Marc Gregoire’s Blog

The Windows 7 Release Candidate has been made available to MSDN and Technet subscribers. It will be available to the general public on May 5th. This RC will expire on June 1 2010. There is also a dedicated forum for Windows 7 at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/w7itpro

A few days ago, my Windows Vista on my notebook started to have the KSOD (blacK Screen Of Death) syndrome. This syndrome is that after typing your username and password on the login screen, you are presented with a black screen and a mouse, nothing else. When searching on the internet for solutions I found out that quite a few people experienced the same issue with all kinds of different solutions. I tried some suggestions like System Restore, file system check, registry changes etc etc, but nothing was working for me.

When you are presented with a KSOD, you can try to press the left SHIFT button a few times to trigger the sticky keys feature of windows. This will popup a window that contains a link. You can then click this link and from there you are able to launch different applications. Of course, if you disabled sticky keys, you are out of luck…

After wasting almost a whole day on trying everything I could think of, I stumbled upon a blog where they said that it might be related to the eventlog. To test this, I wanted to disable the eventlog. Unfortunately you cannot disable the eventlog from a running Windows because some other services are relying on it. I booted into “safe mode with command prompt”, because normal safe mode would also give me the KSOD. I disabled the eventlog and rebooted the machine and to my surprise everything worked 🙂

The next step was to delete all eventlog files from C:\Windows\System32\Winevt\logs, switch on the eventlog again, reboot and everything was again working 🙂

With the release of the first beta of Windows 7, obviously I had to download it and try it out. I tested it on an older P4 2GHz with only 512MB of memory. I normally run Vista on that machine and 512MB of memory is a little bit on the low side for Vista. When Windows 7 first started I immediately noticed how much smoother and how much more responsive everything feels compared to Vista on the same box. I was really impressed.

In this post I want to explain a new maximizing feature that is currently in the Windows 7 beta. Suppose you start with a Wordpad window in the middle of your screen. On a side note, you can also see that Wordpad finally received a GUI update and now includes a ribbon.

Now, grab the Wordpad window and move it to the far left of your screen. Windows 7 will draw a translucent rectangle with the size of half your screen.

When you now release your mouse button, Windows 7 will maximize the window to half your screen as in the following screenshot.

This feature is a pretty useful one in my opinion, especially on widescreen monitors that are getting more and more common.

Axialis IconWorkshop allows you to easily create modern, great looking icons for your projects on Windows, Macintosh and Unix. It creates Windows icons up to 256×256 for Windows Vista and Macintosh icons up to 512×512 for Mac OS 10.5. Unix uses PNG icons. It also allows you to create image strips which can be used for your toolbars. Read the rest of this entry »

The Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released a week ago, however it had a compatibility issue with Microsoft Dynamic RMS. Because of this, the service pack was brought offline again.

Now Microsoft has fixed the issue and SP3 is again available for download. The Dynamic RMS issue is solved with a hotfix. The recommended way of installing SP3 is by using Windows Update, which will download only what you need, saving bandwidth. That way it’s typically around 70 MB.

If you need to install SP3 on multiple machines, you can download an installation package which is around 316 MB. If you are running Microsoft Dynamic RMS, it is recommended to first install the Dynamic RMS hotfix from here.  SP3 can be downloaded from here.

SP3 contains more than 1000 hotfixes and patches. Some new features are also included but which according to Microsoft “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”.

Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on March 18 in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. You can get it from Windows Update or the Microsoft Download Center. In April, Windows Update will begin to download SP1 automatically but will only install it after explicit agreement of the user. In April, SP1 will also be available in the remaining 31 languages.

On some systems Windows Vista Service Pack 1 might not be available for installation from Windows Update and might not be offered by Automatic Updates. This can have several causes. If this is happening for you, check KB948343.

A list of all changes/fixes in SP1 can be found here.

Cyberlink PowerDVD was one of the first DVD players on the market and is still considered by many to be one of the best. The latest version is version 7 which I’m reviewing today. Installation went smooth on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Most people cannot be bothered to spend money on a DVD player because most of them are happy with the DVD player software that they got when they bought their PC. However, once you have used PowerDVD 7 you simply do not want to go back anymore. PowerDVD offers so much more. The deinterlacing quality of PowerDVD is much better than you get with most of those pre-installed DVD players. On top of that, the latest version adds support for high definition formats like MPEG-4 H.264 and WMV-HD and supports a wide range of audio formats like DTS 5.1, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS-ES Discrete and more. Unfortunatly if you want to experience DTS-ES Discrete, DTS Neo:6 or SRS TruSurround XT you will need to buy the advanced audio pack. However, even though version 7 supports the high definition video formats, it does not support playing movies directly from Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs. For this you need PowerDVD 7 Ultra.

The Say-It-Again option allows you to quickly jump back a few seconds in case you missed something. The Read-It-Clearly feature allows you to change the position of subtitles. For notebook users, an interesting feature is the See-It-All feature. This monitors the battery level of your notbook and will automatically speed up the movie to make sure you can see the entire movie before your battery runs out. Any speed increase between 1% and 20% is actually not bothering anything.

The default interface of PowerDVD 7 looks pretty clean and modern as can be seen on the screenshot. In my opinion the new GUI is better than the previous versions.

The price might seem a bit high but you get a very good and complete DVD playback solution supporting the latest in video and audio formats.