Finally I decided to install Windows 8 Customer Preview version on my laptop. I have been a beta tester for all the previous versions of Windows, so I decided to give it a spin. Although I did not participate technical beta for Windows 8, I finally downloaded the operating system and see what all the craze is about tiles like interface and all. By the way, I am writing this blog post using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.

Download and Install

This part went very smooth. I decided to download 64 bit ISO image of operating system. It took about 25 minutes to download about 3.3GB of file. That was not bad. And another 5 minutes to extract. Since Microsoft has been talking about how they have improved speed of installation and boot up, this was going to be a good test. I was impressed that whole installation was complete in less than one hour. That is a great improvement over previous versions of Windows.

Boot time

After installation was complete, the system boot up took the same time it takes for Windows 7. So I did not see much of improvement in that area.

Tiles and stuff

Now was the time to give Windows 8 real spin. Well, things fell apart for me.

• My screen went dark after 10-15 seconds. For a moment I thought I burnt my video card. It turned out that Windows 8 could not keep my laptop display up for more than 10-15s. Every few seconds, brightness will go down to zero. I will bring it back up
• Switching to full list of application is a total mess. It looked more like some novice programmer did some display of grid view. Not too impressive.
• Then I lost title display for good. And now I and now I am wondering what do I need to do to get it back.
and then it will go dark. That was very frustrating.

Only thing I can say about this customer preview release is that it is far from customer preview. If a regular user ran into all the issues I ran into, then customer is not going to have a good impression. Yes, I know its preview release. But still you have to have some satisfaction and be able to see stuff on screen. I will play some more and keep you guys posted.

Download Gadget For Vworker Recent Projects (22.07 kb)

In this post I will discuss how to write a Windows 7 gadget. It has been long since I wrote a gadget. This week I was looking at putting some scroll view of freelance projects from vWorker web site. They have a piece of HTML code that you can put on your web site to show latest open projects in a scrolling view. When I am working on some project or executing some other tasks on my desktop, then I do not any web site open. I want to have a view of latest open projects on side of my big desktop view. So, developing a gadget made more sense to me. So in this past I will share that gadget with all of you who use VWorker for doing freelance work. And I will show steps to write this windows gadget as well.

Develop Windows Gadget

If you are considering Windows gadget development, then I will strongly encourage to read Microsoft documentation on gadget framework. It will give some good basic background on gadget development. Here are steps that you will need to follow to write a simple Windows gadget like I wrote for displaying latest open freelance projects on VWorker site.

• Create a folder with name same as what you would your gadget to be named. For example I create a folder named VWorkeLatestProjects.gadgets
• Create a 64x64 image (recommended size by Microsoft) that you would like to use a logo for your gadget. This is the logo that will show up in Windows control panel UI when you look at available gadgets on your machine.

• Create a XML file named Gadget.xml in this folder. This file will contain manifest of your gadgets. In simple terms, this file contains all details about your gadget. This file does not contain implementation of gadget itself. Following is how my file looks like.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
  <gadget>
    <name>VWorker Recent Projects</name>
    <namespace>microsoft.windows</namespace>
    <version>1.0.0.0</version>
    <author name="ByteBlocks.com">
      <info url="http://www.byteblocks.com" text="Byteblocks.com"/>
      <logo src="logo.png"/>
    </author>
    <copyright>
      © 2012</copyright>
    <description>See latest open projects at vWorker.</description>
    <icons>
      <icon width="64" height="64" src="icon.png"/>
    </icons>
    <hosts>
      <host name="sidebar">
        <autoscaleDPI><!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->true</autoscaleDPI>
        <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="VWorkerLatestProjects.html"/>
        <permissions><!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->Full</permissions>
        <platform minPlatformVersion="1.0"/>
        <defaultImage src="drag.png"/>
      </host>
    </hosts>
  </gadget>
  

  As you can see from this file content, it lays out blue print of the gadget.

• Now comes the implementation of the gadget. There is an entry with tag name BASE that defines the entry point for implementation. You will notice that I have set it to VWorkerLatestProject.html. What this means is that when gadget loads it will load up this HTML file. So, add an HTML file in your folder that is going to be entry point. Following is snapshot of contents of my HTML file.

  <html dir="ltr">
    <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
      <link href="css/vworkerlatestprojects.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
      <title>VWorker Latest Projects</title>
    </head>
    <body id="VWorkerProjectFeedGadget">
    <g:background id="VWorkerFeedBG">
    <div id="feedbody">
    <iframe id="VWorkerFeedIFrame" frameborder="1" scrolling="no" width="150" height = "300"
          src = "http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/ScrollingBidRequests.asp?
          txtWidth=150&txtHeight=300&blnHideChannelSubscribe=true&
          blnLaunchLinkInNewWindow=true&blnFullTitle=true&txtBgColor=white">
  		Your browser does not support inline frames...However, you can click 
  		<a href="http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/ScrollingBidRequests.asp?
           blnHideChannelSubscribe=true&blnLaunchLinkInNewWindow=true&blnFullTitle=true">
  		here</a> to see the related document.
  		</iframe>
    </div>
    </g:background>
    </body>
  </html>
  

  As you can see, implementation is just like developing a regular HTML page. For my gadget it was as simple as putting IFrame content for VWorker site into my HTML page. So you can see how I included that IFRAME tag inside g:background tag of this gadget.

• Yes, that was the whole implementation of this gadget. It is ready to be deployed and used.

Deploying Windows Gadget

Deployment of windows gadget is very simple. You just need to copy your gadget folder at either of following two locations depending on scope and visibility of this gadget.

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets (for user gadgets)
%SYSTEM_ROOT%\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets (for global gadgets)

For example in my case, I want every user of may desktop to be able to see this gadget. So I copied it at following location.

C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\VWorkerLatestProjects.gadget

Adding Windows Gadget To Desktop

Once you have deployed the gadget, you can follow these steps to put the gadget on your desktop

• On your desktop go to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization. Or right click on your desktop screen.

• There you will see option for Gadgets. Click on it and it will bring up dialog box with Gadgets installed on your machine. You will find your own gadget there was well.

  
• Double click on the gadget icon you would like to install. It will appear docked to right side of your desktop screen.

Windows Gadget For VWorker Latest Projects

I have attached this gadget with this post. Download the zip file, unzip it in one of the two locations that I earlier specified and you will be good to go.

When you are connected to a windows machine via Remote Desktop (RDP), restarting the remote machine option is not present in Windows Start menu. Only options you see are Disconnect and Log off. If you need to restart that machine you can not press CTL + ALT + DEL. If you do it will bring up shut down option dialog box for local machine. So to restart Windows machine via Remote Desktop, you need to use CTL + ALT + END keys.

After I installed Windows 7 x64 device driver on my Windows 2008 Server x64 laptop, I looked my wireless network connection utility and noticed that my wireless connection was not working. I looked in device manager and saw that there was no problem with driver installation. There was no yellow mark against the wireless card device. Then I went into Manage Network Connections windows. The icon was there for wireless connection but it was in Disabled. I tried to enable it and it won't enable. It kept getting back into Disabled and every time I tried to enabled a windows error message will pop up asking to check for solution online. I decided to look in the event log and found there were plenty of errors with following message.

One thing was clear that network utility was trying to do some action and it was failing in WLanApi.dll. This dll has implementation of Wireless Network APIs. Then it clicked that on Windows 2008 Server, Wireless LAN Service feature is not installed by default. So simple solution is to goto Server Configuration wizard to launch features window and add Wireless LAN Service feature and finish the installation and wireless card will work fine.

I had a very interesting experience when I tried to install Windows 7 on my desktop that has Windows XP 32bit installed on it. Well I knew that I could not simple upgrade a 32 bit OS to 64 bit OS. So it was going to be a dual boot on my machine. I downloaded Windows 7 64 bit DVD from MSDN. It was little naive of me to think that setup file on that DVD will actually run from 32 bit OS. Anyways, I gave it a try. That meant that I have to boot from my Windows 7 64 bit DVD. So I restarted the machine and chose of option of botting from CD/DVD. That did not go very well. The ISO download from MSDN was not bootable. And I could not find my DVD that Microsoft sent me as part of MSDN shipment. Well going by where there is will there is a way here is my work around to do Install Windows 7 64 bit on my Dell desktop.

So I came up with idea of first installing Windows Vista 64 bit on machine because I have boot CD for it. Well, that did not go very well. For some reason Dell desktops with SATA drives do not boot from MSDN disks. They always end up with BSOD. It has something to do with drivers for SATA drive that dell machines ship with. I knew Windows 7 boot disks work with dell machines. Luckily I had my Windows 7 N Edition (version that ships in Europe). So I went down the path of using that. And I got lucky with it. This DVD worked fine and I was able to install Windows 7 64 bit on my machine. One thing you want to do it not to choose the option of activating the serial number because I was about to upgrade this installation to regular Windows 7. Well now I came to know that you can not upgrade Winodws 7 N to Windows 7. Well that is ok because I did not need that installation anyways. Only thing I really needed was a 64 bit OS on my machine so I could launch set up files of regular Windows 7 64 bit. I inserted MSDN DVD for Windows 7 64 bit into the machine and went on with installation.

That was an interesting learning exercise for me.

Download Installation Files

Download Source Code

What is Dat File Viewer?

Simply put, this is a very light weight application that helps you see what all secrets microsoft is hiding in index.dat files in various folders under a user's profile. As per microsoft index.dat files are their cache or index files that they create to speed up access to various web sites, applications etc. But one thing lot of people have to come realize over the time that even after you clean up your Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History etc. files from your windows machine, these index.dat files still carry all the footprints of your internet and file activities. So analysis of these files is used as one of the forensic tools when you want to recreate a user's internet activities in the past.

I am not going to go into details on format of index.dat files and other related technical details. Following link is an excellent technical resource on inside of index.dat file. This is by FoundStone.com a devision of McAfee.

• Index.dat White Paper

I have developed this open source application based on the original C code developed by FoundStone.com. This application is built using .Net framework.

Install It

• Download the insaller package associated with this post.
• Unzip this file in a folder.
• Double click on setup.exe to launch the installer.
• Follow the instructions and you are all set to go.

Pre-requisites

You will need to have Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 installed on your machine to run this application. You can download the run time from the following location.

Download Microsoft .Net 4.0 Framework

I did not spend much time on the installer package to get automatic install of Microsoft .Net 4.0 framework. May be I will get to that in upcoming release. But for now, my apologies for making you do manual install of the framework if you do not already have it.

Run It

If you chose default installation option, you should have ByteBlocks Dat File Viewer entry in your start menu and you should be able to launch the applicaiton from there. If for some reason you do not see menu item in Start menu, then look under ProgramFiles/ByteBlocks folder the application. From there, you can double click on ByteBlocks.DatFileViewe.exe file to launch the application.

After you launch the application, you will see a splash screen with picture of a turtle in it. Depending on amount of data contained in your index.dat files, the application may require few seconds to load. So be little patient with load screen, the application will eventually load.

Export Results

The application allows you to export list of URLs or Coookies from following locations into a PDF file.

• Temporary Internet Files
• Cookies
• History

In the top menu of the application, click on Export > PDF link to generate PDF file.

What are version numbers for Windows operating system?

I keep getting this question so many times that I finally put it down here. This is not something that I came up with it. This information is available in Win32 SDK on MSDN.

In my previous post Fix STOP: 0x0000007B (OxF8968640, 0xC0000034, 0X00000000, 0x00000000), I described come remedies to that problem. The thing that started the whole thing was the following message.

I had Windows XP Home installed on my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop. I decided to upgrade it to Windows XP Professional. The upgrade completed without any problems. After laptop was rebooted, I had my nice login screen come up with all the user accounts listed. I clicked on my account and I got the above message. Since I have valid user license for Windows XP Professional, I clicked on "Yes" on the dialog box. Nothing happened. Usually a wizard starts that walks you through activation steps. I tried rebooting few times, booted in safe mode, repaired my installation. Nothing worked at all. I thought I could log into safe mode to do activation. Well, it told me that I can not activate copy of windows in safe mode. I tried to reboot with "Safe mode with Networking Support". That did not go very well because operating system refused to do so telling me that I have to activate copy of the windows before I could do so. After digging around and calling my preferential technical support at microsoft, I came to know the following things and fix for the problem.

• Windows Activation Wizard Depends on Installation of Internet Explorer. So much for not forcing users to have to install IE.
• Upgrade from Windows XP Home Basic to Windows XP Professional wiped my previous installation of IE8

So from above two issues you can see that I am in catch 22 situation and there was no way that activation wizard was going to come up. So here is the solution to the problem.

• Goto another machine that has CD/DVD burner
• Download full installer of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)
• Burn IE8 on CD/DVD
• Now log in into "Safe Mode" on machine with activation problem
• Insert CD with IE8 installer
• Install IE8 on the machine
• Reboot the machine
• Now when This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can log on. Do you want to activate Windows now? message dialog box pops up, click "Yes"
• This should bring up activation wizard and you should be able to complete your activation of copy of windows and use your machine normally.

Two days ago I decided to upgrade my Dell Latitude E6500 laptop from Windows XP Home Basic to Windows XP Professional. I decided not to do a clean install and use Upgrade option at install time. It upgraded fine. When I tried to log into the machine, i got the error message that I need to activate this version of Windows before I could use it. Well that is another story. I tried few things and decided to do a clean install. So I inserted my boot disk and made the laptop boot from it. All the drivers copied fine and when it went to step of Starting Windows Executive, BAM. I get the dreaded BSOD with error code STOP: 0x0000007B (OxF8968640, 0xC0000034, 0X00000000, 0x00000000). Well, this is a new laptop and was botting fine when I upgraded OS version. So it did not seem logical to think that hard disk is corrupted or some controller is failing. I remember that I had similar issue couple of years ago when I tried to upgrade OS on one of my Dell Precision Workstation. Then it hit me that at that time the problem was because of SATA drivers not being loaded from Windows XP install CD. And I had to ask Dell for installer CD that was used on that desktop. When you see this kind of error when you do any of the following:

• Reinstall OS from disk other than manufacturer
• Change your hard disk configuration
• You got SATA/RAID drives

First try to see if you can find your original OS disk that came with the machine or ask the manufacturer for a new one. There are different solutions proposed like disabling SATA option in BIOS. I do not feel comfortable with those options because it may introduce issues that may affect performance of your machine. I will strongly suggest using disk that has appropriate disk drivers.

I have been running Windows 7 for quite some time now. Lately I started seeing that every now and then machine will consume almost 100% CPU. Especially if machine resumes from hibernation it was taking few minutes to get it started completely and respond to mouse and keyboard events. So I started looking into Task Manager. I noticed that there was good amount of activity happening. And most of the activity was for operations that I did not care or I did not use or I did not know about. There were 2 processes that I am going to mention here.

Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service

I noticed that wmpncfg.exe process was consuming close to 35% of CPU. Then I looked in Service Control Manager and found this service. Interesting thing was that the service was configured to run Manually but it was already running. I never started it. This is what the description of this service says.

If you are not using media player to share your content, then you really do not need to run this service. Change the status of this service to Disabled.

Feed Sync

Second process that i noticed was msfeedssync.exe. This process was actually waking up at regular interval and consuming all the resources. The name pretty much tells that it has something to do with news feed synchronization. I had configured Windows Mail to read some feeds some time back. But then I had removed it from there. Windows Mail also adds these feeds to Internet Explorer as well. You can click on the feeds in Internet Explorer by clicking on Favorites button. The left pane has a tab for Feeds. You can see in the image below that there is one entry for news feed.

Now click on Tools > Internet Option menu option. It will bring up Internet options dialog box. Click on Content tab. At the bottom of the view you will notice section Feeds and web slices. Click on Settings button. It will bring up following dialog box. Notice that by default all feeds are set to be synchronized every 15 minutes. Turn this off if you are not using IE as news reader or you want to synchronize the feeds manually.

After I made these 2 changes, I saw significant improvement in performance of my laptop.