Tag: Windows 7

Starting with Windows Vista the defragmentation utility is scheduled to run on all drives once per week. The defrag is done in the middle of the night but if the machine is not on at that time, the defrag will start after next power on.

Anyway, you can disable, change the schedule or in other ways modify the task centrally by for instance deploying a script file by using GPO:s. The following command line disables the scheduled defrag task from running.

schtasks /change /tn "microsoft\windows\defrag\ScheduledDefrag" /disable

The guys over at TrueSec will be hosting a live online webinar (for free) about Windows 7 on October 7th. The speakers are no less than Marcus Murray, Christoffer Andersson, Johan Arwidmark, Mikael Nyström and Hasain Alshakarti. More info and registration at  http://www.windows7summit.com.

Many users are frustrated to receive the below error message when trying to add network shares or mapped network drives to a Library in Windows 7.

This network location can't be included because it is not indexed.

The error message clearly state what the problem is but it is harder to find out how to solve the problem. You have two options to include the network drive or network share in a Library.

1. Make the network drive available offline by right clicking it and choose “always available offline”. If you cannot control the remote file server as suggested in solution 2 this is the option to use.

2. Make sure that Windows Search 4.0 is installed on the remote file server and make sure that the share or network drive you are adding is indexed on that server. This is the preferred method I would say.

Once either of these two solutions are in place you will be able to successfully add the network share or mapped network drive to your libraries.

Microsoft has just released the group policy reference Excel sheet for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Excel sheet contain all group policy settings that exist and you can easily search and filter which settings are available for which operating system. Download the reference files here.

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!

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