Brandon Live!

They’re supposed to be sending someone over to install Verizon FIOS service at my place next Wednesday Friday.  15mbps up, 15mbps down.  Just the way the internet was meant to be.  And hopefully, without the Torrent-stifling connection-dropping level of service that Comcast has been supplying for a while now.

If you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista, or a 64-bit version of WDS 3.x on Windows XP/2003, you may notice that the new Office 2007 document formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc) don’t show up when you search using the “Documents” filter in the search UI, or the kind:document Advanced Query Syntax.

This is a known issue with the 64-bit property system, and happens because the 64-bit shell only looks in the 64-bit section of the registry for a set of keys that map file extensions to various “kinds” for filetypes that don’t emit their own “kind” information.  Because Office 2007 is a 32-bit application, it registers its kinds in the 32-bit section of the registry, where the shell never sees it.

In a future release, the shell / search engine will be updated to better handle this situation.  For now, I have uploaded a .reg file which will fix the KindMap for Office 2007 documents on 64-bit machines.

Disclaimer Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall your operating system. I cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.

Click here for the workaround reg file

As I read up on the latest TechMeme news this morning I saw a headline that didn’t seem quite right, “Vista SP1 a Performance Dud” it said.  Intrigued, I clicked on the link and discovered an entire blog devoted to rather poor performance testing and entirely unhelpful rants.

The author of the SP1 comparison claims to have run the SP1 “RC1 Preview” build on a virtual machine to compare its performance in various tasks against that of an unpatched RTM system.  I assume by “unpatched” he means no updates at all - as there are several “pre-SP1″ hotfixes out there that will undoubtedly make it more difficult to quantify the degree of difference between Vista and Vista SP1.

So what were the various tasks he compared?  Apparently, he used two scripted productivity benchmarks I’ve never heard of.  One drives Office 2007 through various tasks, and the other is supposed to measure multitasking performance by exercising “ADO, MAPI, and WMP.”

The author then notices a 1-2% performance improvement, and goes on to say that Vista SP1 is a “performance dud.”

The problems

1. Virtualization.  Running performance tests in a virtual machine is good for one thing:  Measuring performance of the virtual machine.  It is far from an accurate representation of what users will encounter on real hardware. 
2. Coverage.  The most substantial performance gains in SP1 affect the areas most hindered under Vista RTM: games, file operations (copy / move / delete), standby/resume, and citizenship of background services.  It appears that none of these were tested in this comparison.
3. Perceived Performance.  While measured performance of file operations in Vista SP1 is significantly improved, even further gains exist in “perceived performance.”  This is mainly due to improvements to Vista’s file transfer dialogs, which now begin reporting data about transfer rate and time much sooner and more accurately.
4. Advertising.  The comparison includes advertising for the benchmark tool used.  Apparently it is developed by the same company publishing these results, and they want to rope you into signing up for some kind of membership.  This increases my skepticism level slightly.
5. Ranting.  The entire blog seems devoted to ranting about Microsoft, complaining about Vista and Office, and making sweeping conclusions from insufficient data.

It is my hope that we’ll see more accurate comparisons start to spring up that clearly demonstrate the sometimes substantial performance gains included in SP1.  Of course, SP1 isn’t going to turn a slow computer into a fast one.  But if you’re facing compatibility issues that are affecting your system’s performance - it very well may help.  In some areas, like gaming or copying/moving files via Explorer, everyone will notice the improvements.

Update: Apparently, virtualization wasn’t used in this comparison, only the post the compared Vista to XP.  Still, results from that virtualized test are used as the basis for some of the conclusions of this article.

There’s been plenty to write about lately… the most obvious probably being WSUS accidentally installing WDS on unsuspecting machines and Google’s launch of OpenSocial.  Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now, so today I’m going to try and catch up a bit.

I hope that the WSUS issue has already been addressed for everybody affected by it.  But for the record, here’s the post I made in a couple of forums the day it happened:  

Here is my understanding of what happened. No one on the WDS product team knew about this until this morning (I was the first to know, because of an extremely impolite e-mail sent to my personal e-mail account).

• It was a screw-up, and everyone involved is deeply sorry about the trouble this has caused
• It ONLY affects WSUS systems where admins had approved an earlier WDS Update package
• The previous packages only updated existing WDS installations, and wouldn’t install it on new systems
• It was intentional to offer a package that would install WDS on machines without it
• It was NOT intentional for the approval of the previous update to be “inherited” by this package. This was a mistake in the publishing of this package to WSUS.

They have suspended deployment of the WDS package via WSUS while they fix the problem, and provided instructions for how admins can most easily disable and remove the WDS software.Believe me, Microsoft and the WDS team did not intend for this behavior. There was never any secret plan to force WDS onto unsuspecting machines. It was simply an error in the WSUS publishing process, which everyone deeply regrets.

As someone who used to work in IT, I feel the pain of these admins. This is also pretty embarassing for our team even though it could have happened to any group at Microsoft, as the WSUS publishing process is completely out of our control. That said, please don’t think that anyone here is taking this mistake lightly.

Even though our official responses may have appeared slow throughout the day, you can be sure that today was a non-stop fire drill for all involved. Once we identified and understood the problem, it took time to coordinate an official response and go through all the necessary approval processes. Unfortunate as that is, it’s the reality of a business this size, and our guys did their best to push through it and get this handled as best as we could after figuring out what happened.

For any further details, I refer you to the WSUS Blog.