chmod 644

March 1 is quickly approaching and starting Monday, people who are still running the Release Candidate of Windows 7 will start seeing the expiration message. I’ve been running the RC at home since May of last year and knew this time would eventually come, so this past week I purchased the Home Premium upgrade media from Amazon along with some extra RAM for my Dell Inspiron 530 (it had two 512mb chips that I pulled and replaced with two new 1gb chips to bring it up to 4gb total).

Based on my previous experience with the Windows Easy Transfer utility, I used WET to backup my documents and settings to an external hard drive. To be doubly sure I didn’t lose anything, I also just copied my entire user profile folder (C:\Users\<my login>) to the same hard drive. I wanted to do a clean install with the upgrade media (and also go with the 64-bit version), so I made sure I had that external drive with my WET backup attached when I booted from the Win7 DVD. From within the Windows 7 Setup, I formatted my entire 640gb internal drive, completely wiping out the RC partition. Since Setup knew about the WET backup, the Win7 activation process was successful and the rest of the install was smooth.

After booting Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit for the first time and then installing all the outstanding updates, the real fun began. I used WET to restore my files and settings and then began the long process of re-installing and re-configuring all of my applications (64-bit versions where applicable). I had made screenshots of the Programs and Features list before upgrading to facilitate this, so I knew exactly what I meeded to re-install. I had also taken screenshots of my Taskbar and Start Menu so I could put everything back the way I had it under the RC.

So I’m back up and running and have finally joined the world of 64-bit!

I’ve been using the release candidate of Windows 7 at home for the past few months but now we’ve started testing Windows 7 at work. This past week I “upgraded” my laptop and desktop at the office to the RTM version of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Actually, both were clean installs since they were previously running Windows XP (you can only do a true upgrade from Vista).

Installation

My main work machine is an older Sony VAIO laptop (Core Duo 2.0GHz, 1gb RAM, 80gb HD). To prepare, I ran the File and Settings Transfer (FAST) wizard in XP to back up all my documents and settings to my external hard drive, which took a long time. Then I ran the Windows 7 installation from the DVD within XP. The basic install took just about 90 minutes.

Once I was logged into my fresh new install, I ran the Windows Easy Transfer (WET) utility to restore my saved settings from XP. What I learned, however, is that I had misread the “upgrade” instructions. I was supposed to run the WET wizard from the Windows 7 installation media to back up my XP settings because the backups created by FAST are not compatible with WET (it’s meant for upgrading from XP to Vista)! Thus, after my clean install, I was unable to restore my documents and settings. I ended up working around this by restoring my FAST backup to a spare XP laptop and then using WET from the Win7 DVD to back up the settings again and finally transfer them back to my laptop.

Also, I chose not to re-format/re-partition my drive during the installation of Windows 7. The result of that was Windows 7 went into the standard C:\Windows location and the installer moved the old C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, and C:\Documents and Settings folders to C:\Windows.Old. Thus, I was able to retrieve all of my documents from there as well, in addition to retrieving some settings and files not handled by the WET utility.

If you’re “upgrading” from XP, the only benefit you get by using the WET utility is an easy (but not quick) method to transfer your documents and files (but depending on how much you’ve got to save, you may need a pretty large external drive). There aren’t that many “settings” that get transferred, from what I could tell, other than your actual account setup. You do get a nice report from the wizard, however, that shows you what applications you might need to re-install along with what was transferred. So if you’re going to format/re-partition your drive before installing Windows 7, WET is the way to go. Otherwise, I say just copy your stuff out of C:\Windows.Old after the install is complete and don’t worry about taking the extra time to back all that stuff up to an external drive (unless you want a backup just to be absolutely safe).

Drivers

After the initial install, I had basic SVGA (800×600) resolution and no Aero glass effects, as the installer did not find a suitable driver for the nVidia GeForce Go 7400 card in my laptop and the Experience Index was 1.0 due to low scores for the Graphics/Gaming Graphics items. The Windows 7 driver package (beta) from nVidia’s site did not contain a driver for the card either. I tried using the Vista driver package, but when I ran the setup program it told me a compatible adapter could not be found. Argh! I eventually was able to go into the Device Manager and manually update the driver, pointing it to the directory where the nVidia installer had extracted the Vista drivers. This gave me back the ability to use the native 1280×800 resolution on the laptop panel and also turned on all Aero Glass features once I re-ran the Experience Index (which went up to 3.5, still hampered by the low scores for graphics).

Most of the internal laptop hardware seemed to be functional, like the built-in wired and wireless network adapters, but I still had a few “Unknown Device” items listed in Device Manager. One turned out to be the built-in webcam and the other was the Memory Stick slot. The Windows 7 driver wizard was able to point me to the proper drivers directly on Sony’s web site to get these working, which was nice. My first run of Windows Update also pulled down a driver for the biometric device (fingerprint scanner).

Not every driver worked properly, though. Since the Sony Notebook Utilities wouldn’t install, I can’t use the Fn keys to control screen brightness, volume, LCD/VGA output switching, etc. I’m also missing the switcher utility that allows me to independently turn off the wireless G and Bluetooth radios. Sony’s Windows 7 page for the VAIO just says to check back once Windows 7 is officially released, so I’m hopeful this annoyance will eventually be resolved.

Post-Installation Configuration

I had made a list of everything installed on my laptop before I started this process, but it still took a lot of time to re-install everything and tweak it all back to just the way I liked it (Start Menu configuration, shortcut keys, shared drives, network printers, etc.). While annoying, this gave me the chance to leave out all of the stuff I hadn’t used in a while. Once I was done, I removed the C:\Windows.Old folder to free up the disk space.

XP Mode

I wanted to try XP Mode in Windows 7 to see if I could use it to run some of the older programs we use in the office in a virtual machine. I downloaded and installed it from Microsoft’s site, but ran into a problem when I tried to run it on my VAIO due to a lack of hardware virtualization. Apparently Sony hasn’t enabled hardware virtualization in the BIOS of any currently shipping VAIO even though the processors support it, so Virtual PC will not run.

Luckily, I was able to enable hardware virtualization on my desktop (on which I had also done a clean Windows 7 install). Once you have the XP virtual machine running under Windows 7, you install your “legacy” applications normally (inside the virtual machine). For example, in the screenshot below I was adding IIS:

Windows 7 creates corresponding shortcuts for the applications under the XP Mode folder on the Start Menu of your PC (you can also add your own custom shortcuts to that folder by simply creating them under the All Users Start Menu within the virtual machine). When clicking on one of those icons, the application runs seamlessly on the desktop so the user is not even aware the application is being virtualized (except for the old XP Luna-style interface instead of the new Aero glass look). Using XP Mode, for example, I was able to successfully install NetMeeting (which I need to connect to the voicemail system console). It ran just fine “on” Windows 7, with almost no noticeable impact on performance.

It requires a little bit of advance setup but XP Mode seems to be a good way of running any legacy applications that won’t work natively under Windows 7 (assuming the user’s PC supports hardware virtualization, of course).

The developers over at Cerulean Studios announced today that with Build 117, Trillian Astra (for Windows) has gone gold. You can download the free version here.

I’ve been using the beta on Windows 7 for the past four months and am pretty happy with it (I’ve been a paid Pro user since 2004 and have upgraded to the Pro version of Astra as well). I still have one random problem where sometimes if I initiate a conversation with someone on Yahoo, they won’t get my messages, but if they start the conversation we can chat back and forth just fine. The random crashes seemed to have been fixed as well (at least, I don’t think I’ve had one since I got Build 117 a few days ago).

So if you’re looking for a good multi-service IM application for Windows and have been scared away from Digsby, give Astra a shot.

I’ve been working on this post for a while. It’s a bit long, so bear with me …

A TiVo is much more than just a souped up digital VCR. What separates TiVo from your cable company’s generic DVR (other than the awesome features of TiVo service itself) is the wide range of (mostly free) applications you can use to enhance your TiVo experience. I’ve written about some of these applications here before (like Galleon, streambaby, and pyTivo) but I figured one comprehensive write-up might be in order.

First off, all of these apps require a TiVo with an active service subscription. For those of you with the old DVD-combo units (like the Toshiba TX-20 or Pioneer 810h), this means you need to have the TiVo Plus service, not TiVo Basic. I’m not discussing hacked boxes here either. You’ll need to know your Media Access Key (MAK), which can be found under your account on tivo.com or on your TiVo under Messages & Settings, Account & System Information, Media Access Key. Finally, I’m focusing on utilities that run on Windows and Linux. Many of these will run on a Mac as well, but I’m less familiar with that platform and the features that may or may not work with it.

Ok, let’s jump in!

TiVo Desktop

I have to start with TiVo’s own application, TiVo Desktop. The free version allows you to publish the music (in MP3 format) and photos (JPG, GIF, etc.) on your PC so you can access them from the TiVo interface. The Windows version of TD also allows you to download recordings from your TiVo (as long as they’re not copy-protected) to watch on your PC, or send previously downloaded content back to the TiVo for viewing on your television (as long as they’re in MPEG-2 format). Do you want to download every episode of “Robot Chicken” that your TiVo records? Set up an auto-transfer and TiVo Desktop will automatically download them for you in the background.

If you upgrade to TiVo Desktop Plus for $25, you’ll gain the ability to automatically transcode your downloaded recordings to a variety of portable formats (like for your iPod) and send more formats back to your TiVo (like Divx/Xvid or Matroska). Combining this with the auto-transfer feature, you can point TiVo Desktop at your iTunes folder where you download your video podcasts and have them automatically pushed up to your TiVo once iTunes downloads them. Before you shell out your $25, though, check out the rest of the applications below since you can get all of the same functionality of TiVo Desktop Plus (and more!) for free if you don’t mind tinkering with other third-party software solutions.

One tip: if your music isn’t in MP3 format, try Dan203’s Universal Audio Plugin, which adds support for unencrypted AAC, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis formats. If all of your music is DRM’ed (i.e., purchased from iTunes), you’re out of luck … even the free stuff below won’t be able to play those files.

pyTivo

Written in the Python scripting language, pyTivo is a free application similar to TiVo Desktop except it supports sending a wider variety of video formats to Series2 and Series3 TiVo boxes. Using pyTivo’s web interface (or by directly editing the configuration file) you can set up the plugins you want (i.e., video and music) and then configure the shares pointing to where your files are located. You can then use the TiVo interface to “pull” files onto your box (just like TiVo Desktop) or use the web interface to “push” them there.

The beauty of pyTivo is its use of ffmpeg behind the scenes to transcode a file into a format that your TiVo recognizes (MPEG-2 for video, MP3 for music). You can throw any video file format that ffmpeg supports at your TiVo and have it play: MP4, AVI, WMV, MKV, FLV, just about anything. It’s amazing … and the resulting quality is pretty good too! One drawback to this method is that it takes CPU power to convert video files from one format to another. Depending on the speed and power of the PC running pyTivo, you may or may not be able to watch the video as it’s being transferred onto the TiVo. Because of this, pyTivo works best (for me anyway) when you want to kick off a transfer for something you will be watching later.

Another cool pyTivo feature is its support of multiple levels of subfolders. No matter how you have your videos organized on your PC, TiVo Desktop always shows them in a flat list. The software will look two subfolders deep for accessible videos, but you’ll still get just one long list when browsing your PC’s Now Playing List from the TiVo. With pyTivo, however, whatever folder structure you use on your PC is what you’ll see when browsing from the TiVo. So if you want to have a path like Movies > Science Fiction > Star Wars > Clone Wars, pyTivo can handle that.

Finally, pyTivo supports metadata. When you download a .TiVo file it has a lot of information embedded into it: show name, air date, actors’ names, etc. Other video types don’t have this extra data, so when you transfer them back to your TiVo via TiVo Desktop, the resulting recording in your Now Playing List will be missing all of that “stuff.” pyTivo will read this extra information from a specially formatted text file and then send it across when the video is uploaded back to the TiVo. Rather than creating these text files by hand, grab the excellent MetaGenerator utility which lets you search for movies and TV shows in several online databases and then creates that metadata file for you. Using metadata also allows you to group shows in folders once they are on the TiVo!

As you can tell by my somewhat lengthy write-up here, pyTivo is hands down the application I use the most … it’s a must-have for any TiVo owner with an extensive digital video library. It can be a bit daunting to set up at first, if you’re not used to tweaking text-based configuration files or playing with metadata, but once you do get it working you’ll find it was well worth the time and effort.

Tip: if you need a quicker, easier setup for pyTiVo on Windows, try the Windows installer to get you going. Just keep in mind that it sometimes lags behind the current codeline so you may run into bugs or be missing out on newer features. Also, be sure to visit the pyTivo forums.

Galleon

One of the older third-party applications out there, Galleon started out as JavaHMO back in 2003 and is a sort of swiss army knife of TiVo applications. In addition to providing the standard download (ToGo), upload (GoBack), and music and photos functionality like TiVo Desktop, Galleon lets you do other things like view local weather, traffic, or theater listings, read your e-mail, browse your Netflix or Blockbuster rental queues, even parse your iTunes library for music playback (MP3 format only).

One neat feature of the ToGo app is that you can initiate downloads of recordings from the TiVo itself rather than from the desktop application. You can even start to download a recording from a different TiVo in your house. Similar to TiVo Desktop’s auto-transfers, you can set up rules in Galleon’s ToGo application for automatic downloads as well.

Galleon was abandoned by its original developer, Leon Nicholls, some time ago, but a few people are still working on it occasionally. I personally have contributed a few features to the Weather and ToGo apps and fixed a bug or two in the Movies app.

StreamBaby

StreamBaby (aka stream, baby, stream) is another application (written in Java) that allows you to transfer video from your PC to the TiVo. Unlike using pyTivo to transfer (i.e., copy) a video file to your TiVo, StreamBaby actually streams the video, similar to what the TiVo does for Netflix streaming. This means that you can actually fast-foward to a section of the recording that hasn’t been transferred yet (complete with thumbnail previews so you can tell what section you’re actually going to)! If you have to stop playback, StreamBaby remembers where you were so you can resume the stream from that point later on.

Just like pyTivo, you point StreamBaby to your video folders via a text-based configuration file. Your preciously organized folder hierarchy is preserved when browsing from the TiVo (multiple subfolder support) and if you’ve got metadata text files for your videos, it supports reading those as well.

Also like pyTivo, StreamBaby is accomplishing its “magic” with ffmpeg, so you can stream any video format (supported by your build of ffmpeg) to your TiVo Series3, Tivo HD, or TiVo HD XL box. The Series2 boxes don’t support streaming, however, so StreamBaby won’t work with that older platform.

TiVoPlayList

A TiVo Desktop replacement, TiVoPlayList (TPL) lets you download unprotected recordings and use auto-download rules but adds some extra bells and whistles like the option to shut down the PC when all transfers are complete. For the people who like to see how much space is being used on their TiVo’s hard drive, TPL can show you the size of each recording on disk along with total disk space used and available. You can even see this information in a nice graph. You can also export the list of recordings in a comma-separated format if you like. TPL is only for downloading recordings, however, so it can’t completely replace TiVo Desktop (no music, photos, or GoBack support). It’s a handy utility to have around, however.

kmttg

If you’re looking for an easy way to download, trim, and re-encode video from your TiVo in an automated fashion, kmttg might be the answer. The middle scroll area of the application is your standard Now Playing List showing you the recordings on each of your TiVos (in a tabbed interface). Select the recordings you want to download, and then click on the checkboxes along the top of the window to build your post-download batch processing job. You can have kmttg automatically generate metadata files for pyTivo, convert the downloaded .TiVo file into a plain MPEG-2 format, and then re-encode the video into a format of your choosing (again, using ffmpeg) for your portable device or for eventual transfer back to your TiVo. If you own one of the excellent VideoReDo products (I highly recommend them, well worth the money for MPEG-2 file editing), you can also have kmttg run the downloaded MPEG-2 file through VRD’s Quickstream Fix feature (to fix any quirks in the video) and AdDetective (to remove the commercials). kmttg is written in Java so it runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux (but VideoReDo is Windows-only).

Web Browser

This isn’t really an application, but more of a tip: you can use a browser to easily download recordings from your TiVo. Just point your favorite browser to https://{your TiVo’s IP address} and log in with a username of ‘tivo’ and your MAK as the password. This is a bare-bones way to pull shows off of your box (you can’t queue up multiple transfers, for example) but it works in a pinch.

To be able to play those .TiVo files you download, however, you’ll need to either install TiVo Desktop for the DirectShow codec or use something like tivodecode to convert it into a plain MPEG-2 file you can view in the player of your choice (like Windows Media Player or VLC).

For even more great information on these tools I’ve just described, check out bkdtv’s excellent posts on downloading and viewing videos over on the TiVo Community Forum. You can find me over on TCF as well.

Now, go have fun getting the most out of your TiVo!

Microsoft is really reaching with some of its latest advertising campaigns. Perhaps you heard about the vomiting woman with IMGIGP (oh  my god, I’m gonna puke) syndrome commercial that they recently pulled? And yes, that was Dean Cain as the spokesman.

Well, check out the latest “ad” for Microsoft Office 2010:

I have to admit that’s pretty creative and humorous, but does it really tell us anything about Office? On the other hand, does it need to?

“Spell check this!”

Microsoft is getting into the anti-malware market.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a replacement for Windows Live OneCare and, I think, Defender. Did I mention it’s free? Paul Thurrott has a good write-up on MSE on his SuperSite for Windows.

Since I’m already running the Windows 7 release candidate, I figured why not give this a try as well? I downloaded the free beta, uninstalled AVG Free, and installed the new software:

I’ll keep an eye on it for the next few weeks and see  how it goes …

Today I had to clean another one of those fake anti-virus programs off of a machine at work. This one was called Personal Antivirus and bore a striking resemblance to AVG Free (which I use myself and usually recommend to others).

Here’s the AVG console:

And here’s Personal Antivirus:

Look familiar? In this particular case, neither our corporate Symantec anti-virus nor Malwarebytes (both with current definitions) detected the fake program. I eventually had to clean it off manually myself.

These things are really sneaky. How can we educate the average user to tell these two apart? I mean, other than the fact that they had to click on something in a web browser to get the fake one installed in the first place, once “installed” they look and act like the real thing (well, except for all the fake alerts they throw up). Arrrrgh!

I stumbled across another neat feature in Windows 7: the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR).

Run psr.exe from the command-line and you’ll see a utility window you can use to record your session:

Click “Start Record” and then replicate the problem. Click “Stop Record” when you’re done and the tool will prompt you to save a zip file that has an HTML document in it containing screen shots and descriptions of the steps taken. Also cool is that the tool automatically highlights important areas of the screen:

This is obviously targeted toward help desks and IT support professionals (without remote access to the machine) who need to solve problems like “I just clicked the thingy and shows it some error message and disappears!”, but I could see myself using this as a quick and easy way to generate user documentation (like how-tos) as well.

Tech Republic has a good, detailed article on the PSR. Check it out.

How many more Eee puns can I come up with for my blog posts?

The Windows 7 release candidate just wasn’t cutting it for me on my EeePC 900A. It looked nice, but Windows is just not meant to be crammed into 4gb of hard drive space. Even after vLite’ing the install I barely had 300mb free left on the SSD. Turning on drive compression (particularly for the WinSxS folder) just slowed everything down which really killed the whole netbook experience. So this weekend I decided to give Linux Mint a try.

Linux Mint 7 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 so it’s basically the same thing I am running on my other EeePC, just with a few differences. Like Ubuntu, Mint releases have version numbers and alphabetic code names. Whereas Ubuntu uses the adjective/noun alliterative combination (i.e., Jaunty Jackelope), Mint uses girls’ names that end in ‘a’ (hence the 7th version uses the 7th letter of the alphabet which gives us Gloria).

First, as always, I used the great eeebackup utility to make a backup image of the Windows 7 setup just in case I feel like going back at some point. I then used UNetbootin (the universal netboot installer) to “burn” the downloaded Mint ISO image onto a 2gb thumb drive and then booted my Eee from that to start the installation. The process was quick and painless and soon I was tweaking away (having gone through installs of Ubuntu Eee, Easy Peasy, Ubuntu NBR, and now Mint in the past six months, I am getting to be quite the expert at quickly configuring a Linux distro just the way I like it on my netbooks ).

Just for fun, here’s a video I took of the 900A (white on left) booting Mint next to the 4G Surf (black on right) booting Ubuntu NBR. As expected, the 900A boots slightly faster due to its better Atom processor. Both are ready to go in just about 30 seconds though, which isn’t too bad.

Last week I stumbled on a deal over at Woot!: a refurbished Asus EeePC 900A (1gb RAM, 4gb SSD) for $160. My addiction to shiny things had me clicking on the “Buy” button before I could stop myself. Considering my original 4G Surf cost twice that (albeit over a year ago) it was too good a deal to pass up.

The 900A has a 9″ screen (running at 1024 x 600 resolution) and is overall slightly larger than my 4g Surf (it still fits nicely into the neoprene sleeve case, though). Like my 4G Surf, it also lacks Bluetooth and the webcam.

Out of the box it had the Xandros Linux distro installed but I wasn’t about to go back to using that. From the moment I ordered the unit I had plans to put the Windows 7 release candidate on it.

The first thing I did was a quick disk image using eeebackup just in case I should ever want to put the clean Xandros image back on it. Then it was time to research how to install Windows 7. Cramming a full Windows 7 install into 4gb of hard drive space requires some creativity. Luckily there are a lot of creative hackers out there. I ended up using a combination of various blog and forum postings (see the end of this post for the links) to create a bootable, vLite‘d version of the Win7 RC on a thumb drive and then used that to install it on the 900A:

After some post-install configuration, cleanup, and compression, I had a trimmed down (but functional, even with Aero effects!) version of Windows 7 on my new Eee with about 1.4gb free on the SSD.

I still need to put some more software on it (like AV software, Firefox, and maybe Office) so that final free space number will most likely be smaller. I’ll probably end up having to use an SD card for cheap, extra storage.

I think I’m taking a performance hit since I compressed the entire drive. Windows 7 isn’t super snappy, but it runs. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes before I consider switching to Ubuntu like I did on my 4G Surf.

Install Windows 7 on Asus Eee PC 900!
Easy direct install from SD card to 4gb SSD
How to vLite Windows 7 Beta 1 and install it on a 901 using an SD card
The noobest noob guide to install Windows 7 directly on your Eee PC