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

Fun one, the option to turn off hibernation via the GUI has been eliminated. I have a laptop with 4GB RAM and a 64GB SSD, so space is at somewhat of a premium. I never use hibernate (sleep works great) so I figure let’s disable it. You have to do this from the command line. Open a command line with administrator privs, and type:

powercfg -H off

Your hibernation file will immediately be freed and all hibernate options will disappear from power plans. Pretty obvious should be the way to turn that back on:

powercfg -H on

Here’s how to open a command line with administrator privs:

1. Click Start followed by All Programs and then Accessories
2. Oon the Accessories menu Right Click on the Command Prompt
3. From the drop down menu, Click on the Run Administrator option

Dell sells this card and it’s supposed to have GPS in it. Only, it doesn’t seem to. The help in the Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility tells you how to use the GPS option in the tools menu, and/or the GPS Status button in the card manager. So here’s the card manager:

I don’t see me no GPS Status button. I contacted Dell tech support a few times over the last few months, and they eventually refer me to Sprint, which is ludicrous since Sprint a> sucks, b> doesn’t have customer support to speak of c> doesn’t support this card. I tried once.

So lo and behold on my final chat session with tech support tonight, the one where I’m planning on getting mad and demanding 40% of my purchase price refunded for false advertising, the man in India types these magic words: “The Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility (DMBCU) determines the presence of GPS software when the software is installed.” Aha. Aha!! Registry.

So I fire up the process monitor. I run the DMBCU and capture events. I search for GPS and I find on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Novatel Wireless\NextGenCommon a key called GPSHWStatus:

…and it’s set to 0 or not there…

I’m running Vista x64 - this key would be different on 32 bit windows machines, should be the same but without the Wow6432Node\ part. So, on to registry editor:

Indeed, it is there and set to 0. So ah sets it to 1:

And the next time I run the DMBCU, it installs a driver(!) for … the GPS!

and would ya lookie here:

It seems to work. I’m inside and I haven’t checked it out yet, but when I hit that button it finds the GPS on COM6 and starts to search for satellites.

I did all this while the Dell tech support guy was connected to my machine remotely. He tried to pull down the Tools menu to look for the GPS entry, moused over all icons in my tray, and then told me I would have to contact Sprint. [sarcasm]I’m SO glad I allowed the remote connection.[/sarcasm] When I got angry about that, he spent 3 minutes looking up information and then mentioned the bit about the install. I did the rest and then near the end when I said “Did you see that? It installed a driver!” he says to me “Great. Glad we could fix your trouble.” Uh huh.

I hope this helps someone. I have seen many posts on the Dell Community forums about this with no solution.

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.

Here’s a program with the confusing name of VistaStartMenu. Thing is, it’s a great replacement for the existing Vista start menu.

From the developer page:

Now imagine that someone secretly came in and rearranged your your things into random places. Your player is on the sofa today, tomorrow it is in the refrigerator and the next day you find it in your car. Such a situation could easily lead to a nervous breakdown!

Now, let’s get back to discussing computer programs. Imagine a software developer who decided to make the buttons in his program randomly change their positions from time to time. This example seems absurd because obviously it is impossible to use such a program. If you think that there are no such programs in real life, you will be disappointed. You use one of these programs every day.

This program is called the “Start” menu.

Try it, you may like it.

I bought a Dell XPS M1330 with a 64GB Samsung SSD in it, as well as some other goodies like Wireless USB and and LED backlight. I wiped most of the drive and installed Vista Ultimate x64.

I feel like I went into the future a few years, mainly because of the SSD. Holy WOW is that shit fast.

Booting is fast. Running Word or Excel results in teh applicaiton almost instantly appearing on the screen. Visual Studio 2005, which normally takes about a day and a half to install was finished in 15 minutes. And on and on. And the silence is eerie.

More soon, but holy wowsers I’m in love.