Windows 7 Annoyances

Editions of Windows 7

Ironically, the internal version number of Windows 7 is version 6.1,^[1] which implies that Microsoft considers its newest operating system to be a (relatively) minor revision of Windows Vista (version 6.0). This relationship is more or less accurate as it turns out, and is akin to that between Windows XP (internally, Windows 5.1) and its predecessor, Windows 2000 (Windows 5.0).

Windows 7 is available in six different editions, all targeted for different markets and carefully designed to give customers the illusion of choice. They’re all the same version of Windows—effectively, the same software—differing only in some of the toys included in the box. Only three editions, Ultimate, Professional, and Home Premium, are available to the general public.

Home Premium lacks some of the data security, management, and networking features found in the Professional and Ultimate editions, but comes with the “premium” games (Chess Titans, Mahjong Titans, Purble Place) missing in Professional. Of course, Ultimate has it all; the only thing you lose with Ultimate is a little hard disk space (not to mention a large sum of cash).

On the fringe, you’ll find the Starter and Home Basic editions, intended for so-called emerging markets, and the Enterprise edition, which has more or less the same feature set as Ultimate (minus the games and Media Player) but with volume-licensing for large corporations.

The specific differences between the three primary editions are outlined in Table 1-1. See the next section for ways you can make up the difference if you’re not lucky enough to have the Ultimate edition.

Table 1-1. What you get (and what you don’t) with the primary editions of Windows 7

	Home Premium	Professional	Ultimate
Aero Glass interface	✓	✓	✓
Backup and Restore	✓	✓	✓
Backup and Restore – Create a system image	✓	✓	✓
Backup and Restore – Network storage support		✓	✓
Create a Home Group	✓	✓	✓
Corporate tools (AppLocker, BranchCache, DirectAccess)			✓
Encryption – BitLocker drive encryption			✓
Encryption – file and folder encryption (EFS)		✓	✓
Fax and Scan	✓	✓	✓
Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)		✓	✓
Join a corporate network domain		✓	✓
Local Security Policy Editor (secpol.msc)		✓	✓
Local Users and Groups Manager (lusrmgr.msc)	✓	✓	✓
Location Aware Printing		✓	✓
Maximum physical memory (64-bit edition)	16 GB	192 GB	192 GB
Multilingual User Interface Pack			✓
Offline files and folders (sync with network folders)		✓	✓
Pen and Touch (Multi-Touch)	✓	✓	✓
Premium Games	✓		✓
Presentation Mode (Winkey + X)		✓	✓
Previous Versions (Shadow Copies)	✓	✓	✓
Remote Desktop Client	✓	✓	✓
Remote Desktop Host		✓	✓
Subsystem for Unix-based Applications			✓
Virtual Hard Disk Booting			✓
Windows Media Center	✓	✓	✓
Windows Media Player Remote Media Experience	✓	✓	✓
Windows XP Mode for Windows Virtual PC		✓	✓

Got Ultimate Edition Envy?

Got the Home Premium or Professional editions of Windows 7, and are considering forking over more cash to Microsoft for a “better” version? Not so fast! Here are most of the goodies included with Ultimate but missing in lesser editions, and how you can get them for free:

Back up to a network location

See Preventative Maintenance and Data Recovery for information on using network storage with Windows Backup on the Home Premium edition.

BitLocker Drive Encryption, and the Encrypting File System (EFS)

The NTFS file system used by all editions of Windows 7 supports compression and encryption for individual files and folders, but the encryption feature is made unavailable in the Home Premium edition. If you want to encrypt files in Home Premium, try SafeHouse Explorer Encryption or Cryptainer LE, both free.

BitLocker, included only with the Ultimate and Enterprise editions, is a method by which you can encrypt an entire drive (as opposed to the aforementioned folder and file-level encryption). Freeware alternatives for Professional and Home Premium include FreeOTFE and TrueCrypt.

See Chapter 8 for the skinny on encryption.

Corporate tools

These tools are only available on the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7, and are mostly of use to PCs in a corporate environment that uses Windows Server 2008 R2. Anyone who doesn’t need to be constantly connected to a central server at a large company to do his or her work will likely be bored to tears by these tools.

AppLocker allows you to control which users can run certain applications; for instance, you can restrict a group of less-privileged users to only running apps by certain publishers (like Microsoft). You can download AppLocker for free from http://www.smart-x.com/. You can also accomplish this in a much more limited fashion with file permissions, discussed in Chapter 8.

BranchCache caches files and web content from central servers to improve performance when working on large-scale team projects on low-bandwidth connections. (There’s no direct replacement at the time of this writing, aside from upgrading your Internet connection.)

DirectAccess allows you to connect a Windows 7 PC to a corporate network running a DirectAccess server. If you have a lesser edition of Windows, you can still set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, as explained in Chapter 7, to do something similar, albeit with more fuss.

Group Policy Object Editor

Several solutions in this book use the Group Policy Object Editor (gpedit.msc) to change a few esoteric settings, but this tool isn’t included in the Home Premium edition. If the gpedit.msc file isn’t on your system, you can access most of these settings with the net command-line tool (provided you open the Command Prompt in administrator mode), as explained in Chapter 8.

Local Security Policy Editor

The Local Security Policy tool (secpol.msc) provides access to advanced settings, the useful ones relating mostly to UAC; see Control User Account Control for details and alternatives.

Offline files and folders

Offline Files is a caching feature, allowing you to work with files stored on remote network drives even when you’re not connected. When you’re reconnected, the files are synchronized invisibly. A free alternative for those using Home Premium is Microsoft’s own Windows Live Sync, formerly FolderShare. There’s also Microsoft SyncToy and SyncBack Freeware.

Presentation Mode

In the Professional and Ultimate editions, you can press the Windows Logo key (Winkey) and X to quickly disable the screensaver, set the volume level, and change your desktop wallpaper, all to make your PC more suitable for hooking up to a projector and giving a PowerPoint-ish presentation. (It’s worth noting that this feature is only available on laptops through the Windows Mobility Center page in Control Panel, and it’s disabled by default.) In other words, Presentation Mode is nothing more than a shortcut, and one that may indeed duplicate similar features in presentation software you’re already using. Users of Home Premium can easily accomplish the same thing through more traditional means (e.g., Control Panel). See Chapter 2 for more nifty Winkey shortcuts that work for everyone.

Remote Desktop

All editions of Windows 7 can control another PC remotely with Remote Desktop, but you’ll need the Professional edition or better if you want your PC to be controlled remotely (act as the host) with Remote Desktop. UltraVNC is a free remote control package that works with any version/edition of Windows, or for that matter, Mac OS X, Linux, and even Apple’s iPhone. See the section Control a PC Remotely for details.

Subsystem for Unix-based Applications

Also known as Interix, this is basically a Unix and POSIX layer that allows you to run Unix software on your Windows 7 PC. Don’t have the Subsystem for Unix-based Applications? Cygwin does more or less the same thing, and is free for all versions of Windows.

Virtual Hard Disk Booting

If you use the Windows Backup tool to create an image of your hard disk as described in Chapter 6, you’ll end up with a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file. VHD files are also used by Windows Virtual PC (see Virtualize Whirled Peas). In the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7, you can boot your PC off a VHD file without using a virtual environment, effectively offering another means of multiple booting. If you have a lesser edition of Windows, you can do the same thing with multiple hard disk partitions, as described in Set Up a Dual-Boot System. See Chapter 6 for more on virtual hard disks.

Windows XP Mode

See the sidebar Windows XP Mode for details on this feature, and how you can get basically the same thing in Home Premium.

64-Bit Windows

More bits gets you access to more memory, and more memory means a faster, smoother-running OS. The processor inside your PC communicates with your system memory (RAM) with numeric addressing. Thus the maximum amount of memory a 32-bit processor can address is 2³² bytes, or 4 gigabytes. Newer 64-bit processors—not to mention the 64-bit operating systems that run on them—can address up to 2⁶⁴ bytes of memory, or 17,179,869,184 gigabytes (16 exabytes) of RAM. (17 million gigabytes may sound like a lot of space now, but it won’t be long before you’ll be taking baby pictures with a 9-exapixel digital camera.)

Note

In reality, 32-bit Windows can only make use of about 3 GB of RAM before hitting a wall; see Chapter 5 for details.

Windows NT, released in 1993, was Microsoft’s first fully 32-bit operating system. But it took eight years before the platform, which had since evolved into Windows 2000 and then XP, became mainstream. (For those keeping track, Windows 9x doesn’t count because it was a hybrid OS that ran 32-bit applications on a 16-bit DOS foundation, which was one of the reasons it was so terribly unstable.) 64-bit Windows became a reality in XP, but Vista—and, by extension, Windows 7—was Microsoft’s first serious attempt to take 64-bit computing mainstream. But the question is, how mainstream is it?

When Vista first hit store shelves in 2007, x64 computing was a hobbyist niche, barely registering on any radar. By the middle of 2008, Microsoft reported that 20% of new PCs connecting to Windows Update—mind you, that’s new PCs, not total PCs—were using 64-bit Windows. Many of those machines were likely sold with 4 GB of RAM or more, necessitating Windows x64 to be preinstalled. But why isn’t everyone using x64?

While 64-bit (x64) Windows can run nearly all 32-bit applications without a problem, it’s not compatible with 32-bit hardware drivers or 32-bit utilities like Windows Explorer extensions (e.g., context menu add-ons). This means that you need native, signed 64-bit drivers for every device on your PC, which only recently have become commonplace. (In fact, for a product to be marked “Certified for Windows 7,” it must be compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the OS.) Of course, you still may have trouble finding support for older hardware, but isn’t that always the case when you upgrade the operating system?

Now, native 64-bit software running on 64-bit Windows has been known to run as much as 10% faster, which illustrates the other reason—apart from memory addressing—that people find 64-bits alluring. But fully native x64 applications are still rare; even Microsoft Office is still natively 32-bits, with only a handful of x64 DLLs thrown in to make everything work smoothly on a 64-bit system.

Note

All 64-bit editions of Windows 7 require a 64-bit (x64) processor (both Intel and AMD make x64 CPUs). If you’re not sure if your PC has an x64 CPU and you’re already using Windows 7 or Vista, open the Performance Information and Tools page in Control Panel and click the View and print details link (available only after you’ve run a performance check). Otherwise, the free Securable utility works on any version of Windows. If you haven’t yet installed any OS on your PC, use the “Processor Check for 64-Bit Compatibility” tool.

So, if you’re on the fence about x64, let’s make it simple. Unless you have fewer than 2 GB of RAM, a non-x64 processor, or some software or hardware product that won’t work on 64-bit Windows, there’s no reason to stick with a 32-bit OS.

All editions of Windows 7 (except Starter) are available in both the 32-bit or 64-bit varieties; the retail Ultimate edition even includes both 32-bit and 64-bit DVDs right in the box. If you have a 32-bit edition (other than Ultimate), you can get the 64-bit version of your edition (in the US, call 1-800-360-7561), and assuming your license key checks out, you only pay shipping. But beware: once you “convert” your license key to work with the 64-bit version, you won’t be able to use it to reinstall the 32-bit version, should you decide to go back. (Thus you may want to try a virtual install first, as described in Virtualize Whirled Peas.)

Once you’ve got your 64-bit OS installed and functioning, it’ll look and feel just like its 32-bit (x86) counterpart, with only a few minor quirks. See Chapter 2 for Windows Explorer considerations on 64-bit Windows, Chapter 3 for 64-bit registry issues, and Chapter 6 for troubleshooting 64-bit hardware and software.

Unless otherwise noted, all of the solutions in this book apply to both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

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^[1] Open a Command Prompt window (cmd.exe) and type ver at the prompt to see Windows’ internal version number.