Marius Bancila’s Blog

I’m sometimes asked what browsers do I use and why. I use Firefox and Chrome, 95% of the time, and IE for those few Microsoft sites that are specially designed to work only with IE. Here is a story that shows an argument why I use those two.

A few days ago I used my father’s laptop to do some web browsing. My father is not a computer specialist, but he knows how do use a computer for basic stuff like writing documents, browsing the web or downloading pictures from his digital camera. His laptop runs Windows XP and he had IE 6. Seeing that I though that’s so 2006. So I decided to upgrade that to IE 8. While IE8 was downloading I also decided to download and install Chrome for my own use. It took about a minute to download and install it. I was already surfing the web with Chrome by the time IE8 had done downloading.

Next step was to start the installer, but surprise, IE8 was requiring .NET 3.5 SP1. This was only 56MB or something so it didn’t take lot of time to download (but this could be very different in other geographical locations), however I thought that was a prerequisite whose purpose I don’t necessary see. So I started to install it and surprise: I got an error message that .NET 2.0, which was already installed, could not be uninstalled because it was not found. After some failed re-attempts I decided to uninstall .NET 2.0 manually and it worked well. However, running the .NET 3.5 SP1 setup again ended with the same error. So I decided to try .NET 3.5 without SP1. After a longer download the setup ran into the same error. Next, I downloaded .NET 3.0 and tried to install, but with the same error. At that point it was quite clear to me that there was something wrong with the uninstallation of .NET 2.0. After reading reports of similar problems on the web and without any suggestion being actually helpful I decided to download version 2.0 of the framework. Its setup allowed me to Uninstall or Repair and I chose to Uninstall. It said everything was OK so I tried 3.5 SP1 setup again, and this time it worked! Finally I was able to start the IE8 installation and it required to download and install a few updates and a couple of Windows restarts, and eventually it was up and running, one hour later after starting!

So my question to Microsoft is: how do you expect someone without good knowledge about computers and software installation be able to go through such a scenario? Chrome installation worked gracefully with 3-4 clicks and in less than a minute I was able to use it already. IE8 requires lots of updates and prerequisites like .NET and restarts and God forbids something goes wrong, you’re lost in installation. If the installation doesn’t work, you don’t have a product!

This is one reason (and definitely not the most important one) I prefer Firefox and Chrome over IE.

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For several months, after I installed Windows 7 at home I had a very annoying problem: whenever I was writing double quotes (“) or single quotes (‘) in some text editors and all browsers, the quotes did not appear. Only after I was typing another character, then both the opening and the closing quotes were shown, followed by the character (like “”X or ”X, instead of “X” or ‘X’). And when pressing some characters, like A or I, instead of getting “”A or “”I what was showing up was an Ä or Ï with two points on top. To get “X”, I had to type quote followed by space followed by X and then quote again. Really annoying.

The curious thing was that my environment was similar to the one I had at the office: Windows 7 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Office 2007, same browsers, etc. So I had to rule out a problem with Visual Studio. It must have been some weird setting in Windows 7, though I had done identical installations at home and at the office. Well, it turned out I didn’t have identical setups: at home I had both Romanian and English keyboard layouts, and for English I had both “US” and “United States-International”, the later being the default input language for the English layout.

Changing the default input language to English (United States) – US (as shown in the image above) solved this problem (without restarting Windows, only the applications where the problem occurred).

You can find this from Control Panel > Change Keyboard or other input methods > Keyboard and Languages > Change keyboards.

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In my previous post I wrote about a feature called “god mode” available in Windows 7 and Vista. By creating a folder with a specific name you get one entry point to all the commands available in Control Panel. It was reported that several such shortcuts exits. Below is an image with the 16 folders that are god modes.

You can create them all by making and running (from the desired parent folder) a .cmd or .bat file with the following content:

mkdir ControlPanel.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
mkdir LocationSensor.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}
mkdir BiometricDevice.{0142e4d0-fb7a-11dc-ba4a-000ffe7ab428}
mkdir PowerOptions.{025A5937-A6BE-4686-A844-36FE4BEC8B6D}
mkdir TaskbarIcons.{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
mkdir Credentials.{1206F5F1-0569-412C-8FEC-3204630DFB70}
mkdir InstallFromNetwork.{15eae92e-f17a-4431-9f28-805e482dafd4}
mkdir DefaultPrograms.{17cd9488-1228-4b2f-88ce-4298e93e0966}
mkdir PublicKeys.{1D2680C9-0E2A-469d-B787-065558BC7D43}
mkdir WifiNetworks.{1FA9085F-25A2-489B-85D4-86326EEDCD87}
mkdir Network.{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
mkdir Computer.{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
mkdir Printers.{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
mkdir workplaceConnetions.{241D7C96-F8BF-4F85-B01F-E2B043341A4B}
mkdir Firewall.{4026492F-2F69-46B8-B9BF-5654FC07E423}
mkdir PerformanceRatings.{78F3955E-3B90-4184-BD14-5397C15F1EFC}

(You can get the GUIDs of the folders from the above listing).

You can read more about this here.

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There has been some buzz in the last few days about a feature in Windows 7 called “God mode”. Well, it doesn’t empower you as a God but allows you to access all the nested features available in Control Panel from a single entry point. All you have to do is creating a folder (or renaming an existing one) with the name GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

After the folder was created/renamed its icon changes to the icon used for Control Panel.

When you enter the folder you find all the commands that are available in Control Panel, but in a single list with no nesting. So this could be a good place to access quick commands.

On the other hand you can get the same from the Start menu by searching for the name. Here is an example of the commands made available when searching for “defrag”.

Of course, in this later case, one needs to know what to search for, but in general that should not be a problem.

This feature also works in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, but it is reported that is crashes with Vista 64 bit.

This feature only works from Windows Explorer. It is not available from tools like Total Commander or FreeCommander.

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Windows 7 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM are now available for download on MSDN for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Currently, the only available bits are in English. The other languages will become available on October 1st. Volume License customers with an existing Software Assurance license will be able to download the bits starting tomorrow.

For more information on these releases check the Windows Team Blog.

Update: Windows Server 2008 R2 is not yet available.

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