One of the most frustrating experiences for any Media Center user is when a PC connected to a TV resumes from sleep but shows only a black screen. I’ve read plenty of reports about the problem, including some from people I know.  It’s happened to me through the years, and about 18 months ago I found a workaround that helped me—putting an HDMI switcher in-line. As a number of commenters noted, that fix isn’t universal. It works on some configurations, but not on others. Here’s how I described the problem back then:

One of the biggest problems that I’ve run into with HDMI connections is one I fondly call the “black screen of amnesia.” This occurs when you power up a device and the TV doesn’t recognize it. Sometimes, flipping to a different input on the TV and then back to HDMI is enough to jog the connection into working again. But I’ve occasionally had to power everything down and restart in the right sequence to get things working.

Recently, I ran into the issue again. In fact, it’s happened a couple times this year, each time when I changed or reconfigured video cards in my primary Media Center PC. But this time, I was able to fix it, and I suspect that my lesson learned will help others as well.

This week, in preparation for a visit from Comcast to set up my new Ceton InfiniTV card, I installed both the new CableCard tuner and an updated video card, a Radeon HD5670. The Windows desktop displayed at the correct resolution, and Media Center appeared perfectly normal. As it always does, the system went to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity, but when I hit the remote to wake it back up, I got … a black screen. I could hear sounds indicating that the remote buttons were controlling the Media Center interface, but nothing I did would bring back the display, including shutting down the TV, removing the HDMI connector, and reconnecting. I had to press the power switch to get it working again, and when I tried the sleep/resume cycle again, I got the same black screen.

And then I remembered something. My setup includes a five-year-old Sony DLP TV, which runs at 1080i. From the desktop, Windows displays the resolution as 1920×1080 @30Hz—which is the equivalent of 1080i. So everything should be OK, right? But one thing I noticed is that when switching between Media Center and the Windows desktop, there was a pronounced flicker, as if the display were resetting itself to a different resolution in each mode. That, as it turned out, was the key to solving this problem.

Here’s the set of instructions I followed to resolve this problem:

From the Media Center main menu, on the Tasks strip, click Settings, then TV, then Configure Your TV or Monitor. Follow the prompts until you get to the Identify Your Display Type screen:

The logical assumption is to choose TV. Don’t. Choose Flat Panel instead, and then click Next. Choose HDMI as the connection type and Widescreen as the display width. If you’re asked to confirm your current resolution, click No and then click Next to get to this screen.

My TV is a 1080i model, so my natural instinct was to choose the 1080i entry at the bottom of that list. Again, don’t. Instead, choose the "pixels" setting that exactly matches the desktop resolution—in this case 1920 by 1080 pixels (interlaced, widescreen). Your settings might vary, depending on the resolution of the output device. Just make sure it matches the display resolution that Widows is using for the desktop. Allow the system to make its minor adjustments, accept them if they look OK, and then finish the wizard.

After I made this change, sleep and resume began working perfectly again. I’m not sure exactly what was going wrong before, but I’m assuming that the 1080i setting that Media Center was using included some overscan, which caused the Media Center resolution to differ from the desktop resolution. When the system resumes from sleep, the system tries to display the desktop resolution and can’t, resulting in the black screen. But with the two modes set to the exact same values, everything works as expected. As a bonus, that flicker when switching modes is gone.

When I chose TV and 1080i as a default, I experienced another annoying glitch. The Blu-ray playback program I use no longer used full screen mode within Windows Media Center. Instead, it displayed at a lower resolution, with a black band around all four sides. It worked properly outside Media Center, but the whole point of using Media Center is to do everything from a single control point. At the 1920 by 1080 pixels (interlaced) setting, Blu-ray disks and DVDs use the full display again.

I have no idea whether this fix will work for every Media Center setup, but if you’re experiencing this problem it’s worth a try. Let me know in the comments whether it works for you.

Both the print and e-book editions of Office 2010 Inside Out are finally available. The 960-page volume, written by Carl Siechert and me, covers the four core programs that are available in all editions of Office 2010—Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint—as well as Outlook, which is available in all editions except Office 2010 Home and Student.

I’m especially pleased that 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.) One cool fact about the electronic editions: screenshots are available in color (for devices like the iPad that support color), even though the print edition is black and white only.

HOW TO BUY

Print edition

Currently, Amazon.com has the best price on the print edition. In the U.S., that’s $34.64, with free shipping. Order here.

Office 2010 Inside Out does not include a companion CD. In the back of the print edition, you’ll find a voucher that gives you free access to the full book online via Safari Books Online (no subscription fee is required if you use the voucher code).

Electronic edition

The simplest way to purchase the e-book is to go to oreilly.com, where you can pay the full retail price of $43.99 for the Ebook edition alone or $60.49 for a Print+Ebook bundle. (The order link is here, but keep reading for advice on how to spend a lot less money.)

Personally, I think that price is too high, so I’ve found a couple of options that will save you a significant amount of money:

• If you own any previous edition in the Office Inside Out series, sign up for a free user account at oreilly.com and register your title. They’ll send you a coupon that entitles you to a 40% discount on the print edition or a 50% discount on the e-book. That cuts the price of the e-book to a very reasonable $21.99. Order here.
• If you have already purchased the print edition of Office 2010 Inside Out, you can register the title at oreilly.com and purchase an e-book upgrade for $4.99. Order here.
• If you don’t own a previous edition and you want both the print and e-book editions, your best bet is to buy the print edition from Amazon (or another reseller) and then purchase the $4.99 e-book upgrade from O’Reilly. At a total price of $39.63, that do-it-yourself bundle saves you more than $20 compared to the full retail price at oreilly.com.

I mentioned that the e-books are DRM-free, but one other benefit is worth noting as well: when you purchase an e-book, you buy lifetime access. That means if you lose or damage your electronic copy, you can go to your O’Reilly account and download the book again. In addition, you can download and use any or all of the e-book formats as part of a single purchase. So you can get the PDF version and the Kindle version and the iPad version for one price.

If you’ve got the book, Carl and I welcome your feedback and questions, either in the comments section here or via e-mail, using this site’s contact form.

To see the Table of Contents and an excerpt from Chapter 1, go here.

For another excerpt (Chapter 15, Inside OneNote 2010), go here.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been using the beta of Internet Explorer 9 in preparation for a comprehensive post at ZDNet. That post was supposed to go live later this morning, when Microsoft officially unveils the browser, but someone jumped the gun, so I was able to publish early.

Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser

Today in San Francisco, Microsoft will officially unveil Internet Explorer 9 and make it available to the general public. It is, without question, the most ambitious browser release Microsoft has ever undertaken, and despite the beta label it is an impressively polished product.

The underpinnings of IE9 are no secret. Microsoft has been talking since last fall about its determined effort to adhere to Web standards and embrace HTML5. It has also detailed its efforts to improve IE9’s performance compared to previous releases. Developers and IT pros have been able to shake out compatibility issues and benchmark performance with four public platform previews over the past six months. But this beta is the first time Microsoft has publicly shown off the new browser’s user interface and given its Windows customers a product they can use day in and day out.

I sat down with Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer division, earlier this month for a first look at the IE9 interface and a discussion of Microsoft’s goals and its competition. Since that meeting, I’ve been using the IE9 beta extensively on multiple PCs, including my primary desktop and notebook computers. Based on that experience, I have some preliminary answers to the questions you’re asking: Is it fast enough? Is it compatible enough? Is it cool enough to win back former IE users who have switched to other browsers, first to Firefox and more recently to Google Chrome? And will this shiny new browser be able to rehabilitate the tarnished Internet Explorer brand?

Here’s my report.

I’ll have more details, including download instructions and some tips for early adopters, in a follow-up post.

Update: You can now download the IE9 beta code from Microsoft. It’s available in 29 languages.

It’s Patch Tuesday. Here’s what was waiting for me when I visited Windows Update today with my main PC, running 64-bit Windows 7. Some definition updates, a few bug fixes, and exactly one security update.

Here’s a closer look at the part I highlighted in yellow for that single update:

There were no security updates for Office 2010.

Now here’s today’s lineup of patches for Windows XP with Service Pack 3:

The yellow text in each one of those six updates says the same thing as the warning in that single Windows 7 update. And that’s not counting today’s two security updates for Office 2003, which is still running on lots of XP systems. That’s eight critical updates for a system running 2001-2003 software, and only one for a system running 2009-2010 releases.

No operating system is ever perfectly secure. But Windows XP was designed more than a decade ago, in a very different era. The difference between it and a modern operating system like Windows 7 is profound.

Note to commenters: My spam filters automatically place comments into a moderation queue if you’ve never had a comment approved at this site before. For some reason, this posts is drawing a lot of comments from newcomers, so I’ll repeat what longtime readers already know: If your comment contains a bunch of insults and you use a fake e-mail address, it will go straight to the trash. I welcome disagreement and debate, but I have no patience for incivility. if you want to be a jerk, you’re wasting your time.

Oh, and if you want to use the comments section here to tell me how awesome Linux is and how everyone you know is using it now, save the keystrokes. I’m not interested.

An interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today, citing comScore statistics on who’s hot and who’s not in webmail:

As mail traffic at Yahoo has dropped an average of 11% in 2010 versus last year, the fall in its overall U.S. traffic has averaged 8%. Yahoo Mail remains top in total email page views in the U.S., but Microsoft‘s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail are grabbing share. Internationally, Hotmail has the most page views, and is building its lead according to comScore.

In my experience, power users tend to scoff at any webmail service other than Gmail. And some people (myself included) have multiple e-mail accounts but access them through a desktop client. Hotmail’s age and its onetime reputation as a haven for spammers make it hard to get techies to look closely at it. That’s too bad, because the new Windows Live Hotmail service is downright impressive, with a slick, fast interface and some new features that do a very good job of sweeping away clutter. Gmail is making some impressive innovations as well, especially with its Priority Inbox feature, which tries to bubble important messages to the top of your inbox and push routine mail lower down on the stack. It’s an old idea, one that has been available for Outlook users with the ClearContext add-in, but it seems to be well implemented.

Given the impressive advances in both Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail, I’m skeptical that Yahoo can actually make much of a dent.

Any Yahoo Mail users out there have a contrary opinion? Why do you continue to use that service in preference to others?

Microsoft has already sent out invitations to the press for a San Francisco event celebrating the beta release of IE9. (Alas, I’ll be getting ready to leave on vacation, so I’ll have to miss the live event.)

If you’re interested in being among the first to try out the full IE9, you’ll need your own invite, which you can get here:

http://www.beautyoftheweb.com

That takes you to a teaser page that includes the new IE9 logo and spells out the launch date:

Click that link in the lower left corner to add a reminder to your calendar and you’ll see the time neatly translated to your local time zone from the event’s 11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time start.

So far, with the exception of a single leaked screenshot, Microsoft has managed to keep the new browser’s interface a tightly guarded secret. Think they can maintain that level of secrecy for another eight days?

My good friends at Microsoft Press note that their imprint now includes 370ish DRM-free titles.  That includes Windows 7 Inside Out, which is available (just as its shelfmates are) in four—no, wait, now it’s five digital formats. You can download any or all of the formats, and you get lifetime access to purchases as well. Here’s a breakdown of which formats work with which devices:

• ePub works on the iPhone’s Stanza app and in mobile versions of Bookworm on multiple platforms; you can also use this format in some Android-based readers and the Sony Reader
• Android Package files (.apk) work as apps on Android mobile devices
• .mobi is the Kindle-compatible format (I’ve used it with Kindle software on the PC and an Android device as well as on a Kindle reader)
• PDF is probably the best choice on a PC but will work on any platform that includes a PDF reader
• DAISY is a format I hadn’t heard of before; it’s apparently a means of creating "digital talking books."

All of the e-book files are fully searchable, and you can cut-and-paste and print from them without restriction.

Of course, the book is still available in the classic print format from Amazon and other booksellers, which includes a PDF copy on a bundled CD. If you want one of the other digital formats and print, you can get a bundle price.

Finding the best price on either or both editions can be a challenge. Surprisingly, the best option might be a bundle that you put together yourself. Here’s how it works:

• Start by signing up for a free membership at oreilly.com (which distributes Microsoft Press titles).
• Next, buy the print edition from a retailer like Amazon, which currently sells Windows 7 Inside Out for $31.49 and has Office 2010 Inside Out available for pre-order at $34.64. Or, if you own a previous edition of the current title, you’ll get a 40-50% upgrade discount buying it from oreilly.com.
• Register your new book using its title or ISBN number. Sorry, English-language editions only. And no, they don’t care where you bought it.
• Now order the digital edition of the book you just registered and pay $4.99 for the full e-book package. That makes the total price of Windows 7 Inside Out (print and e-book) $31.49 + $4.99, or $36.44. That’s a big savings over the full $54.99 retail price of the exact same bundle at oreilly.com.

That $4.99 upgrade applies to any Microsoft Press or O’Reilly title on your bookshelf, making it a great deal if you want a copy for your Kindle or phone.

I’m still waiting for Office 2010 Inside Out to appear in stores in either format. It should be available in print around September 20, but look for the e-book sooner.

Over the past five years, OneNote has become one of the most important software tools I own. I use it for interview notes, travel details, serial numbers, product keys, and operating instructions for just about everything around my home and office. In fact, the Send To OneNote button is high on the list of reasons I prefer Internet Explorer to the competition.

In preparation for IE9’s arrival on September 15, I’m spending more time in other browsers. Today I was checking to make sure I had the latest version of Firefox and, out of habit, I checked the Mozilla add-ons site to see if there was anything new for OneNote. I was pleasantly surprised to find this extension, updated just two days ago:

Clip to OneNote :: Add-ons for Firefox

Send text, pictures to Microsoft Office OneNote with a single click.

In very limited testing, I’ve found it works fine with OneNote 2010. It’s not as full-featured as the IE version. Instead of being able to choose a notebook and section, your snippet or the current page is added as a page in the Unfiled Notes section. That adds an extra step to the workflow, going through the Unfiled Notes section and either moving pages to the proper section or trashing them. It looks like that feature is on developer madharasan‘s "what’s next" list, which promises "more versatile access of pages and sections inside OneNote."

Unfortunately, no one has written a OneNote extension for Google Chrome yet. That’s surprising—I would think the user base for that combo would be pretty strong. Anyone out there working on one?

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been upgrading, rearranging, cleaning, and labeling all the PCs in our home and office. As part of the process, I’ve been cleaning up the network layout too. I thought you might be interested in seeing how things are laid out. Here’s a diagram I prepared to help me understand how things are arranged:

This diagram doesn’t include one desktop PC and a handful of notebooks that make only wireless connections. It also doesn’t count the three or four virtual machines—servers and desktops—that are in operation at any given time.

As you can see, we are diehard Media Center users here, with two working systems doing full-time duty in that role, each with at least two TV tuners attached. That’s not something I necessarily recommend. It’s important for me, though, because I need the freedom to tinker with one Media Center setup—typically the one in my office—without jeopardizing the family’s main entertainment center in the living room. The dual setup did come in particularly handy earlier this month, when the HTPC system in the living room failed because of a faulty power supply. I was able to move the second Media Center setup out of my office and have it working in less than 30 minutes.

Our house is relatively new (five years old). We’re fortunate that the builder had the foresight to run Cat5 cable to every room in the house, which means every PC that’s connected to a TV is also connected to a wired Ethernet connection. For that matter, every wired connection runs at Gigabit speeds. Wireless technology is way better today than it was five years ago, but it’s still touchy enough that I try to avoid it for anything involving high-definition programming. And being able to swap HD video and lossless music files at wired speeds is a convenience I only notice when I use one of the wireless connections for the same task.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to go into some more detail about the equipment I use and why I chose it. If there are any questions you want me to cover along the way, leave them in the comments.

Vis Search Engine Land, I ran across these new stats from Nielsen yesterday, which appear to be good news for Microsoft and Bing:

MSN/Windows Live/Bing’s share has grown from 9.0% to 13.6% (a delta increase of 4.6% or a relative increase of 51%) while Yahoo!’s share has fallen from 17.1% to 14.3% (a delta drop of 2.8% or a relative drop of 17%). Consequently, over the last year Yahoo!’s delta lead over MSN/Windows Live/Bing has been reduced from 7.1% to only 0.7%.

A relative increase of 51%? That’s a very impressive uptick, although making that sort of gain is a lot easier when your initial share starts in the single digits, percentage-wise.

The statistic I found more startling, though, was this one:

The number of searches conducted in the U.S. over the last year has decreased by 16% from 10.5 billion in July 2009 to 8.8 billion in July 2010. MSN/Windows Live/Bing was the only one of the top three engines to have experienced an increase in search volume – a 28% increase from 0.9 billion to 1.2 billion.

Are you using search engines less than in the past? What’s your favorite starting point for search these days?

Adding … I’m still not sure what this means, exactly. Probably a combination of factors: Search is getting much better at some things, so you’re more likely to find the right answer to some types of questions in a single try. Google in particular is also getting worse at some types of searches, especially those related to trending topics and pop culture, where results pages are loaded with spam and useless junk. I’ve learned not to even bother for those types of searches.

Facebook and Twitter are no doubt handling some tasks that used to be done via search. And I frequently do the same things several commenters have noted, starting at Wikipedia if I’m confident that’s going to give me the best, cleanest result.

Maybe, collectively, we’ve all gotten 16% smarter at search?