My ZDNet first look is now live:

A first look at Windows 7’s pre-beta PDC release

Image Gallery: See features from the pre-beta release as well as later internal builds not yet publicly released.

OK, the gang of all-star Windows bloggers is mostly in place. If you want to follow along, here’s where you can find us:

In preparation for the public unveiling of Windows 7 tomorrow, Microsoft has renamed its flagship blog. The Windows Blog has a new look to go with its new name. It’s down at the moment as the upgrade goes through, but I was able to sneak a peek this morning while it was very briefly live. It looks remarkably like builds of Windows 7 that I’ve seen. Something tells me there will be a bunch of new stuff there tomorrow.

Ironically, windows7.com and windows7blog.com are owned by domain-squatters, as is windowssevenblog.com. And windowsblog.com is apparently a Greek site, offering “Aegean windows” for gracious Mediterranean living. It’s hard to find a good domain name, apparently.

Update: Looks like someone at Microsoft managed to snag the windows7.com domain, whoch now works properly. Thanks to an anonymous commenter for the tip.

I have no idea how well this will work, so consider today’s session a dry run for tomorrow.

Today will be a discussion of cloud computing. Tomorrow is the public unveiling of Windows 7.

In a new report on Microsoft’s anemic Windows sales for the most recent quarter, Steve Lohr of the New York Times writes:

Microsoft has said that Windows System 7 will ship by late next year.

Uh… Windows System 7? You guys have been hanging around Apple too much lately.

Update: The Times has fixed its error without acknowledging it. Thank goodness for screen captures!

Safe Mode is an important troubleshooting tool for all versions of Windows. Safe Mode starts the system with a minimal complement of drivers and services and no auto-start programs, giving you the opportunity to make configuration changes, delete files, or perform tests that are impossible in normal mode.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find it difficult to get Windows started in Safe Mode. The official way, of course, is to press F8 at startup and then choose a Safe Mode option from the startup menu, but timing is critical. Too early and your keystroke doesn’t get noticed. Too late and you miss your window of opportunity and start in normal mode.

The solution? If you’re already running in normal mode, use the System Configuration tool to restart in Safe Mode. In Windows Vista or Server 2008, click Start and type msconfig in the Search box, then click the shortcut that appears at the top of the Start menu. Click the Boot tab and select the check box next to Safe Boot, as shown here. (If you have a multi-boot system, be sure to select the correct entry from the list in the top window.)

You don’t need to make any other changes. Just click OK and then restart when prompted. The next time you start, you’ll go straight to Safe Mode.

In XP or Server 2003, the procedure is slightly different. Click Start, Run, type msconfig in the Run box, and press Enter. In the System Configuration Utility window, click the BOOT.INI tab and select the /SAFEBOOT option.

In all cases, after you’re done working in Safe Mode, open the System Configuration utility again, click the General tab, choose Normal Startup, and click OK. When you restart, you’ll be back in business.

Here’s how old Windows XP is:

When you install a fresh copy of XP, as I did today in a virtual machine, little billboards appear during different phases of the installation. One of them talks about support for “new classes of hardware” (or something like that – it blew by pretty quickly). As an example, it mentions Zip drives.

When was the last time you used a Zip drive? I think I threw away all my Zip disks in 2003.

Bonus snark from Wikipedia: “In 2006, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 15th worst technology product of all time. However, in 2007, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 23rd best technology product of all time.”

Brilliant idea. Visit this page, type the name of the domain you’re having trouble reaching, and get a result like this one:

Bookmarked!

(via Wisefaq)

I’m sure a team of black helicopters is on its way to Taiwan right now, with orders to pick up ASUS CEO Jerry Shen and bring him to the underground lair of Steven Sinofsky. The offense? Blabbing just a little too much about Windows 7 ship dates.

In an interview with Laptop magazine, Shen said Vista is a nonstarter with his company’s ultralight Eee PCs, especially given the imminent arrival of Windows 7. He predicted that “in the second half of next year we will put Windows 7 on Eee PCs.”

For those who find that surprising, you just haven’t been paying attention.

This is the very picture of an unhappy, unhealthy Windows system:

In this Reliability Monitor chart, the two rows to focus on are at the bottom. That string of Windows failures (and related Miscellaneous failures) indicate the appearance of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. I’ve highlighted the last appearance, on October 14. Note that the Failure Detail section below lists the error code, 0x000000D1, and examining the blue screen itself shows that the error is triggered in (although not necessarily caused by) a Windows system file called Afd.sys, which is related to networking.

As you can see from the chart, this string of errors started on October 1, and these hard crashes were occurring with alarming frequency by October 10. The crashes were not triggered by any particular activity but seemed random. To troubleshoot, I did the following:

• Ran hardware diagnostics. Thorough testing showed no problems with memory or hard disk, and I was able to rule out heat and power problems as well.
• Installed a BIOS update and a hotfix from the system manufacturer’s website. The readme files for each download mentioned that they were designed to fix BSOD problems that sounded similar.
• Uninstalled several third-party programs that I had installed around the time the crashes began occurring. This included an antivirus package and a display utility.
• Checked for unsigned drivers using the Verifier tool. Found none.

And still the crashes continued. The data set shown above is from a relatively new system, an HP m9300t that I purchased last month. After exhausting everything in my troubleshooting bag of tricks, I was ready to send the system back but decided to first contact HP support. I used the online chat feature and connected with a tech support rep within two minutes, and we walked briskly through the problem.

After about five minutes of research, he came back with the answer. I needed to replace the storage driver for my onboard Intel ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID controller. In fact, I had inadvertently caused the problem by replacing the HP-supplied OEM driver with a newer Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver downloaded from Intel’s site. The Intel driver was version 8.5.0.1032. HP’s recommended driver was version 7.6.9.1002. After confirming that the BIOS was up to date, I installed the recommended driver, reinstalled the QFE 955252 hotfix (using the x64 version here), and restarted the system.

The results? Well, you can see for yourself in the screen shot above. This system has been running nonstop for exactly a week, without a trace of the previous problems. (The red X’s in the second row are application crashes related to a beta program I’m testing.) I’m confident that this BSOD problem is now cured.

And the moral? The latest driver is not necessarily the best, especially for critical components like a network card or a storage controller. Think twice before replacing an OEM-supplied driver with one from a different source, and be ready to roll back that driver at the first hint of trouble.

I have to give props to HP for its support as well. The entire support interaction lasted less than 20 minutes. The tech was knowledgeable and polite. And most important of all, he was able to diagnose and fix the problem the first time.