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January 2009 Blog Posts
Windows 7 Beta Upgrade: Some Flakiness Appearing

A couple of minor things (well, one not so minor) have started happening, some resolved, and some not.

The CEIP problem, which caused Explorer to stop working (never noticed any MSI problems), just showed up one day after never having been an issue.  Deleting the Registry Key as indicated fix that.

Mozilla Thunderbird has stopped working, as of today.  I use it as my RSS Reader, and it won’t download any news items (even though I can see them in my Google Reader list) or add new subscriptions.  I don’t keep all of my RSS feeds in Google Reader, so this is a problem.

BugChecks: of .  this has happened twice in the last two days, and seems to be related to driver power issues.  But I haven’t changed any drivers, either manually or through Windows Update.

Perhaps my initial upgrade went unusually well?  We shall see.

posted @ Saturday, January 24, 2009 9:00 PM | Feedback (0)
Windows 7 Beta Upgrade: Outlook 2007 Problems

Other people have commented on stability issues with Word 2007.  I haven’t seen any of those.  But I have noticed issues with Outlook 2007.

I probably spend equal time viewing my email on my main desktop (which is now Windows 7 Beta) and my Samsung Epix, which allowed me to find this issue.  There are times (maybe once every day or two) when Outlook 2007 stops being able to download email from my various sources.  Usually, it will give a send and receive error, but at least once, it didn’t indicate any errors, yet wouldn’t download any new email (which I knew I had from my phone).  Shutting down Outlook and restarting it always fixed the problem, but this obviously is an issue.

posted @ Monday, January 19, 2009 7:52 PM | Feedback (17)
Windows 7 Beta Upgrade: Windows Update Broken

On both machines that I upgraded to Windows 7 Beta, I could not check for updates without getting the error code 0x80072F8F.

For some reason, the time service was stopped (even though it was set to Automatic).  Restarting it solved the issue.

posted @ Sunday, January 11, 2009 2:36 PM | Feedback (2)
Windows 7 Beta Upgrade: IIS Debugging Broken

This is a simple one, but during the upgrade, Windows Authentication is disabled, which prevents Visual Studio from being able to launch debugging for web projects.

Enable it on the site you are working with, and you are good to go.

posted @ Sunday, January 11, 2009 2:30 PM | Feedback (0)
Upgrade to Windows 7 Beta

So I decided to install the beta of Windows 7 onto my main development machine.  This is arguably a stupid thing to do, but what the hell.  I installed first onto a laptop with something like my main installation (the laptop I used before upgrading to my current machine) and it didn’t die, so I took the plunge.

The first thing that surprised me was how long it took.  It took something like 6 hours, with most of the time devoted to ‘migrating current files, programs, blah blah’ or whatever it said.

I hate that they got rid of the Quick Launch toolbar, as I typically pin 30+ programs there.  Annoying.

Also, my anti-virus program identified conhost.exe, a process used by Windows 7, as win.sober.  Luckily, I can white-list it.

I’ll log things as I find them.

posted @ Saturday, January 10, 2009 7:14 PM | Feedback (0)
A mild corrective to all the Toyota love

Can be found here.

Some key points:

“A few years ago the company cast off its traditional conservatism and embarked upon a rapid expansion program that turns out to have been overly aggressive and ambitious.”

“In 2005, Toyota recalled 2.38 million vehicles in the U.S. -- slightly more than the entire number of cars and trucks it sold that year.”

“In October of that year, America's Consumer Reports magazine lowered Toyota's rankings on its authoritative annual car-quality surveys. The magazine stopped its practice of automatically recommending all Toyota models because of quality declines on three models.”

For people who are married to the TPS, they may want to think about a trial separation.

posted @ Monday, January 05, 2009 9:53 PM | Feedback (2)