Yep that’s Windows 7 alright ! As you can see the new taskbar is in place and also has complete transparency. Also the taskbar in the bottom right color has some subtle improvement and looks to be for the better. Looks like Microsoft is on the right track, so stay tuned for more.

So there’s nothing to show at this point but what we do know is…
The build is 6.1.6519.
The GUI is very much like Vista. I don’t know if once the right video card driver is in place whether there will be flashy stuffs to surprise me. The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot.
Gadgets are now integrated into explorer. You can right click on desktop and select “Add Gadget” or “Hide Gadget”. There is a new gadget called “Windows Media Center” that displays now playing information from the WMC. On the same menu, “Display” is added above “Personalization” which gives you direct access to display DPI settings. The page is much more polished than the one in Vista.
The start menu features a pin besides each item. Clicking on it toggles pinning/unpinning the item. Search in explorer is now states where you search within (usually being within the folder, as in Vista). You can now, however, adjust the size of the search box.
XAML fonts, called the “Composite Fonts” are now added to the font folder. Perhaps WPF will be much more prominent in this release. It’s disappointing that I don’t have Aero running, or otherwise there might be some interesting stuffs to see.
A new application is added, dubbed the “XPS Viewer”, no surprises, either.
Then finally, something interesting came up: the feedback tool. The feedback tool lists the “pillars” of Win 7. Highlight’s include ”network aware”, with improved connection tools and detections. It will have the ability to detect which network you’re in and switch your settings and devices accordingly; With Live account, you can carry your IE settings and favorites with you; Gadget data caching; New Calculator, Paint, and Wordpad using WPF; install to desktop in 10 minutes with only 1 reboot; instant streaming; better battery mileage, etc. All descriptions are scenario-based, so what will actually turn up is still yet to know.
Oh.. how could I miss this. A new boot screen does show up, finally!!!!! A full screen Vista-logon screen like boot screen with a beam scrolling across the whole screen near the bottom. Looks nice but reminds me of Win9x (well since XP we’ve been in the “dark”, so surprised to see such a bright boot screen)!
More than likely with this information getting out…someone in the OEM/Partners sector is going to drop the ball.

Thanks Long Zheng from for the post

A recent study by ZDnet UK showed that in 2007 alone, Windows Vista and XP had a combined 23 vulnerabilities reported throughout the year. However Mac OSX had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities reported. This means that in any given month alone, OSX has five times more vulnerabilities per month than both the Windows versions combined.

I can only imagine what apple is thinking about this now. But this only makes Windows Vista and XP shine even more in light of the recent backlash that Vista has been weathering for the last year since it RTMed.

Two Days ago Chris and I finished up some testing scenarios on luafv. LUA File Virtualization Driver is responsible for virtualizing file and registry writes in Vista when UAC is ENABLED. However the effects to the system can be horrible whenever UAC is disabled. When UAC is disabled, this process can not function properly and when booting up directly affects the boot process. Whenever UAC was enabled, boot times seemed to improve; understandable because the driver is able to load without any problem. Disabling UAC suddenly caused the boot up time to pick up 20-30 seconds on average. After going into the registry Chris and I found a key which corrisponded to the driver loading at start up.

Located at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LUAFV
REG_DWORD “Startup” – The default is 2 but setting it to 4 disables it completely.

As you can see from the previous post, this has cut down boot times significantly in some cases. The suprising thing is this is across Vista RTM and the current beta build of Vista SP1 (6001.17042). Microsoft should patch this so that as someone disables UAC it also disables this driver from loading so that the user does not take a performance hit for disabling UAC.

Once again, I thank chris for allowing me to work with him on this and i am thankful we stumbled upon this issue so that it can be addressed to microsoft for a fix.

~BlueScreenOfDeath

Today Chris Holmes approached me with some testing he was doing with UAC and a particular driver known as ‘luafv’. This driver luafv.sys is in the windows system 32 directory and loads whenever UAC is enabled. The truth is the vast majority of power users like myself and Chris do not care much for UAC which seems like a forced sandbox that we must reside in to protect ourselves from ourselves. After doing some testing with 3 secenario we found that the driver actually doesn’t stop trying to load even when UAC is disabled.

Take a look at the results:

My Desktop

UAC Enabled – 1 min 30 sec.
UAC Disabled w/ tweak – 1 min 12 sec.

System configuration: 2.4 Ghz Dual Core AMD Opteron 165 , 4 GB DDR500 , Geforce 8500GT, Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 RC1

Laptop -

UAC Enabled: 2 minutes 25 sec.
UAC Disabled w/ tweak: 1 minute 45 sec.

System Configuration: 1.6 Ghz Pentium Dual Core, 1 GB DDR2 533 , Intel Mobile Graphics 950. Windows Vista Home Premium RTM

Chris123NT’s Test:

UAC Enabled: 1 minute 38 sec.
UAC Disabled w/ Tweak: 1 min 04 sec.

System Configuration: XPS M1710, 2 GHZ Core2 T7200, 2 GB DDR2, 7950GTX

We want to put emphasis on the boot up times because this is a serious issue. A driver controling a microsoft feature, UAC, causes a latency issue. The driver is waiting to start but the feature is disabled and therefore is waiting the whole time which effect’s the boot time when this is not disabled in the registry. After applying this tweak in the registry we saw an average 75% better boot time. Something is seriously wrong with UAC! A big thanks to Chris for taking the time to figure this out and for allowing me to be apart of this testing scenario.

~BlueScreenOfDeath

As most of you know I was a big advocate of Windows Vista. I was very active within the beta and i even colaborated with others within my circle of people to make sure important bugs got bumped up and recognized. It has now been a year since Windows Vista has been released. I have since updated my 7300GS to a 8500GT so i could get some better gaming performance out of my rig. Which is a tried and true Dual Core Opteron 165 @ 2.4Ghz. Because i have 4 gigs of DDR500 in my system the only real option i had was x64. Since converting to Vista Ultimate x64 and outfitting my rig with an X-Fi Fatality card and this new graphics card i have had nothing but problems. Heres what i have run into but not limited to:

- X-Fi nortorious Snap-Crackle-Pop
- User profile magically corrupts itself.
- Start menu Program list magically disappears.
- Graphics Properties shows an astonishing 512 MB plus an additional 1.5GB of my system ram being stolen by DirectX10.
(sidenote: I did a big professional right up about this to MS to which it got ignored)
- Applications load significantly slower under Vista
- Sidebar apps disappear.
- Suprise Suprise i cant share my printer on the network..infact Vista refuses to share it on the network.
- UAC nags the living daylights out me.. why do i need make sure i wanna delete a file two times?
- Networked Printer is practically unaccessable to any other machine on the net..and its because its connected to a vista machine
- Sharing a drive has never been so agonizing in my entire life..what happened to right click > share.
- Pagefile useage in Vista x64 – 2.2GB Pagefile useage in XP Pro x64 – 232 mb
- Since when did 4 gigs become not enough for an OS? …seriously..you cache my 2.9 GB of my memory thats leftfor what…Prefetch?!… no video steals it…
- Wife’s laptop refuses to shutdown…she hates Office 2007 and Vista. Needless to say..she’ll be getting a Mac next time.

On an end note , with all my trials i am just waiting for Vista to break itself one more time or waiting for the SCP issue with the Xfi to come back so it gives me a reason to wipe this machine and put Xp Professional x64 on it. I haven’t submitted but a few bugs for SP1 and they got closed so why bother reporting them if MS themselves don’t care to even acknowledge they exist. Oh and don’t think the corporate world is going to welcome vista warmly…You had it right with XP and 2003… improve on it not completely build a os on beta code. The only reason why i dont switch right now is cause A: i cant afford it, and B: XP and 2003 do what i want it to do…maybe i’ll do like the rest and throw the towel in on Vista. It’s pretty sad when some of your own people Microsoft don’t even understand vista anymore. You have lost base with your customers, your testers, and the community all together…

~BlueScreenOfDeath

Oh and for the record..im writing this in Windows XP Professional SP2 x64 …in VMware.