Building Windows 8

After the initial excitement around Windows 8, things have now gone scarily quite. However, in the background Steven Sinofsky (president of the Windows division) and his team have been busy taking on board feedback from the developer preview and building towards the beta release.

As part of this process Microsoft have been running a "Building Windows 8" blog, which is a fascinating insight into the minds of the people designing Windows and helps us (the end user) understand why certain decisions are being made. Obviously one of the big talking points is the new Start Screen and how this will work for both touch based tablets and traditional PC's. Microsoft have posted a number of articles on this topic, but I found "Evolving the Start menu" to be particularly interesting.

Within this article they go into meticulous detail about how people use their Windows system today, specifically how they interact with the Start menu and taskbar. As a result of this research they developed the following graph showing the percentage of users who "pin" items.

As you can see from the graphs, the majority of people do not pin anything to the start menu, but have 3 items pinned to the taskbar. Microsoft go on to say that they are using this research to drive the evolution of the Start menu.

I'm pleased to hear Microsoft are doing their homework for Windows 8, however I hope they are doing more than just quantitative date collection. For example, I believe the data shown above is specifically for the average consumer and not office based or power users. The reason this is obvious is that the highest percentage for both values happens to be the Windows 7 default (what is configured out the box). Therefore other demographics, such as office users will have a completely different set of needs and as a result a completely different setup.

Take for example my Windows 7 setup (primarily used for work). As you can see from the image below I have 8 items manually pinned to my start menu, which are my most commonly used applications. The great thing about this setup is that I can access the recently used feature (the little arrows) to access documents quickly and easily. However, if you compare this to Microsoft's data you will see that I'm in the under 5% category.

The same can be said for my desktop and taskbar. As you can see from the image below I retain my minimal desktop experience (the only way to work effectively), but actually go out of my way to remove pinned items from the taskbar, leaving just Windows Explorer.

The primary reason for doing this is that I often have multiple applications open at one time and therefore like plenty of real estate available on the taskbar for quick application switching. The only other customisation I make is to pin a number of my key folders within Windows Explorer, which can be accessed with Aero Snap. Again this provides me quick access to my most used files (for example a project I am currently working on).

The point of this article is not to say Microsoft's data is wrong, but to highlight that everyone has their own style of working and one of Windows strengths has always been its ability to customise the experience. My concern with "Metro Style" Start Screen (as seen in the Windows 8 Developer Preview) is that it offers a much more rigded experience, locking you into live tiles and lists of applications. This may actually benefit the average consumer, but I'm not convinced it will work for someone who actually needs to get things done.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1

After a couple of false starts, Microsoft have finally announced the official release date for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). If you are an MSDN or TechNet subscrber then you will have access to the download on the 16th February. The general public release will come one week later on the 22nd February.

So what's new in SP1? Well, like all Microsoft Service Packs, the primary purpose is to package all the existing updates/patches since Windows 7 was launched into one single download. This means that if you have been keeping your copy of Windows 7 up-to-date then chances are that you already have 95% of the benifits. This will also mean that your update to SP1 from Windows Update will be relativily small (and hopefully painless).

There is however one significant new feature included in SP1, which is an enhancement to the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

The new feature is known as RemoteFX and it aims to deliver a full Windows 7 experience over a remote desktop session. This includes multiple displays, full Aero effects and multimedia streaming. This is a major breakthrough for remote desktop, as it means, for the first time, virtualised computing and thin clients (such as Oracle/Sun Ray Clients) will be capable of recieving a full audio and video experiance.

RemoteFX is able to achieve these results by using a technique known as host-based rendering. This technique allows for the final screen image to be rendered locally on the remote PC or thin client after being compressed and sent down to that remote host. The enhancements are expected to greatly improve video streaming across remote sessions which is currently one of the major drawbacks of virtualised computing.

When SP1 is made available, you can go grab it from the Microsoft download center, or simply wait for it to appear as part of Windows Update. For more information on Windows 7 SP1 head over to Microsoft TechNet.

Enable RDP in Windows 7 Home Premium

Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) is a great service that allows you to remote control your Windows PC from another device (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, etc). This is an invaluable service at work, however also has many uses when at home.

Unfortunately, in Microsoft's wisdom, they disabled the ability to use RDP in Windows 7 editions other than Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise. As a result most home users will not have access to this incredibly useful and flexible service.

Thankfully, Microsoft only disabled the service and the key components are still built in to the operating system. As a result, it only requires a relatively simple change to the file "termsrv.dll" to get things up and running. What's even better is that the guys over at the Green Button have done all the hard work for you and provided a simple "Patcher" that can enable or disable RDP in one click.

Simply download the patcher, unzip, run and click "Patch".

You can now connect to your Windows 7 Home Premium machine from any device using RDP. The Patcher should also work on other versions of Windows 7 (x86 or x64) and even Windows Vista.

HP kills the Slate?

Since the launch of the Apple iPad I have been patiently waiting for some competition in the tablet market. We saw the JooJoo come and go in a blaze of underwhelming reviews and news of the Google Android powered Dell Mini 5 has been suspiciously low over the past month.

This left me waiting to see what the Intel Atom powered Windows 7 HP Slate would bring to the table. HP have been pushing this device for months now and even stated on their own video blog that they have been "working on the product for years, long before the iPad". We also saw Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) demonstrate Windows 7 running on the HP Slate at CES 2010 in January.

Personally I have never been convinced about the HP Slate. In my opinion the Intel Atom is the wrong choice of architecture for a tablet, it is simply too power hungry and therefore unable to achieve decent battery life. Also, I have said time and time again, although Windows 7 is "touch aware" it was not designed for finger touch in the same way the iPhone OS or Android was, which I guarantee will result in a poor end user experience (think of Windows Mobile 6.x).

After all this hype it would appear that HP have finally realised the same thing as both TechCrunch and CrunchGear are running with the story that HP has killed the Slate. The current rumor is that they are going to re-think the product, potentially moving away from Intel and Windows in favour of the more efficient ARM architecture and Google Android (or maybe now Palm webOS).

I actually hope that HP do still bring the current Slate to market, as the most recent sightings of the device made it look like it was very close to production ready. If they decide not to, then I guess we will have to wait and see if we get a Google Android or Palm webOS powered device later in the year. Here's to hoping! 

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

Microsoft have finally released their open-source (free) Windows 7 USB/DVD creation tool. This piece of software allows you to convert your Windows 7 install (ISO) to other bootable media, such as a USB flash drive. This will then allow you to install Windows 7 without having a previous version of Windows installed, by booting directly from the BIOS. This is a very useful tool for system administrators or anyone that spends a lot of time re-building machines.

There are plenty of other applications that allow you to do this, however this is the official application provided by Microsoft.

Very simple to use and extremely useful, I suggest you head over to Microsoft CodePlex for the download information.