I’ve probably never seen a more glaring bug introduced in a Windows OS version. The bug was noticeable since the beta and (of course) it was introduced to RTM version as well.
When you click the picture below you will get an animated gif (gasp!) which will demonstrate what the bug. Just watch the placement of icons on the right side and the height of “organize” bar (or whatever it’s name is).
I won’t bother you or myself with detailed descriptions of this build (which you can get on other sites anyway) but I am going to share things I did notice.
1. Team Fortress 2 runs like Usain Bolt, that means fast and smooth! Even faster than my Windows XP. I kid you not. On xp when I enabled Multicore Rendering even though I did not get bigger slowdowns, there was a constant choppiness, the game wasn’t smooth at all. But with this build the difference is very tangible and welcomed. (Just for your information I play at 1920x1200). Another problem which vista x64 and previous build had was hl2.exe crash when exiting the game. That was solved by Valve in some recent patch, it wasn’t microsoft’s fault.
2. That file permission bug I was talking about is still present! That bug really showed up much sooner than expected and that means yesterday (same as install day) all the files in my documents folder were locked (at least there is a nice little icon with a lock so you know they are locked) so I couldn’t view or edit them. But I did manage to fix the problem, more precisely, the symptoms, rather then the cause. But as I can treat the symptoms now, I’m not that much worried because I certainly can’t fix the cause (only microsoft can). So enough with the medical claptrap and onto the solution itself.
1. Download the takeownership.zip from blogsdna.com article. The file included two .reg files and one of them adds Take Ownership to the right mouse click as seen below. You can download those two files individually here and here. You need this reg hack because without it you have to take permission for file after file manually which is extremely inconvenient.
2. Select the folder where you have the locked files and Take Ownership.
3. Go into “Advanced Security Setting for $yourfolder” [1]. Add yourself and administrators. Be very careful to absolutely click on the “Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object”. I didn’t click on that checkbox the first few times so it didn’t work for the files in the folder.
4. There is no step 4.
[1] To get there you have to go to folder properties->security->advanced->change permissions.
As you can see, I’m not complaining about anything else at this time, so stay tuned because something will probably come up.
If you need any help with the file permissions or anything else, be free to leave a comment.
The gmail mobile app on my nokia 6500c is great (too bad iphone doesn’t have similar version), but it lacked full screen support for my mobile. The problem was that google didn’t have special version for that mobile too so I always had to download generic app which doesn’t run in fullscreen. Another problem was that I always downloaded finnish or swedish language version so that didn’t work too. The idea that I had was that I had to trick google in giving me a version for nokia 5320 xpress music which has pretty much the same electronic hardware. Or even identical. So that part in guessing the address took me some time, but I finally managed to guess it. The language problem I didn’t solve completely (I wanted english version), but the trick is to set your phone to your own language (croatian in my case) and then it will download that version. The link will probably work with 2.0.7 or whatever other version.
The link is this:
http://www.gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Nokia&model=5310&ver=v2.0.6 (link broken now unfortunately)
Wasted two days to install it on my windows xp desktop. Couldn’t manage do the same on my macbook even though the installation is supposed to be simpler. I wanted to write a guide how to do it (the official one is out-of-date), but after a few days I forgot what was os special about my installation. Sorry. It is a CMP (Content Management Platform), so I guess that means it is a superset of CMS. Everyone is talking about it nowadays so I gave it a go. In any way, I didn’t use it that much because in one way it seems too simplistic, and on the other too complex. Adding some “blog posts” is easy enough, but it just seems that I’m doing something wrongly, probably I don’t even know what Drupal is all about. In any way, I’m going to explore it a bit more and report back.
After a very unpleasant experience concerning file permissions with build 7000 I decided to skip a few builds and go for some newer. This build was released yesterday and I’m just testing it at the moment. The problem with the file permissions bug is that it doesn’t manifest from the start, it can take days or weeks for problems to emerge.
It seems that some Microsoft employee has maybe seen my improved picture from my previous blog about build 6801, as demonstrated here:
My suggestion for this window (build 6801).
New Win+P window (build 7068). I like my solution more though,
same functionality but better looks.
More impressions and talk about performance soon to come as I test this build more closely. Update: see my post after this one.
My Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA hard disk (not a primary disk) started to sound strangely. When I start Norton Ghost it just starts to produce some metallic sound and windows really slow down. The end is near I think. What is strange is that the disk is only few months old because it was swapped under warranty because the old barracuda died as I said in my rant post about lack of quality in modern electronics.
As you may know, I had bought additional 2GB of RAM for my desktop computer so I decided to give a Windows 7 beta x64 a spin.
It all went very smoothly, and I had no problems at all. To my great surprise Team Fortress 2 did run acceptably good, which means it was better than vista/vista x64. So all was well and good for the next 4 days.
So I wouldn’t be writing this if all was well isn’t it?
You are right of course because yesterday I was stunned when I discovered that iTunes wouldn’t play songs. This was very fishy so I immediately copied my 70GB of iTunes managed songs on another backup drive. I cannot recall the exact sequence anymore because I was really upset yesterday so I’m just going to tell you what were the problems yesterday and what I did to solve them.
Problem 1: iTunes couldn’t play music from iTunes folder (70ish GB of music and podcasts)
Solution: Immediately copied the folder to another drive.
Later problem 1a: I couldn’t access iTunes folder at all (after xp reinstall)! Couldn’t unlock the folder (with Unlocker), couldn’t delete it, nothing.
Solution: formatted the partition of the hard disk with the itunes folder. Copied the folder from the backup disk.
Problem 2: Couldn’t read any document from My Documents. I could add new documents in the folder.
Solution/description: File/folder permissions were set up ok. Nor did I change something before so the problem manifested just now. Strange thing was that when I copied some file on to another folder I could read it without problems. I managed to copy some of the more recent documents to another folder for backup but this isn’t really a solution. This isn’t really a small problem, it is a huge one, and I was constantly afraid that the “iTunes problem” wouldn’t happen to My Documents folder as well. So I didn’t want to leave anything to bugs of some programmers, so I reinstalled Windows xp from ghosted image 5 days ago. In xp my documents seems to be intact, which means everything is ok with it. But iTunes folder afterwards was completely unreadable. So I reformatted the partition as described in the previous solution.
But this could be all forgotten as a showstopper beta bug, and I was thinking that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. The following morning (today) the very similar thing happened on my msi wind which is running windows 7 beta 7000 too (but 32bit version). Problem with my documents folder on the Wind I solved quite more easily with taking ownership, and giving myself permissions (didn’t work on my desktop computer as there everything was (re)configured correctly). I thought that was the end of the problem (as I really didn’t want to reinstall xp, as Windows 7 was working pretty much flawlessly (until today). But I realized that the My Documents problem was only a part of the a larger problem. I went to this site’s blogger dashboard and there I was greeted with the note that I need to set my browser to accept cookies (because the site failed to write one to my hard drive). As I never, ever disabled cookies on this computer I immediately figured that this was the same problem with file permissions as the problems I mentioned previously. As I have no intention to hunt down and try to get back permissions on random occasions, I decided to reinstall xp on wind.
This really is a showstopper bug because I’m always ready to accept some rough edges and beta bugs, but when you are actually afraid for the existence your own files/folders, I had no doubt in my mind to reinstall windows xp (which is saying a lot, so to be short yes, I do think that Windows 7 will be a replacement to windows xp worth installing and using). There is even some irony in this too, because I always considered msi wind for experimentation with other operating systems, but I just cannot pass over the security of my own files on my own hard drive(s).
Until they fix this problem, I’m not going back to windows 7 beta.
Finally, I have provided a file and a web page which is generated by the extremely cool Problem Steps Recorder program which is included in Win7 (I’m hoping in all versions). The mht file (compressed as zip) opens only in Internet Explorer and Word but I’ve saved the web page opened in IE as a normal html page so you can see it by following this link. Be warned though that the IE version (mht file) looks much nicer, but if you avoid IE at all costs you can see the (poorly) saved html page. The linked page/mht file is going to demonstrate you in detail one instance of the larger problem with write permissions.
PS: There is ongoing (?) discussion on two forums concerning the problems I mentioned in this post. Seems too me that they are just instances of the large problem, even though on the forums they treat it as separate issues, and some even say it is the problem only with x64 version of Win7 which is not a truth at all.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t720870.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=720922&st=0&gopid=590406834&#entry590406834
Slashdot continues to moan because the average commenter has neither ran the beta or used Vista for longer than 5 minutes. Its more fun to bitch about Microsoft than to actually use the product.
Its also fun to sit and read some of the bitch comments and see how many Slashdotters overlooked the "beta" part, bitch about missing features, and apparently thought they were downloading the final RTM code.
I've never had a lick of trouble running Vista. Nor have I had a lick of trouble in the two weeks I've been running this beta. But then I made sure to put it on a modern PC built with Vista in mind, not my grandfather's Packard-Bell 486 with 4 meg of ram.
(Score:5, Insightful)
Yes that's nice. It's clear MS didn't finish the OS. Because of things like this [imageshack.us]. They didn't even bother making the Aero UI that they hyped up for so long mesh with the rest of the OS. They took the Desktop Properties window (right click->Properties) in Windows XP, and just separated the tabs and provided a link to each one. Boy that's an improvement.
Or how about having to click 3x more than XP just to get to the network connection status or, Bill Gates forbid, make changes to the TCP/IP settings. Jeez it feels like 15 clicks. I have to STOP doing what I'm doing and concentrating on, and figure out which of the 5 buttons to click, and do that for about 5 more windows that come up before I get there. With WinXP I just double click the little computer on the taskbar and it opens it for me. Or I right click it and can get to the TCP/IP settings with one more click.
(Score:2, Insightful)
Likewise I'm finding that Windows 7 feels subjectively more responsive than XP on the same hardware. So far I'm really liking the beta, but as a microsoftie friend of mine pointed out, "the vista betas worked really well too...."
(Score:3, Informative)
He is only a confused kid, maybe not a new, but clearly confused. (very few vista's annoyances were resolved, only some with wifi, and a thing here and there, but nothing serious to be honest).
TFA has six pages, almost all of which were praise for Windows 7, and yet the "summary" picks out three choice sentences that were negative.
Nevermind the new features (both under the hood and with the UI), nevermind all the annoyances of Vista that this undoes, nevermind the ZDNet tests that show 7 to be faster than XP and Vista.
No, let's scan the entire article and post the most damning phrases we can find and call that a summary.
And no I'm not new here.
(Score:5, Insightful)
Let me start off by saying that Windows Vista is no longer the piece of shit that it once was. Ever since SP1, the many problems that Vista used to have have been gone. I was using Vista Ultimate since July and had absolutely no issues with anything, and it actually runs faster (gasp!) than XP on my machine. (Let me point out that my machine has a Q6600, 4GB of RAM, and an 8800GT)
(Score:3, Interesting)
1. I was able to work with Excel without a problem. It opened up and ran as fast as a dual core machine running XP. So that's fine.
2. Installation speeds were completely in line with what I'm used to. I installed Firefox, Flash, Adobe Reader and Office 2007. I didn't run into any problems.
3. The OS' installation was seemless. I didn't try to upgrade and just let it go from scratch. Once I finished the basic setup I just let it sit for about an hour and it did it itself. Once it finally booted up I didn't need to install new drivers. I really liked this to be honest given how painful driver installations and downloads can be.
(Score:2, Informative)
