the issues getting video to work on my laptop with Windows XP Professional I decided to try Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. I was sure MCE would include everything to play a DVD movie out of the box. Nope. I still had to download a codec to get Media Player or Media Center to play a movie.

I did manager to find one more place to increase the volume on my speakers. I clicked on Start, Control Panel, Sounds Speech and Audio Devices, Sounds and Audio Devices. This brought up the Sounds and Audo Devices Properties dialog box. On the Volume tab is a button for Speaker Volume. I clicked that and found a place where you can adjust the speaker volume with a separate slider for the left and right speakers. Both were in the middle. I moved them all the way to High. That’s a total of 4 places to adjust volume:

1. Speaker Volume Applet (above)
2. Volume Control (double-click the speaker in the task bar)
3. Volume slider in Media Player (or whatever application you use)
4. The physical volume knob on the laptop

Who came up with this? I don’t know if I want to start over again and load Windows XP Professional just to see if I can find this fourth location to adjust volume. Media Center Edition looks just a tad more “glassy” than XP Pro. However, the Start Menu looks busier.

Did it work. I think so. I played a movie and it certainly seemed louder. However, I don’t have any equipment to prove this. I also don’t have identical laptops to compare configurations. Finally, it may be a while before I get back on a play where I would definitely notice the difference.

Vista to XP Upgrade Snags

I have been dealing with a few issues with my recent upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP. I thought I was done, but then I wanted to test the volume when watching a DVD. If you read my previous posts, you know that I had to install Windows XP from scratch. I had expected to restore my laptop to the way it left the factory, but found out way too late that the “Recovery CD” I made on this laptop when it was new did not recover the laptop. It was just a utility disc.

Anyway, when I went to play a DVD Media Player would not play it because I did not have a codec for DVD playback. I searched Toshiba’s web site and they didn’t have anything I could download for DVD playback.

I eventually tried a few things. I first installed a freeware program that would play DVDs. This worked, but it did not install a codec, and media player still didn’t do anything. I even tried upgrading Media Player 9 (part of the Windows XP install) to Media Player 11 for XP. No luck there either. All the codecs Microsoft pointed me at cost at least $14.95. So why not install the software that came with my Plextor DVD drive in my desktop machine.  This worked, but it did not install any codecs either, and pointed me to a place I could buy one for $24.95. Oops!

Finally I went looking for a free codec to install. I installed a codec pack, which included a Media Player Classic. It is a freeware app that looks a lot like Microsoft’s Media Player 6.4. In fact it was versioned at 6.4.9, and works fine if it lacks bells and whistles. This also let Media Player 11 play a DVD, but it threw an error before playback actually started.

I can live with it this way because I don’t watch movies much on my laptop. However, I very disappointed. Maybe I should have installed Windows Media Center edition. That must include a DVD codec, right? Maybe I will do that. Hmm!

What about the volume? With Media Player Classic I can turn up the volume all the way in the application, turn up the volume in Windows and turn up the volume with the knob on the laptop and it is comfortable to listen to. I am sure in a noisy airplane I would not be able to hear conversations playing in a movie. It just doesn’t seem loud.

I don’t know if this is a limit to the system, or if I am doing something wrong, but I am leaning toward a hardware limitation. That’s a shame for a laptop equipped with harman/kardon speakers and touted for multi-media.