• [ Kill the Process, Use Killbox if your Access Denied ]

[In Windows Vista Run As Administrator, After Execution System Will Restart]

• %Windows\System32\XP-C6A2E412.exe
  [ No Exact Information about Files, search above related files in Program files Folder ]
  If you have any of these files in running process from task manger, end the process before removal.
  Note: if task manager is disabled, Download the following file, Click to Download - Enable Registry.reg [ Right Click - Save Target As/Linked Content As ]
  Open it with Regedit.exe [%system32\regedit.exe], then it Confirms Add to registry Yes or No, Confirm Yes, then click Ok.

I had to really respond to this joke of an article by PC Magazine affiliate website AppScout which discusses the 'smooth' upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard compared to Windows upgrades and Windows 7. A lot of misleading paragraphs:

I've just upgraded a heavily customized OS X system from OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and I'm amazed at how smoothly the upgrade went. I've never seen an OS version upgrade that so completely respected the customizations I had already made to my system, and I've never seen an upgrade that produced so few glitches. I'll get to the details in a moment, but first a word about my experience with Windows upgrades.

If you've ever tried to upgrade your Windows system to a new version of Windows, you probably don't want to repeat the experience. Applications break, your system doesn't behave the way you want it to, and you'll probably spend a day or two sorting out problems before your upgrade system works as smoothly as it did before the upgrade. The good news is that Windows 7 seems to provide a relatively smooth upgrade path from Vista, but I still had to waste time customizing my Windows 7 desktop to get back the settings that I had carefully worked out in Vista.

Read the entire article here

I could not get to post my comment there, so I decided to respond with a blog post here.

You are misleading readers with this article. The minute you started bashing Windows upgrades, I immediately knew where this story was heading. You talk about Windows not preserving your customizations? What kinda customizations could you seriously be talking about? I have done an upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit RC and I never experienced any problems at all, everything migrated smoothly. I have been running this installation of Windows Vista since December 2006. It preserved my desktop background, my Gadgets (Notes were migrated to the new more powerful sticky notes app), all my Start menu items remained in their place.
Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/cdzhfs

You talk about the upgrade being a smooth one, yet you still had to do a fair amount of tweaking before and after upgrading. So, you are telling a lie already that its a smooth upgrade, applications were broken, you had to reset and reinstall some things. The only thing not working in my Windows 7 64 bit upgrade is Apple Bonjour (and I am not surprised) and VMWare Workstation 6.1 (it works but the VMWare tools are buggy, I plan on replacing it with the free Windows Virtual PC anyway). I can get an update for the VMWare for free which enables compatibility, but the updates are too large and annoying - I don't get this with the free Virtual PC XP Mode.
Learn more here http://tinyurl.com/mdejy4

Considering that Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade to 'Leopard', why are you even surprised by the smooth upgrade? Its just a Service Release that fixes many of the problems that 10.5 users have experienced since October 2007. The 7 GBs of space you get back is no surprise, they made the installer more intelligent, this is something Leopard users could do themselves by not selecting certain languages and printers during setup. Also, Snow Leopard is Intel only, so some of the universal binary PowerPC code has been removed reducing application size significantly for many of OS X's built in applications.

To end this, not everyone agrees with your views about a smooth upgrade, it varies.   Rafe Needleman of CNET, concludes: "Regretful upgrade: Snow Leopard incompatibilities" http://tinyurl.com/n4zgm8

Please stop writing articles you believe Steve Jobs will stumble upon surfing at home drinking mint tea.

 Updated: September 2nd, 2009 - 6:31 PM - Thanks for the correction Corrine!

CJ Saretto, Senior Program Manager provides an overview of Power Pack 3 features including how it will improve the Windows Home Server experience with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center. Fan Zhang, Development Lead on the Windows Home Server team in China also gave his input on several new features including Backup Warning Suppression, and Windows Search 4. (Keep in mind that Windows 7 is compatible with the current version of Windows Home Server, but Power Pack 3 will offer additional enhancements).

It has been just over 1 month since the Power Pack 3 BETA was made available to the public and we have seen great participation. We have received helpful user feedback and the work toward a final release in the end of October is looking good.

The video is posted here.

If you are still interested in trying out the Power Pack 3 BETA and becoming a participant, you can sign up on Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer.

-Nicole

Purchase Network Administrator 2.9 for only $99 per administrator (50% off since you are a reader of my blog), and when it is released you will receive 3.0 Free.
Just follow this special link

We have been hard at work building a new version of Network Administrator, and have been taking many suggestions from you.

Here is a screen shot of the main form:

The first thing we did was make the actions multi-threaded. Currently the system only works on one machine at a time.

Silly as this sounds, it was due to a limitation in the Remote Registry service with threads – We found a way around this problem.

It means you can reboot all of those computers in record time.

Plugins, Plugins, and Plugins. It seems kind of crazy that we did not do this earlier, but the current version of Network Administrator does not have any plugin system. It makes it difficult to add new actions. In our redesign we have added a fantastic plugin system:

Best of all, when you purchase a license, new plugins will be automatically downloaded to you for maximum plugin goodness

What else will you see in the new version? It depends – on you. What plugins would you like to see in 3.0? We will take the top 10 ideas and put them in the final version. Send your ideas to plugins@intelliadmin.com

If you purchase Network Administrator 2.9 today, you will get 3.0 for free. In addition, since you are a valued reader of my blog – you can get it for half price!

Just follow this link

Want to part of the 3.0 beta program? Then Sign up here – We will release our first public beta in about two weeks.

Previous post: Widget Anatomy – The Manifest

This is part two of my “Widget Anatomy” series which will explain the ins and outs of the Widget Framework that is shipping as part of Windows Mobile 6.5.  In this Article we will discuss the major challenges of creating a great user experience that not only looks great, but it integrates nicely with the phone and it’s snappy and fun to use.

The dark side of choice… dealing with screen DPIness

One of the coolest things about the Windows Mobile®  ecosystem is that there are many different devices with all shapes and forms for me to pick up the one that matches my lifestyle best.  All those choices do have a dark side though, there is a variety of screen resolution/sizes we need to make sure our Widgets work and look great on.

The table bellow shows all the supported Resolution/DPIs Windows Mobile 6.5 supports and as you can see it is a big table.

Thankfully for widget writing, there really are only two options, one that we will call HiDPI (for 192) and then LoDPI for the rest.  The reason is that, in practice, a document designed for 96 DPI (Internet Explorer on the desktop at 100%) will look fine on 96 DPI, 131 DPI and 128 DPI but it will look way too small on a 192 DPI screen.

Now that we have reduced the supported DPIs to only two, then the best (and easiest) way to handle this in your widget is as follows:

1) Generate two CSS Style Sheets for your widget. You can call them something like HiDPI.css and LoDPI.css, and the basic rule is, for HiDPI, things should be about twice as big to look the same way as they do on the desktop.

2) Detect the screen resolution at runtime to determine which CSS to load.  Here is an example:

   1: function applyCSSStyle() {

   2:     var width = document.documentElement.clientWidth;    

   3:     var cssFile = "css/LoDPI.css";    

   4:     if (width >= 480) {        

   5:         // The document is wider than 480 pixels        

   6:         // it must be a High DPI device       

   7:         cssFile = "css/HiDPI.css";   

   8:     }

   9:     

  10:     // Add the correct CSS style sheet to the document    

  11:     var headID = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];    

  12:     var cssNode = document.createElement('link');    

  13:     cssNode.type = 'text/css';    

  14:     cssNode.rel = 'stylesheet';    

  15:     cssNode.href = cssFile;    

  16:     cssNode.media = 'screen';    

  17:     headID.appendChild(cssNode);

  18: }

  19:  

  20: function onLoad() {    

  21:     applyCSSStyle();

  22: }

How to best utilize those SoftKeys

The Widget API gives you full control over the soft key menu bar, but since we want our widgets to behave as native  applications do there are a few guidelines we should try follow:

1. The left soft key should always represent the default action and it should be context sensitive to what the user is supposed to do at that particular step in the User Scenario.

2. The right soft key can be either a menu or a button, when there only are two possible actions you should save the user one click and make it a button… that said, if you do this there should be a way for the user to exit the widget somewhere on your UI.

Just as a quick reminder, calling widget.menu.append(menuItem) Adds a menu item to the right SoftKey, if it was a button it will turn into a menu with the non configurable label “Menu”, also, the “Exit” menu item is added automatically and can’t be renamed nor removed.  calling widget.menu.setSoftKey(menuItem, widget.menu.rightSoftKeyIndex) removes all menu items from the right SoftKey and turns it into a button.

Best practices

The following are some of the best practices we have found really help greatly widgets be the best they can be:

1. When possible, integrate with the phone “skin” by using theme able colors like “highlight” (details)

2. Use art assets that match the screen DPINess, or, just provide a high resolution set (shrinking is always better than expanding)

3. Minimize scrolling, vertical scrolling is ok on some cases, horizontal scrolling in almost all cases is a general NO NO

4. Handle the screen rotation event, remember that this must be fast

5. Load fast, generate all dynamic content after the widget is loaded.

6. Give visual feedback to all user actions.

Next post: Widget Anatomy - Performance… the final frontier