Within Windows

Limestone in the traditional sense is a type of sedimentary rock, consisting of layers and layers of “schtuff” mushed together. This is perhaps why the word was chosen for Microsoft’s Office internal scaffolding. The software, which actually leaked under the radar back in Office 14 beta days, appears to have been developed for the purpose of testing each and every layer of the Office suite – ranging from the basics like text formatting to the more complex Ribbon and Backstage UIs. Judging by the screenshots, it’ll never be a consumer facing application or magically integrate anything with everything. It’s simply a fun dev. tool.

(This particular build of Office 14 (14.0.4302.1000) doesn’t uninstall properly, therefore I used an older Windows Vista virtual machine I had lying around for screenshot purposes.)

While swimming around the registry, looking for hidden settings to disable the now permanently enabled sequential message grouping, I stumbled upon a hardware “blocklist” at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\UX\HwBlockList. After punching a few of the PCI-SIG registered DeviceId and VendorId pairs into a PCI database, it was clear this list was purely for blocking video cards.

But why?

A cursory analysis came up empty, so I took a different approach; I placed my ATI Radeon HD 5900’s hardware ID pair (vendor 1002, device 689C) into the registry location and restarted Windows Live Messenger. After firing it back up, it was immediately obvious what the list’s purpose was. All the UI elements were purely static and made no effort to wow me; all whizz-bang animation effects were disabled.

But why?

Resolving all the IDs in the list paints a damning picture. Dominating the list are NVIDIA’s GeForce FX-based cards, known for their god-awful DirectX 9 performance. (Remember the whole Valve and NVIDIA fight?) Intel also made the list with its equally horrible and buggy GMA 500 chipset but ATI was strangely missing from the list, due to lack of data no doubt.

Conclusion: Windows Live Messenger uses a list of known under-performing (read: crap) DirectX 9 video cards, to ensure a consistent and stable user experience. Case closed. If you have one of these cards, it’s really time to upgrade.

The list, as of August 19, 2010 (WLM Wave 4 Beta Build 15.4.3002.810), follows.

(Thanks to the anonymous tipster whom indicated that the below poll is “pretty darn accurate” in terms of what’s being discussed internally.)

Michael Pietroforte at 4sysops emailed me about a month ago, wanting to run a cross-technical-blog poll of sorts, garnering feedback to potentially help shape Windows 8. I agreed to participate, it sounded neat. I mean, it can’t hurt, right? Worst case, Microsoft simply ignores the whole thing.

Here’s how it works: Scroll down and follow the on-screen instructions. It’s pretty simple. At the conclusion of the poll, the results will be gathered from all the participating blogs – actually already done on the backend – and be published. If you have any questions regarding the definition of some poll items, don’t guess – simply refer to Michael’s post. (If Microsoft works on UAC, vice the bare-metal hypervisor, because of an errant vote… I will hurt you.)

Participating blogs: Demonic Talking Skull – markwilson.it – msigeek – Standalone Sysadmin – Teching It Easy: with Windows – The Experience Blog – The things that are better left unspoken – The Windows Club – WindowsPro – Within Windows (you are here) – 7tutorials – 4sysops