Windows 7 Inside Out Deluxe Edition is at the printer now and will be available for sale soon. You can see the chapter-level outline and read the introduction here. A sample:

Introduction

By some measures, Windows 7 sets a new standard for usability. It needs less out-of-the-box tweaking and troubleshooting than any Windows version we’ve ever used. The arrangement of folders and fi les in Windows Explorer, basic system security, User Account Control settings, and numerous other default configuration options are well thought out. Adding a new hardware device typically requires nothing more than just plugging it in, and setting up a network no longer entails invoking supernatural help.

Despite all that—or perhaps because of it—we have plenty of good stuff to share with you in this edition of Windows 7 Inside Out. The good news: we don’t need to spend a lot of ink on Windows 7 features that work as expected. That allows us to concentrate on the many capabilities and features that are buried just beneath the surface. We cover the handful of essential tasks—backing up your computer, for example—that aren’t configured automatically. We’ve also brought together countless shortcuts, tips, and tricks to help you perform tasks more quickly and with less aggravation.

This Deluxe Edition adds several chapters not included in the original edition, giving us the space to dive deeper into media applications, networking, scripting, and deployment of Windows throughout a small organization. Perhaps more important, spread throughout this edition are additional tips and explanations based on many, many hours of poking, probing, and studying Windows 7 in the two years since its release. This book also covers the latest changes to the operating system, notably Service Pack 1, as well as a new version of Internet Explorer and an impressively updated collection of programs in Windows Live Essentials 2011.

You can preorder the book from Amazon.com now:

Microsoft Press, through its distribution agreement with O’Reilly, has made this title available in five DRM-free e-book formats. That means you can buy the e-book once and read it on any compatible device or a reader program on your PC. It’s available in the native Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Sony Reader formats, as well as PDF. All formats are unprotected, so you can search, copy, paste, and print as needed. (For the full scoop on how these DRM-free ebook formats, work, see this detailed page. You can also read my earlier post, Microsoft Press dives deep into the DRM-free e-book business.)

All five e-book formats are available free with the print edition. To pre-order the electronic edition only, go to this page at oreilly.com. (Hint: It’s cheaper to order the print edition from Amazon and then download the e-book.)

I’m old enough to remember the Mercury and Gemini launches, and I vividly remember being spellbound by the black-and-white images of the first steps on the moon in 1969. I held my breath today for longer than I thought I possibly could when I watched the final launch in the Space Shuttle program, just as I have done with every such launch since January 28, 1986.

This picture of Mission Control from today’s launch of the Shuttle Atlantis is so rich with detail, one hardly knows where to start.

There’s the big bank of analog clocks in the upper left. An awful lot of engineering workstations, all facing in the same direction. And on those three giant screens you can practically trace the evolution of PC technology, with text-based console windows and graphics that would have been only slightly far out in the original Tron.

But the detail I found most interesting is at the bottom of that third screen.

That is, unmistakably, the Windows XP Start button and taskbar.

The Space Shuttle program has lasted an unusually long time. So has XP.

In both cases, the underlying technology is showing its age and probably should have been retired a few years ago. But hey, it still works!

As this report in the Huntsville Times noted, An Xbox 360 has far more power than the flight computer:

The flight computer aboard the space shuttle has less than one percent of the power of an Xbox 360 game console. Astronauts load programs directing the phases of a mission – liftoff, orbit, landing – into the computer one at a time after removing the program for the previous segment. Why hasn’t NASA upgraded the computer? The agency values its 30-year history of reliability. That said, astronauts don’t go into space with only one computer. Crew laptops and other laptops also make the trip.

This is a farewell mission for the space program. It’s also a nice milestone on XP’s trajectory toward retirement.

If you’re curious about how much longer XP will be supported, download the Windows XP End Of Support Countdown Gadget, which neatly keeps track of it on a PC running Windows 7 or Vista. Here’s where it stands now.

Safe travels, Atlantis.

Thanks to Brendan Morgan (@nutterguy on Twitter) for the screen grab.

Greg Duncan points to a very interesting third-party tool designed to help .NET developers connect to Windows Live SkyDrive:

I’ve been waiting, and waiting and waiting for an official SkyDrive API. Since SkyDrive was released in 2007 (yes, SkyDrive has been available since 2007), I’ve been whining about the lack of an API. Sure there’s unofficial ways to work with it, third party utilities, etc, but lack of an official and supported API bugs me. And it’s not like Microsoft isn’t using some API in their growing list of services and app that use SkyDrive. sigh…

Anyway… This project looks interesting and seems to be constructed in such a way as to if there ever is an official API, it could be updated to use it. Using an unofficial API is always a risk, but if it’s the only game in town…

According to the project description, the SkyDrive .Net API Client (available from CodePlex) is an open source client for Windows Live SkyDrive developed in C# for the Microsoft .NET Framework. It “allows developers to easily integrate Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive online storage and sharing services into their own applications.”

The author goes on to describe a little background for the project:

At the time of this writing, as far as I know, there is no official API to use for SkyDrive. However, there are several legacy applications (Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office) and open source tools (SkyDrive Simple Viewer for WebDAV) which are already using some sort of, non-documented web services like SkyDocsService, Live API and SkyDrive WebDAV. This project integrates/wraps those web services into one, single service client in order to provide a super set of all the features available -one by one- in those individual web services.

I suspect Microsoft will be announcing something in this space when it unveils Windows 8 at the Build conference in September. The question is whether it will eliminate the need for a third-party tool like this.

I recently canceled my Dropbox account (this ZDNet post explains, in detail, why). All my file-synchronization tasks are now run by Windows Live SkyDrive.

I’m also evaluating some other cloud-based services, including Box.net and SugarSync, where I’ve had accounts, mostly unused, for years.

When I revisited the Box.net account, I had to blow the virtual dust off the place, which hadn’t been visited since 2009. But my files from 2004 and 2005 were intact, including a folder full of photos from our vacation in Tuscany in 2003. I remember carefully selecting, cropping, and tagging those photos, which really bring back some pleasant memories.

With the help of a very cool third-party tool called Gladinet Cloud Desktop, I added the SkyDrive and Box.net accounts to a mapped Z: drive. Then I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to upload those photos to SkyDrive, and finally used Windows Live Writer to turn the collection into a photo album and embed it in this post with no more than a couple of clicks:

That description sounds more complicated than the actual sequence of tasks was. In fact, the whole operation probably took no more than 2 minutes.

I’ll do a more detailed walk-through later. If you have favorite ways to accomplish similar tasks, tell me about it in the comments.

PS: It wouldn’t surprise me if someone wants to turn this into a Windows theme. Feel free to do so and include a link to this post if you can. Update: It only took Rod Davis 10 minutes to respond to the challenge. Get the theme here. And thanks, Rod!

Microsoft has released a set of customized ribbons for Office 2010.

Each download is for a specific app: the 2010 versions of Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio, and Word.

The entire set of downloads is at the Microsoft Office Blog: Download free customized ribbons.

The files are in Exported Office UI format, with a .exportedui file name extension. (You can read more about this format—including a few gotchas—in Office 2010 Inside Out.)

What you get is a single new tab, Favorites, which appears as the first tab on the ribbon for the selected app. It’s filled with the most popular commands for that app, based on customer feedback data collected by Microsoft.

Here’s what the Favorites tab for Outlook looks like.

You can (and should) tweak this tab so that it reflects the commands you use most often—then export that saved tab to a file so that you can reuse it on another machine.

You could do something like this manually, but having this ready-made file to kick-start the project is much easier. And of course it would be even easier if my custom ribbons could just follow me as I move between different PCs in different places.

Let me know what you think.

I dropped in to the Steam website today to check something else and ran across the current hardware survey. Now, this isn’t representative of the PC universe at large. Gamers tend to have more modern and more powerful hardware than most. But it’s still interesting as a leading indicator.

Under the Windows-only heading for May 2011, here are the usage statistics for different Windows versions:

 

Operating System	Percentage
Windows 7 64-bit	40.64%
Windows XP 32-bit	21.63%
Windows Vista 32-bit	13.73%
Windows Vista 64-bit	12.13%
Windows 7 32-bit	10.44%
All others	1.44%

A few things are worth noting from that data.

• * First, among Steam users, Windows 7 now represents more than 50% of all PCs in use. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment roughly 18 months after the OS was released.
• * Second, XP is about to drop below the 20% threshold. Good. It had a long life, but it’s time to retire.
• * Finally, 64-bit computing is now officially mainstream. The 64-bit version of Windows 7 outnumbers 32-bit boxes by a ratio of more than 3:1, and the combination of Windows 7 and Windows Vista 64-bit accounts for 52.8% of all machines in the survey.

Finally, where’s the Mac in all this? Among gamers, at least, it’s still a minor player, accounting for 5.64% of Steam’s customers.

*** June 10, 2011 Note: A server crash this week took this site offline for about a day and a half. Everything should be running properly now, but if you see any errors I’d appreciate a heads-up.***

Microsoft showed off Windows 8 publicly for the first time last week, and one of the most important bits of info released is that Windows 8 will have the same system requirements as Windows 7. Of course, Windows 7 had the same system requirements as Windows Vista, and Windows 7 actually runs better than Vista on similar hardware.

So, in theory, when Windows 8 ships in 2012 you should be able to run it on a system originally designed and built five years earlier.

That certainly wasn’t true in previous Windows generations, where system requirements typically doubled between releases.

Has this affected your plans for future PC purchases? How long do you normally keep a computer in service, and what do you do with it when it’s no longer useful to you?

One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informant’

The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.

Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.

It’s Philip K. Dick’s world, we just live in it.

In an embarrassing disclosure, Adobe this week acknowledged that the latest release of its Flash Player, versions 10.3, doesn’t work properly with Internet Explorer 9 on some systems.

The bug is detailed here. The symptoms are that Flash content either doesn’t play or plays in the wrong location, typically in the top left. It might be related to your graphics adapter.:

The reports for Flash Player 10.3 indicate that systems with Intel HD Graphics adapters running Internet Explorer 9 are the systems being impacted by this particular bug. However, if you are encountering this issue and have a different configuration we’d love to hear from you. Please review the instructions on this page for details on generating the information we’ll need for further investigation.

I have seen similar symptoms on systems with high-end ATI graphics adapters, typically when a very large number of tabs are open. I’ve found in that case that killing the right process returns things to normal.

If you’re afflicted by this bug, you have a few options:

• Try updating your Intel HD Graphics drivers, using the latest version from Intel.
• Temporarily switch to another default browser.
• Disable hardware graphics acceleration and use software rendering instead, using these instructions.

I don’t recommend rolling back to an earlier Flash version. There are too many security issues in Flash 10.2.

Have you been affected by this one?

Sorry for the geeky title, but if this post applies to you, well, you’ll know exactly what it means.

If you’ve ever poked around in the power settings of Windows 7, you’ve probably seen a check box that lets you specify whether Windows should be allowed to wake up when another network device sends it a directed packet.

Today I stumbled across an apparently definitive answer in the Readme file for an Intel network driver:

Power Management and System Wake

Not all systems support every wake setting. There may be BIOS or Operating System settings that need to be enabled for your system to wake up. In particular, this is true for Wake from S5 (also referred to as Wake from power off). Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 do not support on directed packet. Systems with these operating systems will not wake on a ping or other directed packet.

System does not wake when expected

Under Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, the system may not wake when sent an ARP packet. Forcing your system into Home Networking mode (instead of work or public mode) will resolve the issue. You can set the network mode during install or from the Networking Control Panel. However, if the network is disconnected and reconnected, and a DHCP server is not available or if there is no default gateway defined, it appears to the operating system that the network is undefined and the OS will reset it to public.

System does not wake on link

On a driver-only installation, if you change ‘Wake on Link Settings’ to Forced and change ‘Wake on Magic Packet’ and ‘Wake on Pattern’ to Disabled, the system may not wake up when expected. In order to "Wake on Link" successfully, check the Power Management tab and make sure that "Allow this device to wake the computer" is checked.

This information is especially useful if you have a Windows Media Center or a shared media library on a Windows 7 PC that you want to access from a networked device, such as an Xbox 360.

If you have tinkered with these settings, successfully, or unsuccessfully, I’d be interested in hearing about your experiences.