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This feature of Windows 7 (its correct name is “Aero Peek“) is often hated by users that want to be free moving the mouse anywhere in the screen, without that anything happens.
The new “show desktop” corner in the right is a really good idea and I use it everyday, but I also prefer to click on it – when I want to minimize everything: it’s really rare that I want only to take a little… preview of what is going on my desktop.

Disabling only the “mouse over” version is really simple: just click with the right mouse button on the Windows Taskbar and choose “properties”, then uncheck the option “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop“. That’s all! Now you can click on the show desktop button, but hovering it will do nothing.

It could sounds ironic, but the main feature I miss from Windows Seven – when I’m using a PC with Windows XP – it’s that little button on the bottom-right corner of the screen. Nina, an MBA accounting student I know, talks about how useful this button used to
be. It has the same functionality of the old “Show desktop” button on XP, but its position allows me to “launch” the mouse in that direction, without any precision, and click it to get all windows hidden.

Of course, someone released a tiny (and free) utility to backport this feature to 9 years ago, on Windows XP
It doesn’t need to be installed, just download and start it (and maybe put it into the “startup” section of your Start Menu)!

http://ceiiular.deviantart.com/art/Show-Desktop-133022210

While we are waiting for BLUntrl, a very promising application that is partecipating to the Windows 7 “Code 7 Contest”, I want to put highlight an interesting little utility: ScreenBright (aka “ScreenWhite”) is able to control your monitor brightness, contrast and color balance, directly from Windows.
ScreenWhite is really basic, but it represent one of the few Windows applications that can communicate directly with the hardware of your monitor throught DDC/CI. A lot of monitors have uncomfortable commands, so it can be useful if you want to quickly change the brightness of your screen, several times a day.

As I stated some days ago, I’m testing Windows 7 beta 1. Honestly, I’m very satisfied by the new operating system of Microsoft, that seems to be “What Vista wasn’t”. Because of my satisfaction, I’m trying to give my little help sending feedbacks to Microsoft when I encounter some bug or when I find that usability/user experience is not optimal.
I’m saving my feedbacks locally to keep a trace of what I suggested… and maybe to check if these things will be corrected in the final version.

I will also paste them here to make others know… and to collect some comments from readers of Web Review. leggi tutto »

Today I fixed a new problem with my test installation of Windows 7 (first public beta): Avast! Free – my “default” antivirus, was causing random system crashes. After some tries, I understood that blue screen of death was occurring during internal network activity. To be more precise, the problem is located in the use of shared folders (aka “samba shares”, for Linux users) and it involves the tdx.sys file, that seems to be often a protagonist of BSODs. leggi tutto »

I’m currently testing the first public beta of Windows 7 on a desktop and a notebook, so I installed Live Messenger through the official Live installer provided from Microsoft as optional pack of the operating system. While there wasn’t problems on the notebook (connected to the LAN via Wi-fi), the desktop gived me 81000306 error trying to connect to Messenger service. After a lot of tests, including activation of uPNP on the router and forwarding the typical Messenger ports to the desktop’s IP, I finally discovered that the problem was in a feature of Windows 7 (also included in Windows Vista), the auto tuning of TCP stack. To disable this feature (that seems to be also the cause of network slowness on some LAN), you’ve to execute a simple command as Administrator:

• click on the Windows logo in the bottom-left corner of the screen (the old “start” menu);
• type CMD.EXE and wait a second: the cmd.exe program will appair in a list;
• right-click it and choose “Run as Administrator”, then confirm the action in the request that will appair;
• you’ll see a black window; type the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
• now just close the window and try to connect with Windows Live Messenger (it shouldn’t be necessary to restart the computer).

Note 1: I suspect that this problem is linked to my hardware (a Netgear DG834G router and a Atheros PCIE Gigabit LAN, on a ASUS M2A-MX motherboard).

Note 2: If you want to restore the auto tuning feature, you’ve to repeat the above process with the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Post updated at 13:50 (GMT+1) on June, 17th 2009 – Now Windows 7 RC1 is public and available to everyone.
As anticipated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES (Las Vegas), Windows 7 first public beta is now available for free download.
Windows Vista users are free to get and install it on their computers as update.

The download is Beta licenses are limited “only” to the first 2,5 million of users.
This version will expire on August, 1st 2009.

At this moment, official pages don’t seem to offer the link to start the download. (Windows 7 official site – Post on Windows 7 official blog), but… leggi tutto »