Two days ago, I provided a small snippet of code that redirected users to a deep-within-Microsoft page that allowed users to pull semi-public hotfixes. Well, it was ugly, error prone, didn’t bring in revenue, and worst — wasn’t easy to link to by the media.

Say hello to Hotfixr with GETr technology!

All you do is fire up the page and type in the knowledge base article number for an issue that claims to have a hotfix available if you jump through product support hoops (phone call).

I tested the page a few minutes ago with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and – surprise surprise – Google’s Adsense ads wreak havoc on the rendering (randomly too). You’d think Google engineers would at least stay on top of Internet Explorer releases to ensure their ads work, regardless of browser… I’d switch to “the other ads” but there’s a manual approval process in place I have to get through first.

Your server crashed. After hours and hours of grueling crash dump analysis, you determine a problem with a Microsoft component. You search online and release a huge sigh of relief after discovering your problem is documented in the Microsoft Support knowledge base and a hotfix is available… but wait.

To obtain this feature immediately, contact Microsoft Customer Support Services

NOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo.

In the past, you could use a snazzy form to request hotfixes, but Microsoft has conveniently buried it in the knowledge base. Thankfully, you can use the brand new Snazzlicious Hotfix Fetchr (beta) below Hotfixr!

Update 08/28/08 1:44am EST: Hotfixr launched!

In January, Long Zheng and I had a field day picking out the crazy Windows Vista shots and product placements in The Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles. Today, while viewing the 1080p trailer for the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, I couldn’t help but notice the use of some familiar looking Microsoft applications.

On the right, you can immediately recognize Office 2007’s Ribbon UI in multiple instances of what looks like Microsoft Word 2007. On the left, you can recognize the Windows Vista wallpaper (zoomed in, not set to fit the screen) with a My Computer icon on the desktop. The existence of a window title and menus hints at some kind of virtualization product, but the foreground window has me confused.

The Explorer-esque window in the foreground lacks a search input box (the address bar runs to the edge of the window), and a Windows Vista Beta 1-themed Details Pane is placed at the bottom. The blue Details Pane at the bottom hints at the fact this is a My Computer window.

I spoke to Chris Holmes, who has the uncanny ability to memorize things like the color of an icon in alpha builds of Windows, and he agreed this is likely just some conceptual collage put together to make Windows Vista look cool. Or maybe it’s an early build of Windows Mojave?

After reading an excellent article written by The How-To Geek debunking some popular tweaking myths, I too became motivated to seek out and debunk a few myths myself. This is the first of many to come, I’m sure.

The myth goes like this:

Microsoft Windows [insert SKU here] only recognizes one processor core, on multi-core platforms, during boot leading to out-of-the-box slow boot times. With a simple tweak, using the msconfig utility bundled with the operating system, you can increase your boot time!

It seems this myth originated from a post Chris Pirillo made in 2007 on his personal blog, commenting on a reader’s video submission, no surprise there. Pirillo’s lack of real technical experience, combined with the power of suggestion (placebo effect), resulted in the myth appearing on his blog, enabling it to proliferate and remain on the intertubes, to this day.

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that setting this value to equate to the number of processors (incl. cores), regardless of operating system, will result in absolutely no change in boot time. Enabling this option adds a NUMPROC=[value] entry in your boot loader’s configuration (whether it be boot.ini or bcd-based) that sets the maximum number of processors Microsoft Windows will use.  I quote from “Available switch options for the Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 Boot.ini files” (KB833721):

This switch sets the number of processors that Windows will run at startup. With this switch, you can force a multiprocessor system to use only the quantity of processors (number) that you specify. This switch can help you troubleshoot performance problems and defective CPUs.

For a short time during boot, it is true that only one logical processor is being used… but in this short period, systems like the clock and power management are being spun up – a task that doesn’t necessitate more than one processor. For details, I suggest you grab a copy of Windows Internals (currently in its fourth revision). Here’s a relevant snippet from Chapter 5: Startup and Shutdown (page 267):

When control returns to the KiInitializeKernel function on each processor, control proceeds to the Idle loop, which then causes the system thread created in step 4 of the previous process description to begin executing phase 1. (Secondary processors wait to begin their initialization until step 5 of phase 1, described in the following list.) Phase 1 consists of the following steps. The boot splash screen of Windows 2000 systems includes a progress bar, and the steps at which the progress bar on the screen is updated are included in this list:

1. HalInitSystem is called to prepare the system to accept interrupts from devices and to enable interrupts.

2. The boot video driver (\Windows\System32\Bootvid.dll) is called, which in turn displays the Windows startup screen. (On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 systems, the driver presents the same graphic that Ntldr placed on the screen earlier in the boot.)

3. The power manager’s initialization is called.

4. The system time is initialized (by calling HalQueryRealTimeClock) and then stored as the time the system booted.

5. On a multiprocessor system, the remaining processors are initialized and execution starts.

Die evil myth. Die.

Seven days before the opening ceremony, I threw a fit about the non-availability of a 64-bit plugin to watch the 2008 Olympic events from NBC via Windows Media Center. Thankfully, the TVTonic team, responsible for the software, woke up and finally made the 64-bit client available for mass consumption. Now if Microsoft would follow suit with its Windows Live products…

Yesterday, I stumbled onto Betanews and discovered a freeware application hiding in the enormous list of shareware junk. What caught my eye was the phrase “Orca-replacement”. Readers, this is Pantaray Research Ltd.’s SuperOrca. Honey, these are my readers. Where are they? Oh, they’re imaginary. Play along.

One of the most irritating tasks to perform with Microsoft’s Orca tool, as everyone knows, is the extraction of a file from the Binary table. With Orca, you’re forced to double-click [Binary Data], which brings up a painfully un-intuitive Edit Binary Stream dialog. From this dialog, you then select Write binary to filename, click Browse, specify a location to save to, and finally click the myriad of Ok buttons. With SuperOrca, however, you simply right-click {Binary Data}, click Write binary to file, and specify a location to save to. Thank. God.

Microsoft Orca makes saving binary files a click-happy nightmare.

SuperOrca saves the day (and your fingers) with a simpler method of saving binary files.

Other nice features you won’t find in Microsoft’s Orca tool include cross-table keyword searching, MSI comparison, dialog previewing, and other advanced schema editing/validation tools. Now, I did mention it was almost perfect… Unfortunately, SuperOrca does not have any Transform generation tools, that I could find. When I’m not ripping files out for reverse engineering, I’m usually gluing them back in, generating Transforms as a kind of poor man’s patch.

Because of the gap in coverage, I’m forced to keep the Orca tool around. I emailed the gang to see if they could slip that functionality into their next version, if they’re still working on it. I promised them bacon chocolate-chip cookies in return.

Brandon LeBlanc made some interesting noises today regarding the availability of some fancy TVTonic-based plugin for Windows Vista Media Center users. Today was actually the first time I started Media Center on my Windows Vista Ultimate (x64) machine. Woo hoo! After clumsily moving about in the menu, I found the NBC Olympics tile and launched it.

Looks neat. After a few more clicks, I got the installer fired up.

It was then that I was greeted with The Error Message from 64-bit Hell that always manages to squeeze a “this is fuckin’ bullshit” out of the purest of souls, like myself. Cough.

Reading the forums, it appears 64-bit support was planned for TVTonic version 3.3 in Q4 of 2007then Q2 of 2008 then an undisclosed period, known only as the time of the "next release” (since 3.3 already came out). According to a TVTonic Team member, they have ”been attempting to tackle this for a couple versions” but “somehow keep running out of time and have to drop it”.

Sigh. The Olympics are in seven days guys. Come on.

Sidebar: Yes, it really isn’t compatible. They use a custom 32-bit component that can’t be loaded by the 64-bit Media Center process. There’s no workaround to this. Really.

As Engadget gobbled up, a response was generated by the Director of Marketing in HP’s Connected Entertainment group himself and shot over to a few of us. The relevant parts have been provided below.

The McAfee Total Protection Service must index all of the files stored on the Server in order to provide the protection against a virus attack. The PacketVideo PVConnect will, upon installation, create a database of all the media files such as photos, music and videos on the Server. When these two services are installed together, the combined ‘first run’ indexing by McAfee and database creation by PacketVideo, can use the majority of the resources on the Server. This may result in slow response times from the Server until those activities have been completed. If the user has also installed other add-ins or software packages on the Server there may be an additional lag in response time. It has also been reported that the Windows Home Server Console can become unresponsive during this time.

As a result, we recommend that users install each update one at a time, independently. Users should first install Windows Home Server Power Pack 1, then PVConnect followed by McAfee.

While I appreciate the response, I’m not sure this is an acceptable solution (for me). Waiting for these add-ons to finish, while my server is unresponsive, just isn’t going to work. I think I’ll just modify the add-ons to work in my favor…

A week ago, Paul Thurrott and I were chatting about the installation of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1, HP’s add-ons, and how he was having major issues with performance. Admittedly, I wrote it off as PE (Paul error) and went forward with the upgrade. Testing at every increment, everything seemed okay… until I installed the add-ons.

HP’s update (to be applied to PP1) comes with two additional add-ons:

1. McAfee’s Total Protection Service (anti-virus/anti-malware)
2. PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server (media sharing)

Let’s take a look at their minimum system requirements for each add-on.

McAfee’s Total Protection Service minimum system reqs. (snipped):

Intel® Pentium® processor or compatible
64MB RAM (512MB recommended for servers)

PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server minimum system reqs. (snipped):

Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or compatible (1.6ghz+)
512MB RAM

Oh, I’m good, right? Sure, ignoring the fact that the server, after a reboot and at rest, has only about 200MB of physical memory available. Installing the add-ons, turning a blind eye, resulted in several “side effects”. Damnit, I hate when Paul is right.

1. Disk performance plummeted. As a result of the Twonky Server’s (PVConnect) media indexing task, that conveniently runs after installation, compounded by McAfee’s on-access malware protection (per disk-read basis), the disks in the server were being thrashed non-stop. This brought the performance of the entire server down to a crawl. The Slowskys would be proud.
   

   Obligatory Process Monitor screen-shot showing TwonkyMediaServer.exe reading all the media on my server

2. Slow Console. By slow, I mean excruciatingly slow. Starting the Console, defined as the summary screen appears on-screen, takes an average of 1 minute, but isn’t functional for another minute+.
   

   Console's appearance while loading. You will have to get used to this.

3. Unstable Console. If you wait long enough for the Console to load, you’ll notice attempting to use the newly installed add-ons is a frustrating experience. This is because the Console, for no obvious reason, will sometimes completely disappear (crash) when clicking the add-on tabs. When using the client software to access the Console, you’ll receive a similar symptom of a nice white screen.

As I have anti-malware/anti-virus software on my client machines and have no device capable of receiving media (yet), I had no real need for these add-ons. To remove them, without using the Console which requires you restart it after each add-on uninstallation, I RDP’ed into the server and executed the following commands:

• msiexec -x d:\shares\software\add-ins\TopWHSaddin.msi
• msiexec -x d:\shares\software\add-ins\TwonkyMediaServer2.msi
• shutdown /r

If you would rather keep both add-ons installed, I strongly recommend you a) install them at night and let them dice up your disks while you sleep and pray it completes by the morning (mine didn’t after two days), b) install more RAM, and c) tweak your pagefile configuration afterwards.

A month ago, Windows Live Messenger began blocking legitimate URLs from being transmitted to other users. As pointed out by Dharmesh Mehta, Windows Live Messenger product management lead, this process is actually handled outside of Microsoft, by a 3rd party (whom remains a mystery).

Today, I tried pasting an error message to a colleague of mine, Chris Holmes. No luck. The chat text would appear as if it was transmitted but no feedback was given in the UI. Poof. It was gone. Never touched the intertubes.

After a simple process of elimination, it was determined that having the string setup.exe anywhere within your message triggers the deletion behavior.

I am neither amused or surprised. I am, however, waiting for a reply to my inquiry regarding this issue. Psst Microsoft, this may help.