First let me thank the MS dev folks for fixing UAC in Windows 7. The new default setting has nearly eliminated the twitching I got when I tried to use Vista. It’s still not perfect though. I have two apps that I use all the time, a screen rotation controller and the excellent Acronis True Image Home 2010 that continuously pop that Allow application to write… dialog box. I trust both apps and the Acronis one is even digitally signed so it should be simple, like on a Mac for example, for me to say ONCE that I trust this app and to keep trusting it unless it changes.

Nope, that’s not possible.

I found a number of very well-written posts on Technet and other sites about how UAC works and how to modify the settings. The net is a) Vista level homicide inducing annoyance b) what you have now c) what you have now without dimming the screen d) no UAC security at all. Funny, none of these do what I want.

The reputed workaround is to uninstall the app and then reinstall it in another folder structure other than Program Files. Maybe a folder called trickthereallyannoyingUACpopup. According to those who have tried this solution it works, or works for a while, or doesn’t work at all. Not going there. You could also create a new shortcut using the built in task scheduler service. Seems like a lot of work for what should be a simple enough selection. Most of the folks on the MS forums made real efforts to be helpful and most of the questioners were very cool, but as soon as someone suggested that the answer was not acceptable and that they wanted, well what I wanted, the answers got snooty from some folks fast. Too bad, because Windows 7 is really good. For Windows at least, and being snooty to people trying to use your product is really bad form.

Oh and in case you haven’t grokked the actual answer to how to do this, you cannot. MS knows what’s good for you so suck it up. Or switch to a Mac.

As noted in a prior post, I have had issues getting eSATA drives recognized off the motherboard eSATA connections, as have a lot of other people.  In my case, the motherboard is the well respected Asus P6TD Deluxe but I could not get a Western Digital MyBook to be seen at all.

I had the same issue on the Mac Pro with the new Drobo S so I bought two different eSATA PCI-e cards, one for each machine.  The one in the Mac is the Sonnet Tempo E2 and the one in the Windows box is a LaCie SATA II 2E.

Both systems work great, but to focus on the Windows issue; the BIOS on the Asus Board immediately recognized the card as a SATALink and enabled it.  Windows 7 needed to start up completely without the drive connected to install its own device drivers.  I’m glad it did as the drivers in the box from LaCie were pretty old, and once again the Microsoft drivers did the job.  As soon as Windows told me my device had been installed, I powered up the WD drive and Windows 7 found it and mounted it properly.  Now instead of FireWire 400 I have an eSATA connection at 3GB/s.  So if you are thinking about an eSATA drive for your Windows 7 machine, factor in the requirement for an eSATA card, about $50 and things should be good to go.

You know you want to participate in the Twitterverse, but you run Windows and the Twitter apps you’ve looked at all leave you cold. They aren’t creating a lot of value for you.

Enter Blu. It’s from a neat company called thirteen23 They build utilities for Windows and Blu, as you will have guessed by now is their Twitter client. The web page says it is the Twitter client for Vista and I guess both people who run Vista are pretty excited. Fortunately Blu also runs on Windows 7 and does so wonderfully. thirteen23 does some other neat stuff but their killer app is Blu.

One of the things that challenges me with Twitter is that I’ll get a reply to something I posted but the reply doesn’t pull together the entire conversation, so I have to hunt for it. Blu does this automatically. Want to reply, DM, or retweet? Blu makes it simple, just click the reply and the original tweet flips over to give you an entry box. Could not be simpler.

Adding shortened URLs is easy with no buttons or sites to select, it’s automatic. You may have seen apps that run out of Twitter api uses pretty quick. That’s annoying. Blu stays on the mark so just scroll for more tweets. It’s so good I wish it had a Mac version. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Well I was reminded tonight why I prefer the Macintosh over other platforms.  I built a new machine running Windows 7 to host my virtual machine repository.  Since I wanted maximum speed for the connection, I bought a Western Digital MyBook Home 1.5TB during one of the Boxing Week sales because it had eSATA.  It also has USB2 and FireWire 400.  I really dislike USB2 as a disk connection because when the volume gets up there it’s just so darn pokey.  FireWire 400 is better but neither the drive, nor the machine (yet) has a FireWire 800 port.  Hence eSATA.  3GB/s should be more than fast enough. 

The drive is inexpensive and while nowhere near the speed of a Caviar Black in a third party enclosure, the price was right.  But there’s an issue.  I’ve learned by plenty of web research that Windows 7 consistently misses seeing eSATA connected drives.  I’ve posted questions to WD and to Microsoft but see that I’m not the only person with the issue, it’s not unique to WD drive enclosures and there is apparently no solution out there.

Now I still believe strongly in Windows 7, if you must run Windows.  But don’t expect any good news for connecting external SATA drives.  Internal drives work fine.  If I get this fixed or find a solution I will update the post, but in the interim, save yourself pain and anguish and don’t bother trying to use Windows 7 with an eSATA device.  By the way, I have exactly the same drive plugged into my Mac Pro as my Time Machine target and it works very well indeed.Tags: windows 7 does not see esata drives, issue with eSata and Windows 7, external drives not found by Windows 7

Mice are integral to our use of computers but in my own experience a bad mouse can make your day go poorly and even cause you physical pain. Earlier this year, I switched from the Apple Mighty Mouse on my Mac Pro to the Logitech MX Revolution. For general use, I think that this mouse is the best one on the market. It’s not cheap, being priced around $130 CDN at retailers and on the web. It’s no longer a current release from Logitech but they still exist out there and it has more functionality than the model that replaces it. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

New up for me this year is the Logitech MX Air. I wanted a mouse that could be used as a presenter controller since my venerable Logitech Wireless presenter stopped working when I upgraded my Macs to Snow Leopard. The MX Air literally works in the air, allowing pointer movement and clicks without having to rest on a specific surface. The buttons are fully programmable and my only missing wish is side to side scrolling as it only has controls for vertical scrolling. Like the Apple Magic Mouse, the top is touch sensitive so there is less actual clicking to be done when scrolling. Expensive at around $200 CDN. RECOMMENDED

Next up is the Logitech Performance Mouse MX. This is the follow-on to the MX Revolution and offers pretty much the same set of functionality. The MX had two scroll wheels, one on top and one on the thumb side. The Performance Mouse MX eschews the second scroll wheel for a surface button on the top of the lower edge where your thumb falls. I set this mouse up on my Windows 7 desktop and use this button for the Aero window selector and it works well for this. On the Revolution I used the wheel to activate OS X screen management functions so it was pretty simple. There is a simpler button to control the gearing function for the main scroll wheel making clicking the scroll wheel another programmable action. This mouse uses Logitech’s new DarkField technology so it tracks on pretty much any surface. Around $100 CDN. Includes the new Logitech UNIFY connector technology.RECOMMENDED

The next mouse from Logitech is the VX Revolution. Like the MX Revolution, this one is no longer current in the line but is found in retailers and online still. I’ve had mine about six months and it is the default mouse for my Acer AspireOne as I really don’t care for the trackpad on that machine. Very programmable and easy to use, the smaller size makes it convenient for the Netbook. Lots of buttons and easily customized. Works very well with Windows 7 Home Premium on this machine. Last seen at $60 CDN. RECOMMENDED

When this little guy appeared it sold for over $100 CDN which is a lot of money for a notebook mouse but now you can find the no longer current line VX Revolution online and in stores for around $55 CDN. It’s very small and has the first generation Logitech USB stub receiver that you can leave in your USB port all the time. Ideal for notebooks and Netbooks, it takes up little bad space and is very customizable. Small enough for an airline tray, back when you could actually get your notebook open back in steerage. You probably wouldn’t want to use this as your primary mouse, especially if you have big hands as I do, but for short term use or as an alternative to lousy trackpads, it’s great. I use them with my MacBook Pro and the Dell Mini 9 all the time. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

VMware is well known for its enterprise class virtualization solutions and of course as noted previously here at thehumantouch.ca for VMware Fusion the awesome virtualization application for OS X. But long before Fusion there existed VMware Workstations and those of us who have had to build complex demonstrations involving multiple servers and workstations have used VMware Workstation to accomplish these goals.

With Version 7 of VMware Workstation, the VMware team have made an excellent product even better. It runs on both the Windows and the Linux platforms. The new version is fully tested on Windows 7 and even offers DirectX 9.0c Shader 3 and openGL 2.13D graphic support in virtualized Windows machines. It also supports the Aero graphics routines in vm’d Windows 7 implementations. It continues to support a wide variety of Windows and Linux guests and I have yet to be unsuccessful in building a VM of anything that could be installed natively on an Intel processor (excluding OS X of course) with VMware.

If you are doing any kind of development work, well you probably aren’t reading this site, but in case you are, the new version integrates directly with Eclipse, Visual Studio and Springsource for app development and debugging. Virtualization is a great way to test the execution of your app on multiple platforms without building up a lot of physical hardware.

VMware Workstation costs about $190 USD but there are promos running from time to time where you can save money. If you don’t need to build VMs, just to run an existing one, such as the prebuilt machines in the VMware marketplace, you can also get VMware Player as a free download. Recommended

Microsoft has made the beta of Office 2010 available via a number of different channels. The shipping product for PCs running Windows is Office 2007. This was the first iteration of the ribbon interface and a very different look and feel for Office as well as the first instantiation of The Soft One’s open XML files format. In fairness Office 2007 works fine with the old file formats that are the default for a gazillion docs out there already, but MS is trying to be more open and that’s not bad at all. That said, I simply could not get my head into Office 2007. It was powerful, feature rich, and worked decently enough. Office is an established brand and drives good revenue to Microsoft but it is a stable offering and respectfully a lot of money when you can get OpenOffice that does 90% of what Office does with a very similar UI to Office 2003 for free. The ribbon required a lot more retraining for folks than was expected and in 2010 Beta, MS has made real efforts to make the ribbon interface much easier to use. Good on them for that. Unfortunately the suite is not smaller or lighter than its predecessor, although in fairness this is a beta, and hopefully it will slim down by the first customer ship date. Overall I think that they’ve done a really nice job so far. I’m not yet sure that the web versions of the apps are strong enough to beat Google or at least not yet. I was also disappointed with Outlook as it is bigger than in the past and while I can see an individual wanting direct integration to Facebook and Twitter, this will give enterprise architects serious concerns about security and user focus. Office 2010 in beta is definitely worth a look whether you are an individual user or a corporate IT professional. Now if MS could only update Office for Macintosh with the long promised macro support so the 2008 version wasn’t something you want to pat on the head in sympathy.

I hear a lot that Windows 2000 was the last good version of Windows. Up until the release of Windows 7 I would have to agree. XP looked like it was designed by Fisher Price, who do great work but are not a leader in operating systems, and Vista was, well until the last service pack, it was like Vger from Star Trek the Movie (4 out of 5 sucking chest wound rating) and the reason I kept referring to it as Veester.

Well we’re a month post release of Windows 7. Updates post release have been minor, and while it is highly unlikely I will ever make a switch from OS X to Windows as my production environment, W7 is superb. Many folks that I respect greatly have made the same determination. Where running Vista was like removing your own appendix with only a jackknife, a bottle of Vodka and a hand mirror, Windows 7 has been a no pain zone for me. I have done clean installs and using tips from Ed Bott and Paul Thurrott done upgrades from the RTM releases and have not had any issues so far, even when running it on old junk like the IBM Thinkpad X41, a previously documented piece of crap that left the factory with an 80% lobotomy. Windows 7 just works, and even the tablet services are so usable, you actually enjoy using them.

I found a badly beaten Dell C400 in a box and will try W7 on this ancient critter that was born in the days before laptop builders understood the concept of “wireless” I think it will be faster than the Windows 2000 that is on the ginormous 30GB hard disk. Why will I do this? I actually believe that Windows 7 will run better on this aged machine that was pretty darn cool when it was born.

I have also done VM implementations of Windows 7 using VMware’s excellent Fusion 3 and they work flawlessly. In fairness I didn’t keep them running because I was doing an experiment only and dont’t own enough licenses to keep all this stuff live and running.

Congrats to the Windows 7 team, great work! And if you are going shopping for the holidays and some dorkstick offers you a Vista machine because “it’s really the same”, run do not walk from that establishment and go somewhere where they sell machines with Windows 7 preinstalled. You do not want XP and you definitely don’t want Vista.

In my world you really want a Mac, but Windows 7 is wicked good if you tend to fall that way.

Credit for this tip has to go to Tekzilla from Revision3. If you are a Windows user and want a simple and free way to build panorama photos, Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research is a really elegant solution.

Downloads are available in 32bit and 64bit versions. There’s no official support but there is a user forum that is pretty good. ICE allows you to insert a bunch of digital photos and line them up together as a long form panorama, and then intelligently stitches them together. You can adjust how the photos appear (projection) and the automated functions also map exposure and maximize the image size.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

We’ve all heard it said that running Windows without malware protection is like running barefoot with scissors in a field of broken glass.  Or something like that.  So if you’re going to do the Windows thing, get some malware protection, and if you won’t buy one of the name brand offerings like McAfee or Symantec et. al. and don’t want to use AVG or Avast or one of the free ones because you hate nagware, or banners to upgrade to a pro version.  (Does that mean you have amateur malware protection?), then at least go get Windows Security Essentials from Microsoft.  It’s pretty basic but combined with the built-in Firewall and Spyware Defender it’s decent basic protection. 

There’s no cost, no adware, and it does a good job of pattern updates.  The only safe Windows machine is one with no network connection that’s powered off.  Windows is the single largest target for those who want to attack an OS.  I’ve installed it on a W7 Home Premium install on an older laptop with 1.5GB of RAM and see no performance degradation.  I’m not overtaxing the little beast and it’s good.  I also use it on the Acer AspireOne when it is running Windows and not Moblin.

Hard to beat the price and good basic protection.