Like the Office Web Apps, Microsoft’s just-released Office Mobile 2010 suite of applications for Windows Mobile 6.5 is free, and positioned as a companion to the full, PC-based Office suites and applications. Here, however, the usage scenario is mobile rather than cloud-based: Since people tend to bring their smart phones around with them at all time, the mobile version of Office provides an always at-the-ready set of limited but still useful apps. What we’re talking about, mostly, is viewing and (very) light editing. But the addition of an updated mobile version of OneNote could provide hugely beneficial to mobile users, be them students or anyone else who needs to take quick notes on the go.

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Office Mobile 2010 can also connect to SharePoint 2010-based document libraries, can access Office documents stored on Windows Live SkyDrive, and can interface with documents that are shared via email. It’s a decent set of functionality marred only by it being limited to Windows Mobile 6.5, the very latest version of a justifiably derided smart phone OS that few people willingly choose. (An updated version will ship with Windows Phone 7-based devices later this year.) One can’t help but wonder how popular and useful an iPhone- and/or Android-based version of this suite would be. Microsoft offers up only a repetitive “no comment” to such questions, however.

Basic Office functionality
Office Mobile, of course, has been around for a while–since the first version of Windows CE in 1996, in fact–but it didn’t really become a semi-cohesive suite of applications until the 2000 release of the Pocket PC OS for PDAs. Then called Pocket Office, it consisted of very basic versions of Outlook (broken into separate Email, Calendar, and Contacts components), Word, and Excel applications. Over time, PowerPoint and then OneNote were added as well.

Until the current version of Office Mobile, the primary interaction method was via stylus and hardware keyboard and most people used the apps as simple document viewers. Light editing capabilities have always been the suite’s biggest selling point, but I have a hard time believing that many people–especially the mobile workers that Windows Mobile targeted–ever did such a thing. And even those that did would have found disappointing formatting issues moving between desktop and mobile versions of the apps. (This problem has been somewhat mitigated over time.)

Over time, Office Mobile got better, but the bar was pretty low, and the basic usage model didn’t really change. So the apps displayed Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations more like their desktop counterparts, but your mileage would vary depending on the complexity of those files. As it turns out, that’s still true today.
What’s new in Office Mobile 2010

Microsoft offers a number of improvements with the latest version of its Windows Mobile-based office productivity suite. It (sort-of) requires a touch-compatible device, common in Windows Mobile 6.5 world, and provides enhanced support for touch gestures. (Microsoft says it supports non-touch Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, but with reduced functionality. I’m amused to think such devices even exist.)

This time around, OneNote is up front and center, and that trend will continue into Windows Phone 7, where OneNote will get the primest real estate on the Office hub. The reasoning here is simple: While few are probably all that interested in working on Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents on the go, many people–especially students–could utilize OneNote’s note-taking capabilities, especially if they’re out and about and the phone is the only device they have with them. That it can capture pictures using the device’s built-in camera and work with voice clips is, of course, just the icing on the cake.

Office Mobile 2010 Review OneNote Mobile 2010.
The addition of SharePoint Workspace is also a big deal: Now Windows Mobile users can access their SharePoint (2010)-based sites, document libraries, and lists on the go. Office documents that are stored in these document libraries can be opened on the device, edited, and then saved back to the server. This can be slow, but if you’re going to access certain documents regularly, you can also keep a local copy on the phone.

Office Mobile 2010 Review SharePoint Mobile 2010.
Word and Excel Mobile trudge along with much the same basic functionality as before. But PowerPoint Mobile picks up some interesting functionality that should prove useful to the Windows Mobile-carting road warrior: You can now use the mobile app as a remote of sorts for your PC-based presentations. This setup won’t come cheaply, however: You’ll need to connect the phone to the PC via Bluetooth for it to work.

Office Mobile 2010 Review PowerPoint Mobile 2010.
Finally, there’s Outlook Mobile, which as before is split into multiple applications and isn’t available from the Office Mobile folder, but is instead afforded a much higher position in the Windows Mobile UI hierarchy. You can access Outlook’s various components through E-mail (Messaging), the Phone application’s contacts list, and separately through Contacts), and Calendar, and Tasks. It remains a mixed bag, but if you’re using a Windows Mobile phone in tandem with Exchange Server 2010, there are a few nice upgrades, including support for Conversation View. (It doesn’t appear to support multiple Exchange accounts, however. Apparently, we won’t get that functionality until Windows Phone 7.)

Office Mobile 2010 Review Outlook Mobile 2010. Final thoughts
Ultimately, Office Mobile 2010 is an evolutionary update to what has always been a fairly lackluster set of mobile-based companions to Microsoft Office. That said, much bigger changes are coming later this year in Windows Phone 7, and while that could potentially change the way we look at mobile productivity, the reality is that the device form factors simply limit what’s possible. Office Mobile 2010 is a decent upgrade, especially if you’re in a Microsoft-oriented shop with Exchange and SharePoint back-ends. And the price, certainly is right, assuming you have the right kind of hardware.

Many readers are likely familiar with the fact that Windows 7 comes with a fairly comprehensive backup solution that includes, among other things, the ability to create a so-called system image of your entire PC. This system image is, more precisely, an exact duplicate of the hard drive(s) in your PC, in VHD (virtual hard disk) format, and it provides you with the ability to fully restore your PC to a previous, known-good state.

Pedantic sidebar: By default, the system image capability in Windows 7 only backs up “the drives required for Windows to run.” The exact nature of these “drives” varies from system to system, and understanding how it works is even more confusing because of the way Windows 7 automatically partitions a hard drive. On a single disk system (most PCs and virtually all laptops), this will be the first (and only) fixed disk (i.e. “hard drive”), which is segregated into a hidden reserved partition and what we think of as the C: “drive” (which is in fact a partition, not a drive, but whatever). In the olden days, the C: drive would typically include the functionality of both the “startup disk” (the disk/partition that contains the files required for booting the PC) and the “system disk” (the disk/partition that contains the WINDOWS directory). And in Windows 7, that’s pretty much how it works, though it’s still possible for the startup and system disks to be different disks or partitions.

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What this means to Windows Backup is that the system image capability will typically backup the C: drive only. But if you have partitioned the disk differently, or are dual-booting among two or more OSes, it’s possible that it could include two or more partitions (or drives). If your configuration is more complicated than that, you can also use Windows Backup to manually create system images for the other disks and partitions in your PC.

The system image capability in Windows Backup is good at what it does. But it has other uses beyond the obvious. And one of those uses is an increasingly common scenario: You’ve got a PC with whatever hard drive in it, and it’s running out of space. If you have a desktop PC, you might be able to simply add a new hard drive. But if you have a laptop, you almost certainly can’t. In either case, however, there are advantages to not adding a hard drive but instead replacing the existing hard drive with one that offers more capacity and, perhaps, better performance.

The trick, of course, is doing so without losing anything: Your data, your installed applications, your settings, and so on.

I used Windows Backup for just this purpose recently. I’ve been using the same ThinkPad SL410 laptop for about a year now, and while it has the best keyboard I’ve ever used, the stock 320 GB hard drive isn’t particularly voluminous and I was wondering whether I could get better performance out of a more modern hard drive. So I purchased a Seagate Momentus XT “hybrid” hard drive, which combines a small amount (4 GB) of solid-state storage with 32 MB of cache and a 7200 RPM hard disk to create a package that offers much of the performance of a true SSD drive for a fraction of the cost. Indeed, the 500 GB version I purchased cost just $109 on Amazon when I purchased it (though I notice its $129 today for some reason).

Here’s how to make the swap.

For purposes of this exercise, I’m going to assume you’re doing this with a single disk system like the laptop I used. You will need a USB hard disk or other supported backup media (which includes recordable DVD discs and, with Windows 7 Professional and higher, a network share) and a blank, writeable CD (or DVD).

First, manually create a system image of your PC’s hard drive. You do this via the Backup and Restore control panel, which is the front-end UI for Windows Backup in Windows 7. There are about a hundred ways to reach this window, but the simplest, perhaps, is to open the Start Menu, type backup in Start Menu Search and tap Enter. You should see something like the following shot.

Click the linked titled “Create a system image” in the task pane to start the wizard. It will search for an acceptable backup device, and, if found, present it in the “Where do you want to save the backup?” phase of the wizard. Otherwise, you can manually point the wizard at an acceptable backup point.

Click Next and the wizard will show you where it’s backing up to and what it’s backing up. On a single disk system like the typical laptop, this will again be hidden, reserved partition (System Reserved) and the C: drive (System).

Click Start Backup to create the system image. This will take some number of hours, depending on the used disk space, your PC’s overall performance, and the performance characteristics of the backup media. I backed up to a USB hard drive and it took several hours.

When the system image is done, the wizard will prompt you to make a System Repair disc. I recommend doing so, though you can launch this process separately from the main Backup and Restore interface later if you’d like.

A system repair disk is a bootable Windows 7 CD (or DVD) that provides two capabilities: It can present the various Windows 7 recovery options or use a system image backup to restore your PC to a previous state. You’ll be using the latter functionality.

Once the system repair disc is done, eject the disk and shutdown the PC.

Now, unplug everything (cables, power supply, laptop battery, whatever) from the PC and remove the current hard drive. How you do this will of course vary from PC to PC, but on the ThinkPad it involved removing a panel on the bottom of the machine, sliding out the hard drive in its protective cage, removing the cage from the old hard drive, and then attaching it to the new hard drive. Then, insert the new hard drive, put everything back together, and reboot the computer, re-inserting the system repair disc so that the PC boots from that. (If the hard drive you’ve installed is truly new, the PC won’t boot otherwise, anyway.)

When the system repair disc boots up, you’ll be presented with a screen in which you choose between the recovery tools–which can be used to solve problems with your current Windows OS–or to “restore your computer using a system image you created earlier. Obviously, you want the latter option.

The Re-image your computer wizard will attempt to find a suitable system image file located on a device attached to the PC. If it can find one, it will present that as an option automatically. Otherwise, you may need to manually select the correct system image.

After that, you’re given the opportunity to exclude certain disks, which applies to the target PC and not the imaged disks you’re restoring. This can be useful in certain conditions, but for the single disk restore we’re doing here it’s not worth worrying about.

Then, you can click Finish to start the restore process.
Oddly, the restore process takes considerably less time than the backup. In my case, I believe it completed in under an hour. When the process is complete, the PC will reboot into the exact same Windows install–complete with all your custom settings, data files, applications, and whatnot–as before.

There is one final task, assuming the new disk is larger than the old: Windows Backup will restore the contents of the old C: drive to a new C: drive that is the same size as the old one. So you’ll need to use Windows 7’s disk partitioning tools to expand this partition to use all the extra space. Curiously, this tool is pretty well hidden, but you can find it by typing partition in Start Menu Search. You will see a control panel called Create and format hard disk partitions appear in the search results. Click that and the Disk Management tool appears.

Looking at Disk 0, you’ll see some empty space after the C: partition. To use this space, right-click the C: partition (and not the empty space) and choose Extend Volume. Then, in the window that appears, tap Enter as needed to add all that empty space to the C: partition. When you’re done, the C: partition will have been resized to be larger.
A few notes

One of the nice things about this process is that it’s non-destructive. If something goes wrong, you can always get your old system back by putting the old hard drive back in the PC. In fact, you might consider saving that disk as-is as an in-time backup of sorts.

One of the other nice things about this process is that replacing a hard drive is not typically enough to trigger Windows Product Activation. So you won’t need to worry about re-activating and, potentially failing an electronic activation attempt that would force you to call Microsoft, hat in hand, and ask for their eternal forgiveness. (OK, it’s not that bad.)

Finally, this process also obviates the need to fully account for all of the provisioned applications and services on your PC. I’m talking about things like iTunes Store, Audible, and Zune Pass, which have only a certain number of associated PCs; this process will not waste a PC “slot” with these services. But it’s also true of activation-protected software, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat. You won’t have any issues with these or similar software titles.

Long-time readers may be familiar with my aversion to product “momentum” discussions, given my general focus on upcoming, future products and technologies. But with Windows client and server releases now on a reliable three year update schedule, and businesses finally starting to actually deploy a new Windows version instead of skipping an entire generation as they did with Windows Vista, maybe it’s time to take stock of where we’re at.

Last week, I spoke with Gavriella Schuster, the general manager of Windows product management at Microsoft about what the software giant is seeing in the market a year after the release of Windows 7. It was an interesting discussion, but when I got back home from what was essentially a ten-day trip through Redmond (PDC and meetings), Las Vegas (Windows Connections) and then New York City (Lync workshop) and had time to gather my thoughts, something obvious occurred to me: While it’s pretty obvious that Windows 7 is in much better shape than its predecessor, Windows Vista, I figured I must have discussed the one-year anniversary of that release with Microsoft back in late 2007. It might be instructive to compare the two.

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And sure enough, I found my notes from an on-campus meeting with Windows client from September 2007. At that time, Microsoft was prepping Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista as quickly as they could in a bid to jumpstart business deployments. Microsoft was “realigning” in the post XP SP2 world, I was told, and was being more aggressive releasing individual hot-fixes over Windows Update, rather than waiting to deliver them via a service pack. This, too, was a response to the poor reception of Vista, when you think about it, as Microsoft was very eager to improve the OS as quickly as possible.

When Vista shipped there were just 250 logo’d applications, but more problematic, there were over 80 of what Microsoft calls “enterprise blockers,” incompatible software applications required by key business customers that were preventing them from upgrading to Vista. Microsoft worked quickly to fix these problems–by October, there were over 2000 logo’d apps and all those enterprise blockers had been fixed. But it was too late. Vista had the stench of defeat about it, and businesses stayed away in droves, using excuse after excuse to explain why they were sticking with XP.

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This won’t shock anyone, but the mood at Microsoft this time around is completely different, and almost giddy. Customers of all kinds are excited about Windows 7, and in workplaces employees are actually demanding it. Based on research we’ve done at Windows IT Pro, and via Microsoft and its analyst group partners, businesses really are deploying Windows 7, and at an ever-increasing rate of speed. Comparing Windows 7 one year later to the situation with Vista is like night and day. There really is no comparison.

That said, most businesses are still in the planning stage of deployment, and there are plenty of related concerns that need to be addresses. In fact, many businesses are looking at this deployment cycle as a time to not just get Windows 7 out to employee desktops, but to also streamline their organizations, deploy more efficient technologies (like virtualization and Office 2010) where and when they make the most sense. The general vibe is that, yes, deployments are tough, but we might as well do it right this time so we are better positioned for the future.

That’s a healthy attitude. According to Microsoft, there are three major outside factors that are weighing heavily in businesses’ thoughts about Windows 7. The first is the consumerization of IT, which we’ve discussed several times this year alone. I see this as a potential problem, but Microsoft is embracing the reality of the situation and is turning it into a business opportunity. And that makes sense, because one of the things that employees are demanding, of course, is Windows 7. They use it at home, and going into work and using XP is like going back in time.

“This is a dramatic shift,” Schuster told me. “Only six months ago, the CIOs I spoke with understood that users wanted something different but weren’t willing to push in that direction. Today, they talk about users and user experience differently. They want to make it right for their users, move off of XP and onto Windows 7, because they know if they don’t, users will simply do their own thing, and perhaps use insecure mechanisms, like their own PCs, to transport work data.”

The second factor is cloud services. Microsoft doesn’t get a lot of credit for this for some reason, but no technology firm is better poised to make the transition to cloud services than the software giant, which is now offering all of its major server products–Exchange, SharePoint, Communications/Lync, and so on–as hosted services, with management and configuration servers capabilities down the pike as well. But it’s not just Microsoft’s ability to take successful products and put them in the cloud that makes this so interesting: Microsoft, uniquely, can offer businesses a mix-and-match hybrid deployment model where some resources are kept on premise–for legal or regulatory reasons, or whatever–while others deployed as clouds services. And these two environments are not separate, but are instead federated, or connected together, so they can behave, and be managed like, a single cohesive infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the cloud today is where virtualization was a year or two ago. Businesses seem to understand they need to figure them out, start exploring what’s out there and where, or how, they can save money. I think they’re in for a pleasant surprise and, as mentioned previously, this just keeps getting better: By mid-2011, businesses will be able to manage PCs centrally from the cloud with Windows InTune as well.

“Everyone is asking about cloud services, what many still don’t understand it,” Schuster said. “Our guidance is to separate out the various desktop layers, start to build out the desktop architecture, and then think about what they can move into the cloud when or if they want to.”

The third trend is desktop virtualization, and here again Microsoft offers unique and compelling solutions that can really simplify your infrastructure and save money. When Windows 7 first arrived, Microsoft’s many desktop virtualization solutions–and really, there may be too many of them–confused businesses. The result was predictable: A lot of questions, but the wrong questions, mostly around what this all meant, and what the various solutions offered.

Today, the question in many quarters has changed, and is now focused around which desktop virtualization solution makes the most sense. The leading contenders are Application Virtualization, or App-V, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI. Both of these technologies provide a similar service from a high-level–that is, they centralize application deployment and management–but they do so in quite different ways. With App-V, you’ll deploy PC desktops using traditional methods, but applications are centrally managed, virtualized, and pushed down to clients. With VDI, the entire desktop is virtualized and is pushed down to thin clients from a datacenter. Looked at another way, App-V puts the investment on the desktops, whereas VDI puts it on the server-side. Each addresses the same basic need, but each also targets specific customer types.

“Customers really get virtualization now and see the savings,” Schuster told me, “and they’re looking to see which solutions make the most sense for them. Desktop virtualization won’t solve every problem, but it will help organizations move away from monolithic desktops that are more efficient and easily managed.”

Microsoft says it’s seeing some form of desktop virtualization in about 50 percent of Windows 7 deployments, which is pretty incredible given the confusion these solutions presented only a year ago. But this is all good news, because as businesses get more familiar with these technologies, they can virtualize more as needed, consolidate apps and app versions, and create a centralized, single management point for all of it.

Aside from these trends, Microsoft has a lot of data around the return on investment (ROI) of a typical Windows 7 deployment ($140 saving per PC per year on average; 131 percent ROI in just over 12 months) and individual case studies demonstrating how real customers like including the British Airport Authority, National Instruments, City of Stockholm, Baker Tilly, City of Miami, and Getronics. I can’t speak to this data specifically, but it’s there for the taking, and should provide some interesting ammo if you’re somehow running into a human deployment blocker of your own. You can find out more about this data, and other Windows 7 deployment milestone information, on the Windows Team Blog.

On a recent Amtrak train ride home from New York, I sat next to a well-dressed young professional who had a new Blackberry and a new laptop, and was in constant conversation with his coworkers back home. When he opened up the laptop, I looked over and was surprised to see what looked like an electronic museum: Windows XP, of course, but also an ancient version of Office and, you guessed it, Internet Explorer (IE) 6, which he used in lieu of newer browsers. I almost said something to him but thought better of it.

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The thing is, it’s not his fault. Businesses are embracing Windows 7 in ever-increasing numbers, sure. But there are some remaining issues. And web site compatibility, especially with intranet and partner extranet sites has got to be somewhere near the top. Thanks to years of calcification, IE compatibility problems are perhaps the biggest Windows 7 deployment blocker, with IE 6 still in use on an astonishing number of PCs, mostly business-owned. In fact, IE 6 usage outpaces that of the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari … combined.

With Gartner now predicting that fully 20 percent of organizations migrating to Windows 7 will experience difficulties because of web site compatibility issues, the time to act is now. To date, I’ve primarily stuck with Microsoft’s solutions, which seem to be both broad and deep. And let’s face it, no one knows more migrating to new Windows versions than the software giant and its close partners that implement the relevant solutions regularly. That said, there’s always been something bothering me, out on the edge, about Microsoft’s approach to web site compatibility issues. And this past week it finally occurred to me what that was.

It’s too complex. While your web developers race to bring your sites into the 21st century, you’re expected to deploy desktop virtualization solutions that let you run an IE 6 side-by-side, sort of, with IE 8. In these solutions, IE 6 is actually running in a virtual machine and exposing, or publishing, the app so that it appears to be working with the native OS, and not inside a separate desktop.

There are several ways to implement such a scheme, but we can divide them very neatly into managed and non-managed, where managed solutions like Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) are deployed in a domain and non-managed solutions like XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC are deployed in smaller environments. They work. And Microsoft provides very powerful deployment and provisioning capabilities around MED-V. But they’re also pretty complex, especially if what you’re looking for is a way to automatically ensure that your users utilize a modern browser 99 percent of the time, but only access IE 6 when absolutely required.

There are other ways to solve this problem, of course. Google offers a tool called Google Chrome Frame which offers a way to manually add the Chrome rendering engine to older IE versions, rendering their various problems moot. But in order to take advantage of this solution, you’d have to add special code to all web pages for which you’d prefer to use the older IE renderer, which is itself a lot of work. You’re going to be updating those IE 6-specific pages anyway, right? What you really need is a way to utilize them with IE 6, automatically, until they’re updated, but use a different browser the rest of the time.

This is where Browsium Unibrows comes in. Put simply, this solution allows you to migrate to Windows 7 (with its bundled version of IE 8) and automatically utilize the IE 6 rendered only on those sites or pages where it is explicitly required, like the intranet. Otherwise, the safer IE 8 browser is used. And it seeks to buy you time while you perform the time-consuming upgrade to your own sites while not needing to hold off on the Windows 7 migration.

Unibrows is implemented like a browser plugin of sorts–it’s an IE child process–and works automatically and seamlessly; indeed, your users won’t even know what’s happening under the covers and everything will typically just look and work normally. It’s deployed via Group Policy or whatever software distribution method you prefer, occupies only a tiny 10 MB memory footprint (not counting whatever the IE 6 renderer needs), and can even fool the browser into working with incompatible, older versions of other add-ins like Flash and Java on a page-by-page basis. It’s sort of a one-stop shop for web site compatibility, really.

Administration is rules-based, so you can easily specify which pages or sites require the IE 6 renderer. And once those page and sites are fixed, you can simply remove the relevant rules and users’ browsers will revert to using the normal IE 8 renderer.

One concern I had about this system was whether it was sanctioned by Microsoft. After all, it seems that Browsium would need to somehow redistribute IE 6 bits in order for Unibrows to work. This was indeed the original plan, but Microsoft eventually required a license where the IE 6 bits are downloaded separately on install. But this is still a much simpler solution than Microsoft’s own virtualization-based migration helpers. I have to wonder if they sense the competitive threat and are making things difficult on purpose. Browsium tells me that they have a great relationship with Microsoft, and its CTO is indeed an ex-Microsoftie himself.

From a functional perspective, Unibrows works a lot like IE 8’s compatibility view, except that when certain sites are encountered they’re rendered with the actual IE 6 renderer, and not a software emulator. But it’s a safer version of IE 6 than is IE 6 itself; the Unibrows version utilizes a separate protocol handler so it can’t be exploited as can IE 6. It’s also very compatible. ActiveX controls run as they do under XP and IE 6, not as they do under Windows 7 and IE 8, but only when you want them to. This behavior, too, is manageable.

Interested? Unibrowse is currently in a closed beta, but they’re taking sign-ups and plan to ship the final product, along with a downloadable eval version, by the end of the month. And it’s going to be inexpensive: $5 per seat per year. Since it’s in essence a temporary solution–you are¬ going to upgrade those sites, right?–that might be a one-time fee, too.

Here are five issues that we feel Microsoft should get resolved either before or sometime soon after Windows 7 is released to the public in a few weeks.

There has been ongoing debate on Microsoft’s TechNet site about an issue with Windows 7 RTM x64 and incremental backups. It seems as though Windows 7 x64 is not performing incremental backups as it should by design. Per Microsoft Help: “After you create your first backup Windows Backup will add new or changed information to your subsequent backups …
Windows Backup keeps track of the files that have been added or modified since your last backup and then updates the existing backup, which saves disk space.” In other words, after a full backup, Windows 7 should only back up changed data.

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Except that isn’t happening, according to many users on TechNet and reviewers’ findings in the CRN Test Center. Win7 x64 is backing up the entire system again and again, eating up tons of disk space and extending backup jobs that should take a few minutes into hours.

To date, there is no satisfactory explanation from a Microsoft engineer or TechNet as to why this is happening, only lots of posts from frustrated users. Users are especially ticked off because the feature worked fine in Vista.

Windows XP Mode
CRN Test Center reviewers ran into an unexpected and unwanted surprise when testing out Windows XP Mode. We tested on a desktop that had a compatible virtualization-ready processor, which was confirmed by a Microsoft utility that checks system compatibility with XP Mode.

We were unable to install XP Mode and kept getting the error message shown in the slide, “Cannot start Windows Virtual PC while another virtualization software is running. Please close the other virtualization software and try again.” The install process simply halted after the message, leaving us with no other action to take.

After a round of back-and-forths with Microsoft engineers and assuring them that yes, we never had any other virtualization software installed on the machine in question, we finally figured out the problem: The machine had an AMD processor on a Gigabyte motherboard. AMD sent us the latest BIOS upgrade for the motherboard (which was not on Gigabyte’s site, by the way) and the problem was fixed.

That seemed to solve the problem for other users on the TechNet site with whom we shared the solution. However, there are still complaints coming in from Win7 users with different motherboards and a few users with systems that have Intel’s virtualization-ready processors. Although most of the latest processors should handle XP Mode fine, Microsoft should take pains to ensure that hardware partners are up to speed with the latest BIOS and other drivers on their Web sites in preparation for Windows 7’s public release.

No Bloat
Wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft makes a pact with OEMs: no bloatware gets bundled with Windows 7?

Bloatware, also affectionately known as “crapware,” probably is one of the biggest contributors to the slowing down of systems, and slowing down precious time for IT professionals who may have to strip PCs of it.

Power Option Issues
Another topic that is the darling of the TechNet forums, and one that we have witnessed on a few systems in the Test Center: Windows 7’s quirkiness with power options. Those power options in particular center on sleep/hibernation mode. Users on various Windows 7 forums are reporting that the preview window for programs minimized on the task bar that comes up when you hover the mouse over it is coming up blank and not showing thumbnails. This is being reported as an issue with systems using certain ATI and Nvidia cards.

This could be a driver issue with the graphics cards (though many users are claiming they had latest drivers installed) or perhaps some kind of memory issue. In any case, it’s a nuisance that ruins a nice feature in Windows 7 and should get fixed.

Prevent Windows 7 From Slowing Down Over Time
One of the biggest complaints about Windows systems is that at first they seem speedy and light and then have a tendency to become slow and weighty in performance as time goes on. Windows 7 has some pretty impressive telemetry — an inherent technology within Windows 7 that gives critical system information about bugs and performance issues. Wouldn’t it be great if that technology could be used to monitor and warn about what exactly is making a system slow down? If Windows 7 could automatically detect and fix problems using this, that would really help to turn around Windows’ reputation for performance degradation.

Essential add-ons for Firefox, Chrome and IE

The ability to add features to browsers makes them the most powerful applications on your screen, but with so many to choose from, where do you start?

Too many and you’ll slow down your system; not enough and you’re wasting an opportunity. Here’s our guide to the ones you can’t afford to be without.

1. Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey runs user-written scripts to completely alter many of your favourite websites, giving them a new look, invisibly mashing up different services and adding brand new features.

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Visit the website at www.userscripts.org to see what’s possible. It’s available for Chrome and Firefox, and is built into Opera as UserJS.

2. AdBlock Plus

Many of us are virtually immune to online ads by now, but if you get a site that goes just that little bit too far, AdBlock Plus is the best way to slap it into shape.

It strips out everything from pop-ups to embedded Flash animations, making your browsing fast, smooth and less likely to make you feel the urge to reach for a Pepsi, the cool, refreshing choice of the new generation. As a bonus, it’ll also strip out any malware too.

3. CooIiris

This is not just a media browser, but it’s an incredibly impressive one too. CoolIris creates 3D walls of content from your favourite social sites, which doesn’t sound like much until you see it in action.

Finding that one photo or video is so much easier when you can see all the options stretching out into infinity. It works on your desktop files too, giving you a great way to read everything.

4. Feedly

An alternative way of reading Google Reader, now in Firefox and Chrome. Feedly reparses your RSS feeds into a magazine-style format, making it less effective as a dedicated research tool or if you have to read every last story, but much smoother if you just want to see what’s going on right now.

An icon on your toolbar brings it straight up, and if you want to go back into full research mode, it’s easy to return to regular Google Reader. Get it from www.feedly.com.

5. Web Developer Toolbar

As the name suggests, you won’t need this one if you never play with HTML and CSS, but if you do, you can’t afford to be without it.

Now for both Firefox and Chrome, it adds all the options you need to troubleshoot your designs, from highlighting individual elements to poking at the CSS directly. Get it from www.chrispederick.com.

6. NoScript

Scripting technologies have made the web a more powerful place, but they sometimes just get in the way. NoScript lets you switch them on and off per page, but because it uses a whitelist to decide when it kicks in, you never need to worry about a rogue page jumping on your back before you can block it. It’s only available for Firefox at the moment.

7. DownThemAll

One for hardcore file junkies, this pulls every file from a web page at a click, saving you the effort of going to each link, clicking ‘Save Target As’, and pointing it to a directory.

It’s for Firefox only at the moment, from here. Chrome has its own equivalents though, including Download Selection, Download All that does the same thing as DTA, and a range of assorted downloaders for specific sites.

8. FireFTP

A complete FTP client inside Firefox. It’s not as good as something like Filezilla if you use FTP a lot, for either website management or downloading lots of files, but if it’s only an occasional thing these days, it’s great to have something like this on hand to handle the gruntwork.

It’s for Firefox only, and available from here. The closest Chrome equivalent that’s currently available is Chrome FTP, although that’s considerably less polished at this point.

9. Instapaper

Not an extension, but a bookmark that should work on anything – although you can get plug-ins as well. Instapaper stores any long articles you find and don’t have time to read.

Best of all, as it’s a web service, there are viewers available for almost everything, including any web-enabled computer. Get it from www.instapaper.com.

10. All-In-One-Gestures

Gesture support has to be used to be fully appreciated. Opera pioneered it in web browsers, and when you’re used to it, it’s impossible to go back. Navigate, close windows and more with simple sweeps of the mouse and it becomes an almost subconscious act.

If this specific plug-in doesn’t work, there are others, although Opera still has the edge in terms of fluidity due to its built-in support. Get it from here.

11. Delicious Bookmarks

Another bookmark-based extension, in both ways. Syncing bookmarks is fine, but if you’re like us, you quickly end up with far too many to manage.

Delicious is the perfect way to sort, share and tag anything of interest online. You can see what other people have said about them as well, and import them into almost any web browser or other link collection.

12. StumbleUpon

On the other hand, if you’re having trouble simply finding something good to read online, sit back and let StumbleUpon show you the way.

Tell it what you’re interested in and it finds you a page that might qualify. You can also add your own favourite sites to the collection, bookmark any of interest for later use, and comment or read comments on sites from other users.

13. AutoProxy

Proxy servers are a godsend if you want to access content you’re not sup… to keep your online life private. And nothing else. Because that would be Very Naughty.

AutoProxy lets you switch back and forth between identities with ease. You’ll still have to track down the right proxy server for what you want to do, and you should be careful that you switch it off before doing anything crucial like online banking, just to be safe.

14. Evernote WebClipper

This is the ideal way of keeping snippets of interest, images or any other clippable content from around the web. With the free Evernote package, you get 40MB a month, which is plenty for web content, and you can access it from any machine or on the major mobile platforms.

An IE plug-in installs with the desktop client (not required, but very helpful for managing your note collection), with Firefox/Chrome plug-ins available separately. Get it from www.evernote.com.

15. FoxyTunes

Don’t waste time switching away from the web just because a Justin Bieber song ‘accidentally’ found its way into your music library. With FoxyTunes, you can control almost every major music player from within your browser – which, despite the name, can also be IE. Sorry, no Chrome.

Media is one area where Firefox definitely still has the advantage, with Chrome’s only real plug-ins being for online players and simple look-up checks of services like Spotify’s library. Get it from www.foxytunes.com.

16. IE Tab

Not many of us use IE by choice, but sometimes there’s no other option. IE Tab lets you open up a window in Firefox or Chrome, but using the IE rendering engine instead. It gives you all the benefits, and is easily closed afterwards.

Chrome extensions

17. Session Manager

Most of us need more than one website at a time. Session Manager helps you recover from crashes by bringing up complete sets of tabs. It’s available now for Firefox and the Chrome browser.

18. PrintPDF

You can download web pages easily enough, but if you want to make sure you see them properly on another platform, PDFs are the answer. PrintPDF is a tool that exports them directly.

For Firefox, see here. Chrome users should go to here.

19. Karbon FLV Downloader

This is a great way to download FLV video files and MP3s embedded in web page code. For FLVs, you’ll need a dedicated Flash player to watch them later on, at your leisure. You can download it from here.

20. Bit.ly

The most popular of the URLshortener tools out there, Bit.ly takes any link you give it and crunches it down into a more Twitter/instant message-friendly format.

For Firefox, go to here. For Chrome, you need to head over to here.

21. Remember The Milk

One of the best task managers around, integrating beautifully with Gmail and available on iPhone and Android. The Firefox and Chrome plug-ins connect it with Gmail too. See www.rememberthemilk.com to download it.

22. Chrome Reader

One of the most bizarre and annoying things we’ve noticed about Chrome is that Google makes it incredibly fiddly to subscribe to feeds. This simple but incredibly effective plug-in fixes that problem immediately. You can download it from here.

23. Unhide Passwords

Security is rather pointless when you’re alone, and Unhide Passwords removes the starring-out so you can see what you’re typing.

It’s for Firefox only, but there’s a Chrome equivalent available from here.

24. Copy Without Formatting

When you copy text from the internet, it retains its formatting when you paste it. This add-on sits in Chrome and gives you a shortcut that only spits out plain text. Find it here, or get the handy Firefox equivalent from here.

Chances are you don’t know about these great technology products because they are only available overseas. We’re here to ruin your day by making you covet them as much as we do.

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Technology isn’t the same everywhere. Some countries take longer to get the newest, best, coolest, shiniest toys—even the United States of America. That’s why, every once and a while, we try to round up a list of fantastic products that you can’t get here. Sometimes the differences with what is available are slight, sometimes they’re major, but it’s always an excellent excuse to see how the other half lives with gear that we can’t have yet, and may never get.

You can check online at sites like Dynamism for a chance to import some of these products, but be prepared for disappointment (or at least sticker-shock).

I can’t imagine troubleshooting a Windows PC without Process Explorer. Users frequently compare Process Explorer to Windows’ built-in Task Manager, but I tend to think of Process Explorer as what Task Manager should’ve been. There’s so much more to Process Explorer that it’s hard to put the two in the same sentence.

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Process Explorer tells you which files are currently open by what program. That feature alone has saved me half a head of hair because, once identified by Process Explorer, the process that’s locked up your file can be killed.

Process Explorer also gives you full information on all of the svchost processes running on your PC. That accounts for the other half a head.

Mouse over a process, even a generic svchost, and you can see the command line that launched the process, the path to the executable file, and all of the Windows services being used. Right-click and you can go online to get more information about the executable. It’ll show each executable’s handles (believe me, that’s important), let you search for an executable based on the handle, and show you the percentage of CPU being consumed, not only by a process, but even by thread within the process.

If you drag the cross-hairs icon over a window, Process Explorer shows you every conceivable detail about the program that’s controlling the window. Process Explorer also shows marvelously complex graphs of CPU usage, memory commitment, and I/O activity. It’s spectacular, even if you’ve never ventured beyond the “what’s my handle” stage.

What’s new in this version? The official TechNet blog says you should expect a “slew” of enhancements and new functionality. I couldn’t find such a bounty, but the new stuff I did locate looks quite useful.

The best new feature is called Tree CPU usage. In the past, Process Explorer would show you the percentage of CPU usage for each process or subprocess. If you bring in the Tree CPU Usage column, Process Explorer will additionally show you the total CPU usage for all subprocesses.

Easiest way to see it: Crank up Google Chrome, which uses lots of subprocesses. In Process Explorer’s Process view, right-click on any of the column headings and choose Select Columns. Click on the Process Performance tab, and check the box marked Tree CPU Usage. Click OK. You see a new column called Tree CPU Usage. Drag it over next to the CPU column and watch. You can see how much CPU all of Chrome takes, not just the individual subprocesses.

There are cosmetic improvements, too. The System Information window now has tabs, giving some breathing room to a previously cramped layout, with a few more memory statistics. By and large, though, if you’re familiar with Process Explorer 12.04, you’ll be right at home with Process Explorer 14. (Yes, in true triskaidekaphobia fashion, PE skipped version 13.)