On October 22nd, the main version of Windows 7 to be sold, in the various EU-participating countries, will be Windows 7 “E”. What is this you ask? Windows 7 “E” is merely Windows 7 sans Internet Explorer, the EU’s OS of choice. Consumers will quickly discover, however, it’s a huge pain in the ass to download a browser of their choice… without a browser.

Mom and Dad will likely get a pre-built machine, by either a popular manufacturer or their kids, so this isn’t a problem for them. Us, on the other hand, are incredibly lazy. We won’t want to bend down and grab one of a million USB fobs. Or put yet another executable on our NAS. Or heaven forbid, waste a CD. We need something clever. This is one such clever.

Step 1 – Launch (and configure) Windows Media Player

Throughout the OS, you’ll find references to Windows Media Player. Click one of them. You’ll be welcomed by a wizard that takes a good five minutes to go through, if you don’t choose the Recommended option.

Step 2 – Search for your browser, using the Windows Media Guide

If it isn’t already on your screen, open the Windows Media Guide. You can do this by clicking the very large Media Guide button in the lower-left corner of Windows Media Player. In the upper-right corner of the Guide, type your browser of choice into the Search box. Purely for example purposes, cough, I typed “Firefox”.

Step 3 – Click an ad, download your browser

Upon completion of your search, you’ll be presented with some advertising. We’ll use this to our advantage to hop outside the cage we’re in. Pick an ad, click it. If it doesn’t take you to the manufacturers site in less than a few clicks, go back and pick a different ad. Eventually you’ll end up at the desired location with the binaries you need trickling down to your desktop.

For those that wish to download Internet Explorer, you can simply type the keyword IE8 or Opera. I’m serious.

Figure 1, 2 -- Windows Media Player being used to search for and download Mozilla Firefox

In an unsurprising better-late-than-never manner, Microsoft has announced (on the Windows Team Blog) a new coding contest titled Code⁷. The rules are pretty simple: Write a native Windows application (sorry Adobe Air people) that utilizes a new feature or five in Windows 7. Prizes include travel to LA, entrance to the PDC 2009 conference, and/or a heap of cash.

Click Code⁷ for more details.

Known only by its codename at the moment, Microsoft Office “Outspace” (MOO?) is one of the more noticeable changes to the new Office suite. Upon clicking of the Office button, you’re whisked away into a fancy task-oriented view that lets you manage your open document, presentation, or spreadsheet at a much higher level. (More details pending technical beta release.)

Figures 1 and 2 -- Microsoft Office “Outspace” turned on and off (Microsoft Word)

For those of us that hate change, fear not. You can revert back to the old way of doing things with a quick registry tweak. Simply navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Toolbars (creating that key if it doesn’t already exist) and create a DWORD named UseOutspace. Give it a value of 0 or 1 (representing disabled or enabled, respectively) and you’re done. You’ll notice with Outspace off, a piece of the original Office button shows up. This is a bug that’ll be cleaned up as the product matures.

For those that spending countless hours maintaining what you think is the ultimate Windows-related website, blog, or forum: Submit your site to the Best Windows Website Contest running at The Windows Club. If you’re picked for one of the top five slots, you could win anything from an I’m a PC shirt to a serious collection of Windows 7 and Office software!

Your scrutinizing peers include myself and these other old farts:

Ed Bott, MVP, EdBott.com
Paul Schottland, Product Unit Manager for Microsoft
Steve Sinchak, MVP, Tweaks.com
Lowell Heddings, HowToGeek.com
Howard Lo, Microsoft’s Regional Team Manager (APAC)
Emil Protalinski, Ars Technica – One Microsoft Way
Corrine Chorney, MVP, Security Garden and The Windows Club Moderator
James Fisher, MVP, Windows Talk and The Windows Club Moderator
Anand Khanse, MVP, The Windows Club Administrator.

You have nothing to lose by submitting, so don’t be a lazy bum.

In March, I announced that my unsigned theme patch-less vision was being realized. Today, I’m happy to let everyone know beta bits of UxStyle Core are now available for public testing!

UxStyle Core does not currently have a theme manager or even a UI. UxStyle Core is exactly what it sounds like – the absolutely bare minimum (core) needed to enable third-party theme usage. Nothing more, nothing less. Later in the beta, we’ll push out a “bundle”, containing both the core software and a theme manager developed by our close partners.

Install UxStyle Core. Download some themes. Give them a whirl, everything should “just work”. Let us know how it went, bad or good, in the forums.

Thank God, no more patching.

Back in March, I wrote about a sick-joke of a limitation in Windows 7 Starter edition preventing users from changing the wallpaper. The limitation was imposed by the use of a technical licensing policy named ChangeDesktopBackground-Enabled and re-enforced by a SHA-256 hash of the static image, to prevent img0.jpg hot-swapping.

Given Windows 7 Starter’s applicability to the rising netbook market, it was presumed that Starter would branded by OEMs and/or mobile carriers (like Verizon) like any other Windows SKU. This is no longer a valid presumption.

Here’s the official scoop, from Microsoft:

In Windows Starter Edition, OEMs must not modify or replace the Windows-provided background for Windows Welcome, the logon screen, or the desktop.

Yikes.

Digging through the recent leaked builds, I have also confirmed that Microsoft has modified the SHA-256 hash, indicating a new (and now permanent) Starter wallpaper is now in place. Due to the low quality of the recent leaks, however, I can’t show you what it looks like. My guess? The new humongous Windows logo wallpaper, shrunk down of course.

(Thankfully, UxStyle, to be pushed out as a public beta this weekend (hopefully), will feature the ability to bypass this wallpaper restriction.)

Super-nerd Corner: The new hash is 08601919CA548F77C5B0ECB49E9B610AF188CA8227CF0F2DA5D99473D80090DC

Back in March, I wrote about how you could easily customize the background of a Windows 7 logon screen. One problem you may have run into is that lighter wallpapers affect button and text readability. To overcome this issue, Microsoft added the ability to change the active “button set” to a couple of alternatives.

 
Comparison of Windows 7 Logon UI “Button Sets” (from left to right: default, set one, set two)

To change your button set, simply jump to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI and add a DWORD value named ButtonSet. The supported integer values range from 0 to 2, with each value defined below.

• 0 – Lighter text shadows, darker (more opaque) buttons (Windows default)
• 1 – Darker text shadows, lighter (more translucent) buttons (for lighter backgrounds)
• 2 – No text shadows, opaque buttons (for darker backgrounds)

I was reading Mark Russinovich’s latest UAC article and Long Zheng’s latest scribblings and… developed quite the headache. Honestly, I’m tired of trying to sort out what UAC really is and don’t care anymore. UAC has become this gigantic undocumented blob of an idea that is explained (differently) on-demand every single time, to fit some marketing agenda du jour, and I’m sick of it. Mark jumps up and down about how UAC isn’t a security boundary and how we’re stupid for thinking such, yet Microsoft’s own sites pitch otherwise. Whatever, guys.

Here’s my million dollar question: If UAC wasn’t designed to ultimately protect us from anything, why does its icon resemble a damn shield?

Third to be touched upon is Microsoft Blackboard, a pseudo-physics game (reminiscent of The Incredible Machine and featuring graphics gaspingly similar to Crayon Physics) in which you use gestures to rotate and resize various objects to get balloons to explode from a light bulb’s hot touch. Like Rebound this game was developed by our friends at Fuel Games. As a huge bonus to those that can’t pass the first level, I’ve included the solve below.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Digging through the technical innards of the Touch Pack games is a rather tedious and fruitless process… but for blog post series completion purposes, Blackboard is yet another Win32 application tying into the usual DirectX and PhysX APIs, requiring shader support for high fidelity, etc. What’s new here, however, is mention of a level editor. Lets hope a) it materializes and b) is as easy to use as Tinker’s editor was.

Next in the list of toys that Microsoft revealed in the new Touch Pack for Windows 7 is Rebound. Rebound, developed by Fuel Games (the peeps that brought us Tinker), is a simple pong-like game with additions such as electricity, spinning projectiles, futuristic sounds, and clumsy AI; the perfect time vampire, if you exclude Sony’s line of products. Gameplay consists of a player (or two) placing their fingers on a set of orbs to create an arc of energy, to act as a paddle. The arc’s strength and ball stopping ability is dependent on the distance between the player’s orbs. That’s the simple rundown, obligatory game-play video below. My thanks to Paul Thurrott for being patient with me.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Judging by the score and timer counters, this was initially designed for Microsoft Surface.

On the technical side, Rebound is a native Win32 application, tying into the DirectX 9, DirectX10 and PhysX APIs. The latter is interesting because you may get a little physics processing boost if you’re using a fairly recent NVIDIA GPU (Geforce 8 or higher) or if you shelled out for and installed an AGEIA PhysX Accelerator. (If you have a PhysX card lying around collecting dust, send it to me!) With regards to shaders, things are a bit gray. It’s not clear which shader model the game requires but my guess is 2. Shader model 1 is for wimps and 3 is a bit bleeding, compared to today’s typical mass-produced consumer PC. Simply put, if your machine can’t do Aero proper (with transparency), you will have issues playing Rebound. You may be able to speed things up by throwing more memory at it with DOS/4GW, however.