Windows 7 Sleep mode problem with IE9 and Skype 5

If you have both IE9 and Skype 5 running on a Windows 7 PC, you may have problems with going into sleep or hibernate mode. Apparently your PC may hang for an extended period of time and then Bluescreen.

Ends up there’s a previously unreported conflict between Win7, IE 9 and Skype 5. Details on the Microsoft Answers forum.

Solution? Uninstall IE 9 and re-install IE 8, or uninstall Skype 5 and re-install Skype 4.

Thanks to SB for the heads-up!

Don’t pay for software you don’t need!

Part 1 is the lead story this week in Windows Secrets Newsletter.

Deleting the wrong folder is much easier in Win7

Fellow Phuket resident ES sent this:

Using Win 7, I inadvertedly deleted 18 GB of movies from my E drive because I selected the parent folder instead of the subfolder. Both would have been too big for the Recycle Bin, so I accepted that warning for permanent deletion. Anyway I recovered it all using Piriform’s free Recuva program. Paying closer attention, I continued with my housekeeping, and guess what, I did it again!!! I couldn’t believe it, so I did some research. Try this:

Set up a new folder “FolderA”, then set up a sub-folder under Folder A called “FolderB”. Set Windows Explorer to show by List or by Details (not by Icons), and show the Navigation Pane on the left.

1. In the navigation pane, open all the way until B shows there. Now single click B in the navigation pane, and then single click A in the navigation pane. You will see that both A and B are highlighted in bright blue. In fact if you look closely, B is a brighter blue than A.. Now if you press the delete button, you will see that the Delete Window selects A for deletion. Not only that but while the Delete Window is open, the highlight of A significantly diminishes, thus indicating visually that B will be deleted, although the warning is for A to be deleted.

2. In the navigation pane, open all the way until B shows there. Now single click B in the main pane, and then single click A in the navigation pane. You will see that A is highlighted in bright blue while B is highlighted in medium grey. Now if you press the delete button, you will see that the Delete Window selects A for deletion, but the highlight of A significantly diminishes to a lighter grey than B, thus indicating visually that B will be deleted, although the warning is for A to be deleted.

In XP, the selected folder (parent or sub) is in dark blue, and the other folder is in the palest of pale grey, so as to make it impossible to confuse. The newly introduced Win 7 colour scheme in scenario 1 above is unforgiveable, and the modified XP colour scheme in scenario 2 has made the colours more distinguishable but introduced unneeded risk.

[Woody here]

There are two links to responses on the Microsoft social answers site, here and here. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be suitably impressed. I think the flippant attitude expressed belies a real problem, and I hope MS fixes this soon.

Thanks, ES…

Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 coming November 24

Microsoft has announced that Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 will be available on November 24. I’m a little slow getting this posted – apologies.

Think of PP3 as the Windows 7 extensions to Windows Home Server, with a little bit of new Media Center stuff thrown in. One of the glaring omissions in the Win7 launch was a way to automatically get the Windows Home Server shared folders tied into your Win7 libraries automatically. Power Pack 3 takes care of that little problem, and adds several new features as well. More details on the WHS Blog.

If you have WHS set up for automatic updates (and, yes, as I explain in Windows Home Server For Dummies, I do turn on automatic updates for WHS), you’ll automatically get Power Pack 3 on November 24. If you suddenly discover that your Win7 computers have picked up the Server folders in their libraries, you know what caused it.

Windows 7 full install DVD won’t boot on some systems – Error 5

Reader JE writes:

I am an MSDN subscriber and as such have early access to the new Windows 7 release. I decided after playing with it on my test machine that I would install it on my wife’s machine. She is currently running Vista and I thought I would do a clean, fresh install of Windows 7 rather than an upgrade.

Easy enough, download the .iso file, burn it to a DVD, boot and install. Right?

All went well up to the Boot stage where the DVD refused to boot. Instead it gave me some strange code 5 error message.

JE searched high and low and finally discovered that the DVD was a good one, but for some reason it wouldn’t boot on his wife’s machine.

After much searching on the internet I finally found this on the German unawave site:

During the boot from the Windows 7 installation DVD on some PCs the error message “Error Code 5 – can not boot from disk” appears. Affected are primarily computer with older motherboards of the company “AsRock” or “MSI”. Other DVDs on these PCs can boot without problems; e.g. from a Windows Vista installation DVD. And the Windows 7 installation DVD is also OK, because this DVD can boot on other computers. Also the replacement of the DVD drive does not help. And booting from the USB stick does not help either. The error seems to be an incompatibility of “AsRock” motherboards with the DVD boot sector used by Microsoft in Windows 7 installation DVD.

As luck would have it, I had an MSI motherboard.

I followed their instructions which amount to pulling the boot sector off of a Vista install DVD and creating a new DVD with the vista boot sector and the Windows 7 files and all was well. It booted, it installed and no more problem.

Every new version of Windows brings its own, uh, special challenges and you can expect Windows 7 will be the same. I’ll keep you posted on inscrutable problems as they come to my attention.

The Best Cheap Video Cards

As I’ve described in my Windows Secrets Newsletter articles, there are two obstacles to turning a fairly-recent Windows XP machine into a Windows 7 powerhouse: memory and video cards.

If you’re contemplating changing your WinXP or Vista PC over to Windows 7, start by running the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. That will tell you immediately if you have a show-stopper problem: no Windows 7 driver for a specific piece of hardware, for example, or no Windows 7 support for your favorite program.

Based on experience with more than a dozen old Windows XP machines, if your PC passes Upgrade Advisor muster, you should also make two hardware changes: bring your memory up to 1 GB; and install a decent video card. Memory’s cheap. So are good video cards.

Joel Durham at ExtremeTech just posted a thorough review of Budget Gaming Graphics Cards. In the $175 category, he recommends the ATI Radeon HD 4870. In the $100 category, he gives the nod to the  Radeon HD 4770.

From what I’ve seen, putting $30 of additional memory and a $100 video card in a fairly recent Windows XP machine creates a very competent Windows 7 machine.

Now the big question is… how much will Microsoft charge for Windows 7?

Microsoft will disable AutoRun and change AutoPlay

Remember all the angst over Windows AutoPlay and AutoRun? (For a detailed discussion of the differences between AutoPlay and AutoRun, start with this Wikipedia article.) AutoPlay was a major infection vector for Conficker. It’s always been a huge security hole in Windows.

Microsoft just announced that it’s disabling AutoRun in Windows 7, and changing the way AutoPlay works. The details are a bit hard to follow – the terminology is more than a bit obfuscating – but here’s what’s happening:

As I explained in my Windows Secrets column in January, it’s very easy to create a file called autorun.inf that can confuse the living daylights out of people. If you stick this custom-made autorun.inf on a USB drive or burn it on a CD, the commands in that file will cause Windows to display a (potentially infective) program on the AutoPlay menu, the menu that appears every time you insert a USB drive or CD into your computer (see screen shot).

In fact, autorun.inf controls what appears on the AutoPlay list if you stick it on any kind of removable media – USB drive, CD, DVD, SD card (so a card from your camera could infect other computers), and so on.

Microsoft is changing Windows so it behaves in two different ways, depending on whether the autorun.inf file is stuck on (1) a CD/DVD, or (2) any other kind of  media, notably a USB drive or SD card.

In the future, when Windows finds an autorun.inf file on a USB drive or SD card, it ignores the file. Nothing happens. You can create the most diabolically clever autorun in the history of mass infections, put it on a USB drive, and if someone sticks the drive in a properly patched Windows machine, it won’t do squat. AutoPlay doesn’t list anything from the autorun.inf, and nothing runs automatically.

In the future, when Windows finds an autorun.inf file on a CD or DVD, it shows the contents of the autorun.inf in the AutoPlay window, but the new, revised AutoPlay window warns you that the entry associated with autorun.inf is from the CD, not from Microsoft. The AutoPlay warning says “Install or run program from your media.”

And no matter where the autorun.inf file comes from, it can’t launch its own program. You have to do the clicking – point the gun at your own foot and pull the trigger.

The recently leaked Windows 7 Release Candidate, which should be widely available next week, already has those changes to AutoRun and AutoPlay. In addition, says Microsoft, “we are planning to release an update in the future for Windows Vista and Windows XP that will implement this new behavior.”

It’s about time.

Oh. There’s one little caveat. For those of you who suffer with U3 – the technology built into some USB drives that makes part of the drive look like a CD drive – Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to treat the whole USB drive like a USB drive. Instead, the CD part will be subject to the same handling as a CD. Quoth the Softies, “It is worth noting that some smart USB flash drives can pose as a CD/DVD drive instead of standard ones (see Wikipedia for an example). In this specific scenario, the operating system will treat the USB drive as if it is a CD/DVD because the type of the device is determined at the hardware level.”

Windows 7 secret unveiled: WinXP mode

Three weeks ago, I mentioned that Microsoft was planning a big, huge announcement about something new in Windows 7. Here’s what I said:

My guess is that Microsoft will announce some sort of Windows XP emulator that runs under Windows 7 Enterprise Edition. (No, they won’t call it an emulator, they’ll call it “Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation” but – with apologies to the developers who hate the term – it’s basically a fancy emulator.) That’ll make a lot of companies happy. But it’s not something I would call major.

Looks like Paul Thurrott was just authorized by his Microsoft handlers to spill the beans. Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7.

Gawrsh. Where have I heard that before? Says Paul:

XPM is built on the next generation Microsoft Virtual PC 7 product line, which requires processor-based virtualization support (Intel and AMD) to be present and enabled on the underlying PC, much like Hyper-V, Microsoft’s server-side virtualization platform. However, XPM is not Hyper-V for the client. It is instead a host-based virtualization solution like Virtual PC; the hardware assistance requirement suggests this will be the logical conclusion of this product line from a technological standpoint. That is, we fully expect future client versions of Windows to include a Hyper-V-based hypervisor.

Sorry, but that’s even less interesting than I thought it would be – and I wasn’t expecting much. Paul (Raf?) goes on to say:

XP Mode consists of the Virtual PC-based virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3). It will be made available, for free, to users of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions via a download from the Microsoft web site. (That is, it will not be included in the box with Windows 7, but is considered an out-of-band update, like Windows Live Essentials.)

Which means those of you running Windows 7 Home Premium won’t get it.

That’s OK. I don’t get it. Sure, running a WinXP emulation window on a Win7 desktop is kinda cool, but I don’t see a whole lot of advantage of this approach over, say, running a VMWare window – and I bet the processing overhead is excruciating.

I wonder what happens to WinXP drivers?