This version will work until June 2010 at which point it will no longer boot, also it will have some other restrictions starting in March 2010. That still provides many months to try it out. I have done just that and would like to relate my experiences, and solutions for particular problems that have arisen.

For more details on the promotion, or to register for your own copy visit windows.microsoft.com.

Items of Note

• I am NOT responsible if anything described here damages your PC or causes data loss. The software is ‘use at your own risk’ and so is this article.
• Back up your data. Microsoft will remind you of this, and so do I. Not backing up data before an operating system install is asking for trouble.

My Setup

Here is my configuration:
Motherboard: nVidia GeForce based
CPU: Intel Pentium 2.8Ghz Dual Core (64bit)
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 2x1TB SATA II drives on a RAID 1 (mirror)
Optical Media: SATA DVD-RW
Current System: XP Home / Ubuntu

Where to Start

Firstly, I assume you have succesfully run the Windows 7 Advisor with no issues and have made a working copy of the Windows 7 install disk.

If you are running Windows XP you cannot do an upgrade. Period. Clean install is the only option. This means you either need to start without an OS, or have an empty NTFS formatted partition prior to attempting the install.
If you do not have a blank NTFS partition the installer will stall after the language setting screen.

Once this is ready, reboot your PC with the Windows 7 DVD in the drive – make sure your BIOS is set to boot from it.

If all goes well you should be now installing Windows 7. I wasn’t this lucky.

The Windows 7 Installer Stalls after Loading Windows…

If you get a pretty blue screen with some leaves and a mouse cursor but nothing else after several minutes you may have the problem I had.
There are several reports online of problems installing from a SATA DVD drive. I presume in my case it is because of the way nVidia handles the DVD in relation to the RAID but I’m not certain.

Solution: Create a USB flash drive version of the installer disk (you’ll need 4gb) and boot from that, or (what I did) install an IDE DVD drive temporarily while installing.

Safely Unloading Linux First

Perhaps this should be higher up, but if you have a dual-boot XP/Linux environment and intend on removing the Linux installation to try out Windows 7 be very careful when you delete the Linux partitions from within Windows. Keep in mind that the boot loader (likely GRUB) resides there as well. Deleting the Linux partition will cause your PC to not boot!
With this in mind, I first booted from the XP install disk (after installing a floppy drive for the nVidia RAID drivers) and from the recovery console I ran fixmbr and rebooted. This puts the boot loader back to the original Windows one allowing you to safely remove the Linux partition. (you did back everything up, right?)

Initial Impressions

Once resolving the SATA optical drive issues and creating the NTFS partition (Windows 7 RC 1 does not appear to have a formatting tool like the XP installer) things went smoothly. In fact, the first have of this article was typed up on another PC nearby while I watched the Windows setup run fully automated. The setup will reboot your computer several times during installation.

My computer scores an average 5.9 for the user experience rating, and things are working mostly as they should. My Belkin wireless adapter does not have working drivers (Belkin hasn’t made them for Vista yet either – no fault to Microsoft for this one). I was able to use another USB wireless adapter sucessfully.
My WinTV-GO (analog PCI tv tuner card) does not appear to have working drivers at the moment either, which is frustrating since I wanted to try the Windows Media Player tv functions and the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor said they would be available via Windows Update.

Overall, it works fairly well. I found switching between World of Warcraft and the desktop to be agonizingly slower than the same task on XP. I am intending to do a reinstallation of the game (rather than a program folder copy) on Windows 7 to see if it perhaps will install a more compatible version of the programs and perform better.
Actual game play has no noticeable differences.

I’ll try to keep an updated set of entries here over the next few months detailing more tests of this new system. Overall, I would say that I’m not about to run out and buy it yet, but it’s more promising than Vista.

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I look through the menus and control panels and cannot find an entry for it. Next step, I check to see if the drive has an ‘Eject’ option. It doesn’t. Only two things I can do – pull the drive and hope it’s all written, or shutdown the PC and pull it out then. Since I was short on time, I yanked the USB drive and everything went OK – but where did that icon go?

Rebooting did not resolve the issue. I searched Google and there wasn’t too much help there at all – although I did find numerous sites with the following tip:

Create a new shortcut on your desktop – right click and slide down to “New” then click on “Shortcut”.

Copy this “%windir%\system32\RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll” (excluding the quotes) and paste it in the field that comes up in the next dialog box, under where it says “Type the location of the item:”, then click “Next >”.

The screen that follows prompts you to give the shortcut a name and is already pre-filled with “rundll32.exe” which is not helpful at all. Name it something obvious, such as “Safely Remove Hardare” and click “Finish”.

Double clicking the shortcut should launch the Safetly Remove Hardware window with your list of devices.

A nice touch is to edit the shortcut’s properties and change the icon to the usual one by using the icon browser. The icon can be found in “c:\windows\system32\hotplug.dll”.

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You can download it at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078.

The screenshot I’ve included shows the theme after installation on my system. The background is not included with the theme, I found that one at http://wallpapers.jurko.net/pic/9005/. I’ve got a calculator window open as well as the start menu with a hilighted item and tooltip showing the general color scheme of things.

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In other words, I have been very careful to jump through all of Microsoft’s little hoops to legally use their software. During my recent adventures in Linux I accidentally turfed my NTFS partition – it was readable from Linux but no longer recognized by Windows even in safe mode or from the recovery console.

This past weekend I set aside some time to clean up that mess, and reinstall everything. I loathe doing it because my XP disc is an original release so I have to download many gigabytes of updates to get current. Big snag – likely due to all of my hardware changes over the years, my license key appears to have been flagged as invalid.

This is quite annoying since as I have previously stated – to the best of my knowledge I have done everything Microsoft asks of me in the license. I have been putting off calling their tech support out of fear of being on the phone for a long time and (since their servers seem to think I’m a software pirate) being told I am out of luck.

Here is the shocking part: This was one of the fastest, easiest and most pleasant support experiences I have ever had! After going through their voice activated phone system, I was promptly transferred to a human being – I had to wait at most 30 seconds for this to occur. I have made some overseas calls before, and the time it took to connect was comparable.

I have no doubt that I was speaking to someone over in India or the surrounding area since that’s the support trend, and the representative had an Eastern accent. She asked me a few basic questions – what is the first group of numbers on the screen, did the software come with my PC, is it installed on any other PCs and is this the first time I have tried to activate it. (######, no, no but it has been and since removed and of course no again)
She then had me enter a sequence of numbers into the boxes on the screen, which she relayed very clearly and voila! Everything is up and running.

On the whole, I do not like Microsoft’s registration system – but I give them grudging kudos for making the telephone activation painless and efficient. Then again, maybe I just got an experienced agent – I wish I had recorded her name so I could sing her praise via an email to Microsoft.

Now, if only they could make their operating systems as efficient…

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When you manage a group of PCs in an Internet-connected network, one of the top concerns always ends up being security. This is no easy task, since there is an enormous amount of effort in the underground community to create software that can defeat whatever software you’re using to keep it out.

We’ve all heard the stories of how hackers exploit holes in the Windows operating system, and Microsoft’s solution to this (with Vista) is to prompt the user for nearly everything – which brings me to today’s point. Even the best designed security system can (and likely will) fail at the user level.

There’s a virus worming itself around the Internet at the moment that exploits this relatively well. On an infected system it hijacks MSN Messenger, sending a message to all users on the contact list with rather innocent seeming text. It asks them if they are appearing in a particular picture on a website with a URL that seems to plausibly point to a social networking or photo hosting site. With the rising popularity of these kinds of sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) it’s almost forgivable to be duped by this. The particular message is ‘is that you on this photo [url not included] ’.

Of course, once the link is clicked and Internet Explorer loads the URL, an application is downloaded and executed on the victim’s system – instantly hooking itself into the operating system and loading a bundle of adware, virus and malware onto the PC. It then hijacks MSN on the new host PC and continues to spread in the same manner.
If your Windows PC is up to date with service packs and updates, Explorer will prompt you, asking if you want to execute this application – clicking ‘no’ leaves your PC unaffected.
Clicking ‘yes’ will run an application named ‘oo.exe’ which will place itself in multiple locations on the hard-drive, as well as a file called ‘Net’ that looks like an application installer.

For non-technical people, here’s where things get really ugly. Instantly the adware starts loading pop-ups on your screen, the malware attacks MSN and attaches itself into your OS, and finally a couple of viruses start stealing your personal information and trying to open a back door into the system to enable remote control of the PC. Other than the pop-ups, you’d have no way of knowing this was happening.

Some of the virus activity will be detected by Norton Antivirus (or other available product) and deleted, however the other components (particularly the hook into the OS) go undetected. The virus that gets deleted will invariably reloaded within a half-hour if you’re still connected online.
The easy solution? Immediately pull the plug on your Internet connection, back up your data to a CD, and perform a system restore before your PC joins the zombie army.

Anyone who has had to do this before knows it’s a huge pain to doing a Windows restore, re-install your applications and recover your data. Now, before I get into the nitty-gritty geek details of the more difficult solution, let me just make a little prediction – with the shift in security focus from software to user on Vista, we’re going to see a lot more of these evil programs faking their way through, using the user themselves as the weakest link.

Ok, so you’ve got things to do and feel technically competent enough to take over where your security software failed. What follows is how I removed this particular threat from two PCs under my care. I make no guarantee that this will work for you, and cannot stress enough that you should make a backup of anything you don’t want to lose – one mistake and you could render your system unusable and be doing a system restore anyways!

Step 1) Reduce the Threat

Go to the Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel and uninstall Messenger. Next, you need to open the Task Manager (by pressing ctrl-alt-delete) and kill all running processes related to MSN Messenger (generally ‘msnmsgr.exe’). Follow this by opening your Program Files folder and renaming all MSN Messenger related folders to something else. Since we can’t easily shutdown the virus on a live system (more on that in a minute) we need to do the next best thing and prevent it from being able to spread or reactivate itself further.

Step 2) Track Down the Source

From the Internet Options in the Control Panel, you need to clear your temporary files.
Next – you’re going to need is a copy of a program called ‘HijackThis!’. Scan your system – look for a strangely named .dll file in the c:\windows\system32\ directory that is listed as both a BHO (browser helper object) and further down as being part of ‘Winlogon Notify:‘. If you’re not familiar with the system32 directory they will all look like strange names – make sure it appears in the two listed places above, on a normal system that would not be the case.

Write down the name of this file. These entries also gave me a clue as to how this threat operates.

Step 3) Know Thine Enemy

By hooking into ‘winlogon.exe‘, the virulent .dll tricks Windows into protecting it from deletion – even in safe mode. This key component to the Windows operating system is even used in safe mode the same as normal. You cannot terminate the ‘winlogon.exe‘ process without the system crashing or restarting, so Windows prevents you from doing this. Since you can’t terminate the process, you can’t delete the file while the system is running. Since you can’t delete it, it loads with the OS at startup no matter what you do.

Step 4) Take a cue from the Daleks: EXTERMINATE!

Now, here’s where things get a little tricky – you need to restart the PC with a Windows XP install CD. If you’re running a brand name PC, you likely don’t have one, you’ll have a restore CD instead… This is not the same thing, and will be of no use for this purpose.
Be very-very careful at this point – selecting an incorrect option could render your system unusable, or erase all of your data!
Make sure you’re booting from the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, not your hard-disc. Once everything is loaded you’ll be on a blue screen with three options – we want the second one, the Recovery Console. This will ask you which Windows installation you want to work with – in most cases there is just one, and you’ll enter 1, followed by your Administrator password when prompted.

This brings us to a command line reminiscent of DOS. Many old DOS commands work and will be used. First off, you need to type ‘cd system32′. Remember that file name we wrote down from ‘HijackThis!‘ … type ‘del {filename.dll}’. That effectively kills the virus’ OS hook. Type ‘exit’ and reboot normally.

Step 5) Cross Your Fingers

After you logon, it might appear to take a little longer than usual – this is OK, Windows is looking for the file we deleted and happily cannot find it.

Step 6) Clean Up Afterwards

Now that we’re back up, run ‘HijackThis!’ again, and click a check in the box beside the two entries from before. Click ‘fix’ and when it’s done, run a scan again. If those two entries are gone, congratulations! Make sure your anti-virus is up-to-date and run a full system scan. If they didn’t go away, it’s likely you have either a different virus, or other issues as well.
Running a complete spyware scan with one or many utilities available would likely be prudent at this point as well.

You’ll have to download and reinstall Messenger to be able to use it again. Although I’ve tried to be as basic and concise about these instructions, if you have doubts about any of these steps – just do the System Restore.

Step 6) Where To Go From Here

A few final technical notes – the virus generates several files in the system32 folder, which you’ll likely want to remove as well. Assuming you’re doing this right away after discovering the virus, sorting the files (in details view) by date should pop the recently created files to the top (or bottom) – check each one’s properties – if it doesn’t say it was created by Microsoft and was made on the same day or after you got the infection, you can (probably) delete it. You will also want to do a search for ‘oo.exe’ – open the folder each occurrence appears in and delete it as well as the Net application.

Did this help? I’ve recently edited the solution for clarity. Please leave a comment.

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The Good
Let’s get this over with since, sadly, it’s the short bit and not without reservations. Vista is more secure than previous Windows, given that applications appear to be unable to launch without explicit permission. The shutdown feature is quick – like you’d expect it to be (unlike XP). Booting Vista seemed to be reasonably quick – XP takes a long time, but then again so does Linux. I say reasonably quick because on a clean install, XP boots quite quickly too but I didn’t have such a thing handy to compare.

A Kludge
As a long-time programmer of Windows I can see where Microsoft was coming from with some of their changes. In their developer documentation they inform you that your code should not write to the application’s install directory but rather to use the system registry or local user folders. However, doing so was not forced by the operating system (as it would be on a true multi-user system) and many applications totally ignored this advice. Microsoft’s solution was to virtualize this behaviour. Application installers put the program in one location, but Windows intercedes on file-access done by the application and redirects to a local user folder. So, it’s partially backwards compatible, partially not and either way is an ugly kludge.

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http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/apr/05bootcamp.html

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