Indiscriminate Transgressions

I’m not sure why this is a completely under-the-radar release, but it improves Vista’s search in myriad ways.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940157

Microsoft’s $240 million investment in Facebook suddenly made more sense to me.

Facebook can’t monetize. Microsoft has a micropayment system (Microsoft Points) already in place. How many Xbox 360 Live users are on Facebook already? Switch on the micropayment system and all of those users have a micropayment wallet ready to spend.

The Zune users are also part of the Microsoft Points universe, but I don’t know how many of them there are. They both tie into the same system.

This could be huge, and I haven’t seen this discussed. Perhaps this is what this strategic investment is about? Or maybe I’m just full of myself.

I had to rebuild the OS on my laptop, so I started from scratch with Vista x64 Ultimate. All went well during the install, and updates were installed. No crashes, no problems.

When I started using the system, I noticed some differences from the other installs. I first noticed when adding the debugging symbols to Visual Studio. When I browse folder, this is what happens:

The User profile folder, which is my case is supposed to be my username, “kk” ( and is on my desktop), instead is empty. When I click on it, I get the error “The folder cannot be used.” If you look at the image, there’s an extra space in there, it’s like the folder name being retrieved by the system is null.

Visual studio recovers from this and I can browse for the folder. Apple’s iTunes, however, fails. I keep my music on an external hard drive, but when I click on “browse…” to point my music folder there, I get the same error as above, but iTunes becomes unusable after I clear the dialog. Which sucks because iTunes also base64 encodes their preferences xml files rather than just writing them out as UTF-16 encoded, but I won’t pick on Apple too much since I am a shareholder. Oh wait, yes I will, what the hell kind of boneheaded decision was that?

In Internet Explorer, you can relocate your folder for cache. Here is what comes up on a properly working system:

And here is what happens on my system:

Note the lack of the User Profile folder in this dialog. So IE wins on the “smartness” of dealing with this issue, but it’s still an issue. On a system where this works properly, you can also browse “up” in certain dialogs to the top, which brings you to that User Profile, I get the same error in that case as well.

Some things I’ve done to try to fix this:

• I tried searching through the Microsoft knowledge base, and I find many articles about “special folders” like Music and Pictures not having the correct icons, but nothing like this.
• I spend about an hour with procmon watching what kind of registry access is made on the system to see if it’s some kind of problem there. That was so painful — when you open a browse dialog there’s a massive flurry of activity and nothing jumps out as a problem.
• I’ve compared permissions, etc, on a working system with this system, identical.
• I decided to create a new account on the machine, all new accounts being created have exactly the same problem.

It’s weird how crippling this is, it’s minor issue but it comes up a lot and it makes it hard to browse for files in general. If anyone has experienced this problem, please share your findings.

After years of using “fat32format.exe” on Windows XP, which no longer works on Vista, whenever I have the need to format a large drive (>32GB) as FAT32 I have simply plugged it into my Mac in the office and formatted it there, since Windows doesn’t show an option for FAT32 format for drives over 32GB.

It turns out you can force a FAT32 format with the built in format command line utility. First, if the drive is already formatted with NTFS, give it a volume name. Or, go into disk manager and delete the partition and create a new simple partition, and do not format it. For this example I have a 120GB drive on E:, formatted as NTFS.

format /fs:fat32 /a:32k e:

This will prompt you if you want to proceed with the format, and if the partition is already formatted, it will ask you to type in the volume name to proceed. That’s it, all set. The /a:32k is the cluster size and /fs:fat32 sets the filesystem. For some reason you can’t combine these with the /Q (quick) flag, which would be nice.

You probably either need to have UAE off like I do 90% of the time, or run in an elevated command window.

System Restore uses a heck of a lot more storage than it used to, and there’s no way to set it from a dialog like there used to be. So, you have to use an elevated command prompt and do the following:

This shows you how much space system restore is using:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.593 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.807 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 11.178 GB

That’s on an 80GB drive, it’s a lot lot more if you have, say, a 300GB drive. In fact, it defaults to 15% of your disk, I believe. Anyhow, here’s how you change it:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=2GB
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association

And then you can check your work:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2 GB

For the size, you can use normal suffixes to set your size, (512MB, 2GB, 1.5GB etc.) If the Allocated Shadow Copy Size is larger than the new size you set Maxiumum, it will wipe out all System Restore information you have, so you’re vulnerable for a small time. It’s probably best to set a restore point immediately after this exercise.

Here’s one way to set a system restore point.

Two days ago I hooked up the HD-DVD player and watched The Big Lebowski in HD. It seemed somewhat silly to get this on HD-DVD, but a quick compare between this and the DVD version and I was sold. The level of detail is almost distracting, and this is on my Samsung 720p set.

Anyhow…

Yesterday I was waiting for a ride to the Poconos, and I decided to play a couple of games of Track and Field or something on Xbox Live. I fired up the ‘Box, and lo and behold:

I guess since the Beta was available for public consumption a few months ago, they’ve gone through Gamma and Delta versions and have now started playtesting the Epsilon version. They must be pretty close to gold at this point — the release date is what, the 25th of September? That gives you 6 weeks guys, the clock is ticking and you should be making DVDs already.

I’d imagine this is the final version, though maybe they’ll go to Lambda and get us all confused with Half-Life.