Category: Windows 7

Just wanted to post a quickie about the fact that a Windows 7 driver with support for multi-touch for the HP TouchSmart range of PC:s is available at http://www.nextwindow.com/windriver/index.html. After installing Windows 7 on it I just got “single-touch” but with the driver found at the link above my HP TouchSmart becomes a full featured multi-touch machine. Sweet!

When I installed Windows 7 RTM on my Sony VAIO laptop I discovered the same problem as when beta testing WindowsVista some years ago. The problem is that drivers for the video card for Nvidia mobile graphics chipsets is missing which means running with the feature lacking and slow Standard VGA driver.

In all releases of Windows 7 up to RTM there has been a driver available via Windows Update for the Nvidia mobile card but this driver seems to be pulled from Windows Update (and Microsoft Update Catalog). If you did not already know it Nvidia offers drivers for many of its mobile graphics chipsets on www.nvidia.com, but unfortunately these drivers do specifically not work on SonyVAIO machines.

The solution to install the Nvidia driver anyway is to download and unpack the driver from www.nvidia.com and then modify one of the INF files to make it support your video card. May I mention that this solution is not support in any way, but the important thing is that it works.

In my case I looked up the hardware ID for my Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT in device manager and found out that is has the hardware ID “PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_9005104D”. Then I went to C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\186.03\International\Display (the path might differ when using a newer driver) which is where the files are unpacked when you run the downloaded driver. Then I opened nvam.inf and added the below two lines where there are similar rows in the INF file.

Note that the “0426” part in the beginning of the first and second line is derived from “DEV_0426” part in the hardwareID which is unique depending on what graphics card it is. In my example the lines I am adding looks like:

NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT (Sony Vaio FZ38M)"

%NVIDIA_DEV.0426.01% = Section012, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0426&SUBSYS_9005104D

If you look in the INF file it will be quite obvious how to proceed. Then run setup.exe or install the driver manually. It should work like a charm ;)

This blog post was updated April 6th 2010 with an additional screenshot showing the evolving Device Stage experience.

 Windows 7 contain a feature called Device Stage. It is a way for hardware manufacturers’ to provide more value related to their products and it can be anything from providing shortcuts to drivers, firmware, manuals to processing of digital photographs online or to provide links to purchasing printer accessories.

The good thing about this is that the hardware manufacturers can provide this functionality for older hardware and not just new hardware, as well as provide updates to the Device Stage experience for each device whenever applicable. This is achieved by using the same feature as the one which in Windows Media Player download album cover art automatically. Note that the Device Stage information can be supplied in the driver from the factory but as this only applies to new hardware it’s best to let Windows 7 update this kind of information from the internet.

Below I provide a couple of screenshots where you can see a Device Stage example for a Lenovo X300 laptop. As you can see the icon is a real image of how the machine looks in real life. The second shot shows you how Lenovo has customized Device Stage for this particular machine. The only Lenovo specific tool as of this date is the link to ThinkVantage Tools, but this can easily be adjusted by Lenovo to contain manuals, important information, ordering parts or upgrades etc.

 
Above: As seen on August 16th 2009, Below: As seend on April 6th 2010.

I would say that the imagination of the hardware manufacturer is the only obstacle when it comes to Device Stage. It will be interesting to see how the manufacturers can take advantage of this feature and I am really looking forward to seeing more use of Device Stage!

A significant change in Windows 7 volume activation is that you must have 25 physical or virtual machines for the KMS (Key Management Service) to become active. This is different than with windows Vista where you needed 25 phsyical machines for the KMS to start activating your machines.

If you already have a KMS you need to install a patch for it, a patch that will be available soon. You also need a Windows 7 license and also to activate it. Read more about the KMS patch at this blog.

Starting with Office 2010 the new version of the KMS will also serve activations for Office for the first time. Office 2010 will be released some time in the first half next year.

So I’ve started the preparations for deploying Windows 7 RTM in my home and I discovered an intriguing problem when injecting the latest Nvidia Geforce graphics driver into my offline Windows 7 image using DISM (deployment image servicing and management tool). The error was:

C:\Windows\system32>dism /image:e:\tempwim /add-driver /driver:”e:\Documents\Windows 7\Drivers\x64″ /recurse

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool

Searching for driver packages to install…
Found 1 driver package(s) to install.

Installing 1 of 1 – e:\Documents\Windows 7\Drivers\x64\Nvidia Forceware v190.38 WHQL (Nvidia.com)\NV_DISP.INF: Error – An error occurred. The driver package could not be installed.
For more information, check for log files in the <windir>\inf folder of the target image.

Error: 30

The command completed with errors. For more information, refer to the log file.

The DISM log file can be found at C:\Windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log 

The problem was that the Nvidia driver wasn’t totally unpacked as it requested files not there. To solve this one has to extract all the files from the Nvidia driver, the most easy was to do this is to put all the files from the original Nvidia installation and then run “expand *.* c:\target” to unpack all files in the driver. After doing this you will have no problems injecting the driver into your Windows 7 wim image.

Note that the problem exist for both the Microsoft Update Catalog driver as well as the one which is available directly from Nvidia. Also note that this problem does not exist if you’re using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010.

EDIT: Corrected the command from “extract” to “expand”. Thanks for the comment!

The other day I got an email from a blog reader which contained the information of a successful analyze of a memory dump file which is generated when an infamous blue screen of death occur. The reader wanted me to give him the solution or point him in the direction of a solution. This got me into thinking. When is it worth putting time on doing blue screen analyzes?

The content of the crash dump is maybe not that relevant after all. What is more important is how often and when the blue screen of death occurs. If the crash occurred just once or very seldom and randomly I would say that it might not be worth finding out exactly what caused the crash. Keep in mind that a blue screen could indicate a hardware failure, although driver problems are the most common cause for crashes.

However if the crashes occur often or at when doing specific tasks you have all the reasons in the world to get to the bottom of the problem. In these cases I recommend following the guide for troubleshooting blue screen crashes.

An interesting thing to note about blue screens that start occurring after for instance upgrading the OS from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 is that the new memory management in the later operating systems might reveal problems in the memory modules that did not show when using Windows XP.

Finally, whenever having problem with blue screens of death I would recommend upgrading the machine BIOS. Often there are compatibility and stability fixes which solves problems with hardware which might be causing you the problems you are experiencing.

Now all dates for when Windows 7 will be available to the various customer groups are out in the open. TechNet availability August 6th, volume licensing availability August 7th. For all dates and info see http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx

Back from a relaxing vacation. Apparently Windows 7 has not RTM:ed yet but it’s getting really close. Looking forward to get hold of the bits of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to be able to wipe all my machines, clients and servers, and upgrade my domain to Windows Server 2008 R2. In the meantime I’m writing a few words about blue screens, it wil be out later this week. Stay tuned!

As i wrote in the beginning of May I took the “70-680 Windows 7, Configuring” exam and today I saw the score. It came back positive! :)

The number of group policy settings that you can use to fine tune your client and server computers are constantly growing. The more settings there are the harder it is to find them. Therefore the option “All settings” in the Group Policy Manager in Windows Vista SP1 and later and Windows 7 is a pleasure. But the best part is that you can filter out and only show polices related to exactly what you are looking for, example only settings that contain “DNS” to see settings only related to DNS.

Start gpedit.msc or the full Group Policy manager which is a part of Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista and Windows 7 and go to Computer Configuration > (Policies >) Administrative templates and click “All settings”. Right click anywhere in the right pane to filter out only settings that you are interested in.