Here are some features that would be attractive to me.

Simple domain setup. I guess home group will that. That is fine with me.

Ability to host my blog. I think I can install Apache and MySQL. Need to run some experiments.

Simple DNS. Again, open source software may be for the rescue.

Simple DHCP.

Simple mail server.

Do you hear the fan running loud after shutting down Windows 7?

Do you have ASUS motherboard?

Your Windows 7 computers’ cooler or fan won’t stop after shutdown?

Here is what happened to me and what a user found out as the solution.

During the beta days I experienced a strange problem on my computer. When I shutdown, I still would hear the fan running loud. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I had Windows 7 beta on two computers and the problem occurred only on one computer. I think what I have done was opened up the computer and then shut down Windows 7. I think the fan that was running was the power supply fan.

This was a computer I assembled and had ASUS P5B-E motherboard. I posted an article on this blog about this problem. It turned out that a lot of people with ASUS motherboards had the same problem. There were posts at Microsoft and ASUS forums asking about the same problem. No one had a clear solution.

Then one day a reader on my blog posted a solution in the comments. It worked perfectly for my setup. Since then lot of people have been able to use the same solution to resolve their problem.

Since then I have changed motherboards on all my computers to Gigabyte. They are not known to be as advanced as ASUS. But I like them now for two reasons. First, they are cheaper. Doesn’t mean they are cheaper in quality. So far I haven’t had any problems or regrets about their quality. Second, all the ones I have purchased have dual BIOS. All my motherboards were bricked at some point by BIOS upgrades. A dual BIOS is very welcome feature for someone like me.

So, about the solution. A user named lemon75 (that’s all the information I have about this user) posted this comment with the solution in that post: Click “Start”, on “Computer” click right mouse button and select “Properties”, click “Device Manager”, select “IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers” group, only contains one device called “VIA 1394 OHCI Compilant Host COntroller” on that click right mouse button and select “Properties”, select “Power Management” tab, and finally check the “Allow the computer to tur off this device to save power” box!

Even today I am getting a fairly large number of hits on this page and people are searching for the same symptoms I and others were facing.

If I was in charge, I would scramble to get a multi touch navigation mechanism to Window 7 for multi touch enabled screens. Current start menu sucks for multi or even single touch. Not even for bigger screens. Forget about small screens of smart phones or MID.

That would be step number one. Once you have that, third party developers can fill in true multi touch applications. At least single touch applications. The OS itself should do basic multi touch gestures. I haven’t used a lot of multi touch on Windows 7. My only experience with Windows 7 multi touch is the HP touch smart all in one PC at Fry’s Electronics.

It is not that Windows 7 is bad for tablet. But there is no good hardware out there. A keyboard is always good to have. Built in is even better. It doesn’t have to be out all the time. Anything more than 1/2 inch thickness including the keyboard is not acceptable for the small form factor tablet.

Get a better screen resolution. I went to NewEgg.com  to check the resolutions of all Windows tablet PCs. Many of them have screen resolutions of 13+ but the resolutions are maxing out at 800 lines vertical. That’s lame. That is much lower than HP touch smart desk top. Google Nexus One has a vertical resolution of 480. That’s for a 3.7 inch screen. And all those tablets are old school.

Use almost all of the devices height and width for screen. Don’t leave bars on all the sides. That makes the device bulkier than it need be.

Get some serious content. One of the problems with Windows Media Center all along was that it lacked content. Even today, the excitement wears out in a day. I didn’t want to go to Windows Media Center after seeing that BP ad over and over again after each video.  All the partners on Windows suck big time.

Apple can find partners for books, videos and music. On Windows there seems to be a decent content for Zune users. Integrate it with Windows. If that requires a separate Windows 7 SKU, let it be. A tightly controlled SKU built on top of some version of Windows 7.

Have 3G/4G and get at least one partner for unlimited data. This will lead to things like NetFlix streaming along with Zune streaming. Why not extend Zune pass to videos and movies? May be buy NetFlix and integrate it into Zune ecosystem. One pass to rule them all. How about books? If I have a Zune pass I can listen to all the music, watch all videos and movies (only streaming) I like and read all books and magazines in the store. I could also decide that I only need music and the price will $10, add videos at $15, movies at $25 and everything at $50.

Disclaimer: I do not have all the information to prove this is exactly how the problem occurs or even there is a real problem.

Yesterday when I went home my wife said she no longer has a password for her Windows 7 account. Then she explained how it happened.

When she tried to login, Windows 7 said her password expired and needed a new password. Since it is just a home computer she tried to enter the same password. I am guessing she missed the second box where you need to enter it again to confirm. So, Windows 7 said the passwords do not match with the OK button. She clicked on the OK button and Windows proceeded to login. She didn’t seem to have realized that the password did not change or something wrong happened. Next time she tries to login, there was no password prompt. It went ahead and logged in with no password. She didn’t know how to use the control panel to set the password. It was obvious that she did not use control panel to clear the password as well.

If this is exactly how the events happen, then there is obviously a problem. I tried going in to control panel and do the same thing and did not have the same effect. My guess is that it could only happen through the expired password interface.

It is a big iPhone. Really big one. If you love your iPhone, you are going to love this one. I am looking at the iPad home page at Apple. Steve Jobs proved himself wrong by creating a computing device that starts at $500. Sometimes proving yourself wrong is a good thing.

This is going to be the best YouTube player on the go for a while. Clam shell designs are outdated. They make the overall size while use uncomfortable. Nobody took that clue from cell phones, until now. Also an inch think tablets are not comfortable for lot of purposes, like reading books and magazines. The user interface is made for multi touch. Not just adjusted to multi touch. Touching on text to get things done is lame. Text should be there to assist when needed.

It is very thin. Thin enough to hold while lying down to read a book or using while traveling.

There is no clam shell to flip open. That is a no no for bed time, travel and such. I would rather carry a phone to do my computing than to carry a flip open computer while traveling.

No convoluted navigation to launch applications. iPhone already has a reasonably intuitive way to list applications.

App store. All your apps you purchased for your iPhone will download and work on iPad. There will be apps specifically designed for iPad as well.

iBooks. This is a huge improvement over what exists out there. The format is ePub. Now you don’t need to carry two devices for computing and reading. Let’s not go to the argument “you could always read on PC”. Since the format is ePub, you should be able to read books from multiple providers, technically. I see my Sony e-book reader going away. It is black and white and its battery doesn’t last this long.

Maps. There is definitely a big advantage to having a bigger screen for maps than on a phone. If Google can get the turn by turn navigation on to this one, it is an instant winner.

The iPad Case is has an amazing design. It allows you to use iPad in various positions to watch video and type.

The WiFi only models may appeal to some but in my opinion you may miss out on great apps that will require GPS. From what I understand only the WiFi+3G have the GPS.

I am an audio/video nut and the specs for iPad video specs doesn’t appeal much to me. It should have been 1080p. I know that would have meant lower battery life and higher price. May be a future version will have that.

The biggest gripe I have is same for all Apple products. No standard output connectors. Only the proprietary Apple connector. It solves the problem of having too many ports though. May be when we get to streaming everything, it wouldn’t matter. For now it means more accessories and cables.

Other OS vendors and their “partners” can start working on tablets now that everyone knows how a tablet should look and work. All they have to remember is what is important is not what is on the surface.

If anyone thinks Windows 7 got the disk activity under control, here is one example showing otherwise. Disks are still the bottlenecks in consumer computers and there is no way you get a better performance out of the computer when there is a lot of disk churning going on.

Yesterday I got rid of the final Windows Vista installation I had. That is a monster machine with so many applications installed and configured I did not want to start on it unless I had enough time to deactivate/de-authorize applications, take backup of user settings etc.

Here are some images of my experience during the Windows 7 64 bit installation.

Those were due to BIOS settings that were not compatible and RAID1 being getting ready or something like that. Complete setup, user configuration restore and such completed in about 2 hours.

This time around for virus scan I chose Microsoft Security Essentials. One thing that link didn’t say at the time was that it is only for 32 bit. I downloaded and ran the setup and it failed saying it is 32 bit only. The error message had a link to get the 64 bit.

I do have Office 2007 professional but I decided to install Office 2010 beta.

I just completed the installation of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate beta on the new Windows 7 64 bit installation. I setup the backup to a SAMBA network drive. It failed a few times. I reduced the backup size (removed the HD video files from camcorder, I use Microsoft SyncToy for that.) and it is running right now. Windows backup to network location is still lagging.

I am about to get rid of the last Windows Vista installation I have at home. This PC has a dual boot, one of which is Windows 7 RC. I will be removing both of them and install Windows 7 Ultimate on it. To migrate some settings and user data I logged in and saw this message. Well, I probably don’t need a solution for Vista. The Windows 7 RC had been pretty good on this hardware even after  being installed on an inferior hard drive (PATA).

We have installed Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 on a bunch of servers at work this week. Suddenly most of servers with NLB settings started experiencing network errors. Connecting to individual nodes did work without any problem. But accessing those servers using their NLB address failed intermittently with the error “An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host”. There were other symptoms too. But most visible were from .NET applications connecting to web services on other servers.

Another department that installed the SP2 and experienced the same issue and they resolved it by calling Microsoft. The issue was an incompatibility of NLB with RSS (receive side scaling).  SP2 seems to have automatically enabled this feature on compatible network cards. We did not see the RSS setting on all network cards after SP2 installation. The reason seems to be that the network driver not being NDIS 5.2 or higher.

The Microsoft support page is http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948496

We just manually disabled the RSS feature, updated the registry and rebooted. Our NLB issues were resolved. Most applications on servers with NLB did not experience the problem immediately. Only one set of servers that cater to very high traffic started throwing this error almost immediately and set off the troubleshooting.

Here is a default desktop screen capture.