The New Windows 8 Bootloader

Literally the very first thing you notice when installing and testing Windows 8 Developer Preview is the new boot screen. I personally find it to be very cluttered and unorganized, and generally aesthetically unappealing. However, compared to the decades of text-based boot selection menus that people are accustomed to, reviewers are seeing this as a dramatic improvement.

Some of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the new Windows 8 bootloader:

1. The new look
2. Completely new process of loading an OS
3. Integration of repair tools into the bootloader itself

New Look

Hopefully the designers at Microsoft can get their hands on the new boot screen before Windows 8 goes RTM. That said, Microsoft has explained the rationale behind the redesign as being purely function over form – the new boot screen is part of the general overhaul of Windows to use the touch-friendly Metro UI. Microsoft is claiming that the new boot menu is intended to be a more touch-friendly interface – and you can’t really disagree with that, as the appallingly-oversized buttons and labels make it very hard to miss-click “miss-press” with one’s fingers. However, just how many people will be dual-booting on a PC with a touch-only input device, ummm, remains to be seen.

That out of the way, the new boot menu is more than just a visual overhaul, it’s virtually a complete rewrite of the BOOTMGR/BCD bootloader that was first revealed during the Windows Longhorn/Vista beta program. Some of the changes are a little subtle, but the Windows 8 DP builds have introduced some very tricky concepts, evolving the bootloader from just a selection menu to something rather more complicated.

New Boot Sequence

For reasons we have not yet been able to discover, though we are confident they will be revealed in time, Microsoft has chosen to completely change the manner in which operating systems are loaded once selected from the boot menu. The usual boot process that just about any bootloader goes through is something like this:

With Windows 8, this boot process has been changed completely, and now something more along these lines takes place:

It’s a subtle change as the boot menu is not shown the second time around, but the PC actually reboots after making the selection. We’re not clear on why Microsoft is doing this, but if I’d had to hazard a really wild guess, I’d say it’s to clean up the environment that’s been altered/modified/corrupted by the new boot menu. Basically, it seems that the new boot menu interface has become it’s own mini-OS, and is possibly running in protected mode (vs the traditional real-mode bootloader), and as such, needs to reboot to bring the system back into a real-mode that the Windows 8 kernel can initialize from and bring the system from real to protected mode itself. In short: the new boot menu is more of an OS and less of a boot menu than ever before.

Repair Tools Integration

If you were still in any doubt as to just how different the new bootloader was, and how much more of a complete and standalone OS it has turned into, you need look no further than the new repair tools integration. Windows Vista introduced the recovery center, a WinPE-based environment with some tools for both automated and manual repair, on the setup DVD, Windows 7 (in some SKUs and as of certain revisions) copied the recovery center image to the local hard drive and could, if the bootloader itself has not been wiped out, automatically provide an option of loading the recovery center from disk. With Windows 8, Microsoft has gone a step further, integrating the repair tools into the Windows 8 boot menu itself.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the bootloader no longer contains an entry/link to the repair center WIM image, the bootloader and the repair center have instead been merged together. Still, the same problem with the Windows 7 implementation remains: if the bootloader itself has been wiped (which is the most common problem), the recovery center cannot be accessed. In fact, we see no benefits for this implementation over the Windows 7 method, and can only see the drawbacks of enormously-increased complexity and longer load times.

EasyBCD and Windows 8 Developer Preview

Now for what you’ve all been asking: how does EasyBCD play with the Windows 8 Developer Preview? The short answer is, EasyBCD supports Windows 8 DP. The long answer is rather more complicated.

It seems that out-of-the-box, the Windows 8 “pretty” (and we use that word very loosely) boot screen supports only Vista and up. It will not show Windows XP, Linux, or other OS entries (in preparation for Secure Boot? Perhaps). EasyBCD can be installed on Windows 8 (though it will attempt to download the .NET Framework if you haven’t manually activated it, because Microsoft has done a 180 and biting the hand of the developers that powers it, has disabled .NET 1.0 – 3.5 compatibility out-of-the-box in Windows 8), and can be used to add, remove, rename, configure, and generally do whatever you want with entries and the Windows 8 boot menu.

The catch is that as soon as you use EasyBCD, Windows 8 will detect something along the lines of unsupported changes to the bootloader and cease to use the new boot menu / boot screen. It will revert to the Windows 7-style boot menu, including the text-based interface and the original boot sequence. Now, while we personally prefer the older menu, we realize that the majority of Windows 8 DP users are rather anxious to both keep the Windows 8 touch-enabled boot screen and retain usage of EasyBCD’s wonderful goodiness, having apparently never heard of the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” ;-)

Now we’re not sure how/why the Windows 8 boot menu reverts to the Windows 7 menu, because in fact, it is possible to force the Windows 8 boot menu to add unsupported entries if you use only very particular bcdedit commands; but as even something as minor and unimportant as changing the order of boot menu entries in EasyBCD causes Windows to use the old boot menu, it seems we’re missing something. Rest assured, this will all be taken care of in due time, though at the moment it seems rather folly to waste time trying to implement support for what is clearly the alpha stages of the new boot menu and the appropriate course of action would appear to be waiting for the next Windows 8 beta build (rumored to be sometime around February 2012).

EasyBCD, when used from within Windows XP – 7, can be used to add a Windows 8 entry to the bootloader in the same manner that you would a Windows Vista/7 entry. So, in short, EasyBCD supports Windows 8, but Windows 8 does not support EasyBCD :)

Some of the changes include nicer icons for all the albums (verses a mosaic of contents), links to full-size images on our extensive collection of tech-related wallpapers, fixing of overall alignment, and a few other cosmetic issues. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or feedback, please do share because we’re (as always) all ears.

For lovers of beautiful backgrounds, we have two “new” collections to share: the official Windows 8 wallpapers to date, and the OS X Lion wallpapers bundle. We’ll be updating the Windows 8 backgrounds with each released build, so check back often! Some samples after the jump.

What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

Come again? Really? To us, this seems like a rather mean and dishonest approach to dealing with the shortcomings of the web browser. While it is true that at this moment in time, Internet Explorer is more prone to crashes and hangs than it would be in the final (RTM) release of Windows 8, this does not in any way give Microsoft the right to assume that in the future any hangs or crashes in IE are to be blamed on the designers/coders of the website being visited.

In fact, no code even if purposely meant to crash the browser should succeed in doing so, and certainly should not be held to blame. If Microsoft cannot make a crash-proof browser, that does not mean that they should dishonestly deflect and redirect the blame towards and innocent third party.

Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

There’s some mixed good and bad news, however. The good news is that all downloads will be direct HTTP links, so no need to learn how to use a torrent client or fiddle around with open network ports: just plain, standard, direct, and very fast HTTP downloads for all our ISO images. We’ve also taken this opportunity to update the repair CDs and add a virus scanner (powered by ClamWin) as well as some command-line tools and utilities that were missing from some of the images.

The bad news is that there will now be a nine dollar download charge for each CD. There was no way for us to avoid charging this, as we now pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in exchange for making these CDs available, and also pay per download to outsource the high-speed web hosting for these large CD images (150 to 200 MiB, each) to an outside service.

We look forward to updating these repair and recovery CDs over time and adding more tools and utilities to help you save your PCs from the brink of death. We thank you for your patience with us over the past few months during which the downloads were suspended, and truly appreciate your understanding of the situation.

Download Links

Windows Vista Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Windows 7 Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

A November 2009 post on the Visual C++ Team Blog by Raman Sharma delved into the improvements Visual Studio 2010 was purported to have made to the “Find All References” feature of Visual Studio. This feature is a must-have for any developer in almost any language. As a project grows in size and complexity, it becomes a real chore to remember and locate exactly where a particular variable was defined – which is something that’s quite useful to know.

According to the VC++ blog post, VS2010 now uses a “speed-mode” by default to locate these references. It’s a bit less accurate in that it generates a lot of false positives, searching by name rather than by usage, but that this reduced accuracy comes with greater speed. And the option remains to further filter out results by having the compiler and the intellisense databases resolve the actual results and determine whether or not they indeed reference the search term.

Except that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In truth, that’s not what happens:

1) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” of Find All References is slower than it was in Visual Studio 2005.

2) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” not only generates extraneous false positives, it also fails to show items that do match the search term.

On any project of considerable size, “Find All References” will cause a hang of the Visual Studio 2010 user interface for up to a minute as it does nothing more than plain-text search for the selected variable or function. It blocks the main user thread, it hangs the UI, and it takes forever. Much longer than Visual Studio 2005/2008 did with its more accurate compiler-based variable references search.

And as for point 2, the time-lapse screenshot below (to show both the selection, the menu, and the resulting dialog) should speak louder and clearer than a thousand words.

(Click the image for a full-size screenshot)

Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 seems to be exemplifying the ongoing trend at Microsoft of slowly giving less and less attention to C++ developers as they continue to push .NET (now at version 4.0 and growing strongly) at the cost of everything else… while still refusing to embrace the .NET platform for their own technologies, leaving their once-content developer-base fighting against their own IDEs for life.

This is the first of several posts about Visual Studio 2010, it’s advantages, and its shortcomings. We love Visual Studio and despite everything else, its still the best IDE out there and a damn good one at that. But some things just need to be said in hopes that they will be addressed at some point in the future.

It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.

NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of a Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a ~150 MiB download ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. It contains an antivirus scanner, access to system restore, Windows backup, memory diagnostics, and command-line tools for advanced repair procedures. Please note that this download is no longer free, due to licensing restrictions imposed upon us.

What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using an antivirus, System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

Download Links

Windows Vista Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Windows 7 Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Instructions

1. Click the link above then select the edition you’d like to download.
2. Select a payment method and enter details.
3. Download the link displayed onscreen and sent to your email.
4. Burn the .iso file that was downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
5. When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.

Support

Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition’s "Ultimate Extras" have been a constant source of derision and anger from Vista users ever since its release 3 years ago. If the blog posts are to be believed, millions of users purchased Windows Vista Ultimate Edition in the hope that the added-value "Ultimate Extras" package – which was left un-described and of unknown worth at the time – would turn out to be a good investment.

Ultimate Extras are a couple of the minor Ultimate Edition exclusives that Microsoft used as a selling point to get users to purchase the most expensive version of Windows Vista. It was originally marketed as something similar to the ancient "Plus! for Windows" package that was quite popular back in the days of Windows 98; except it never really panned out that way.

Ultimate Extras was something of a hoax for the first couple of years, bringing nothing more than animated wallpaper and extra cards game to the table. Since then a couple of new themes/sounds have been added to the package along with a couple of other lame games – all of which made Vista users feel all the more "tricked" into purchasing a more expensive version of Windows that they, in all honesty, didn’t need.

Well, it looks like Windows 7 will be doing away with the Ultimate Extras though it’s anyone’s guess what the final SKU lineup will look like and what the selling points and feature-sets of each of the editions will stack up to. But here’s to hoping that Microsoft learns from (even more) of its mistakes and provides something of real worth with the more expensive editions of its latest OS offering.

In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states

[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.

But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.

The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?

Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ‘spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).

With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.

Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?

Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.

A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…

If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!

But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?

The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.

-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment

Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."

Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.

It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.

But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.

The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.

But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).

Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.

Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).

And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

Obviously not all of Windows Sentinel’s (only) three thousand subscribers are included in the numbers above (it’s highly unlikely that even 80% of the 3000 subscribers are using hardware that only comes from the OEM with Windows Vista installed). And of the percentage that are using late-model hardware, a hefty percentage dual-boot.

We don’t have any numbers as far as the number of dual-booters out there, but they’re certainly not few enough to be discounted. Keeping that in mind, it’s rather unprofessional of InfoWorld to claim that 35% of all Vista users will downgrade to Windows XP. Obviously big numbers make for better headlines, but this is the kind of stuff that can damage stocks and ruin jobs – you don’t want that on your conscious, at least, not without good reason.

Not that we’re suffering from any delusions or hallucinations with regards to Windows Vista’s relatively shoddy performance and stability, but you’ll agree that it’s a rather far cry to go from “a lot of people have reservations about upgrading to Windows Vista” to “a lot of people will take the time and effort to remove Vista from a PC and put Windows XP in its stead;” especially keeping in mind that Vista’s been out for two years now and there’s an (unfortunately) increasingly-large number of Vista-only products out there on the market.

More data from InfoWorld and the Windows Sentinel service would certainly be most-welcome in giving a clearer picture of what the actual numbers are and where end-users stand in this OS mess.

Richard Stallman: legendary founder of the Free Software Foundation, purveyor of the GPL, defender of open source. And – as of today – expert FUD manipulator.

Obviously someone was seriously pissed off at the abundance of (largely positive) press coverage Bill Gates has been receiving as he stepped down from his final roles at Microsoft.. and it appears Mr. Stallman just couldn’t bear to let the man he hates more than any other step down without getting that last word in.

In an article by Richard Stallman published on BBC today, Stallman pulled back no punches bashing not only Bill Gates, Microsoft, and makers of proprietary software everywhere but also took the incredibly cheap shot of accusing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of working to ruin the very countries they’re trying to help:

Gates’ philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people’s good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

Never mind the fact that those are unsubstantiated rumors following money trails several-hundred pockets deep – what does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have to do with Free Software? Is Stallman so desperate to make Mr. Gates out to be the bad guy that he’d sink this low?

Stallman, one of first people to accuse people of spreading FUD to further their opinions, doesn’t stop there:

Gates is personally identified with it, due to his infamous open letter which rebuked microcomputer users for sharing copies of his software.

It said, in effect, "If you don’t let me keep you divided and helpless, I won’t write the software and you won’t have any. Surrender to me, or you’re lost!"

Here Stallman is referring to Gates’ now-famous letter asking people illegally copying, distributing, and using Altair Basic to stop. Stallman somehow neglects to mention that – regardless of whether morally acceptable or not – Microsoft had the legal right to demand payment in exchange for their software. Ignore for a second whether or not Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the right or in the wrong to ask for payment in exchange for their work – is Richard Stallman seriously suggesting that it’s right to illegally obtain copyrighted software?

It’s one thing to say that Gates should never have charged for his software and another to say that it’s OK to use it without paying. Gates chose to ask for money, users (as Richard Stallman himself has advocated on many occasions in the past) should be looking for an alternative if they don’t want to front the cash.

Who Richard Stallman thinks he’s kidding, we don’t know. But he’s obviously crossed that line that shouldn’t be crossed; apparently desperate enough to stop Microsoft the minute he senses an opening… even if it means spreading FUD, making pointless accusations, and generally talking nonsense to get his point across. This isn’t any way for a respected figure in the open source community to act, especially not when it comes to someone who has – whether Stallman likes it or not – contributed as much to the tech community as Bill Gates has.

Whether or not MinWin is the very same kernel that went into Vista or not is officially unknown at the moment; but what we do know is that Shipping Seven is either one huge fake, or else that the Windows core programmers at Microsoft are so stupid that they don’t know the first thing about coding, kernels, operating systems and compilers.

The post at Shipping Seven is littered from beginning to end with fallacies, lies, and incorrect deductions that anyone with even the most basic coding skills would know better than to ever post, especially not when attempting to pass it off as the work of some of the more talented coders out there.

Here are some of the more-glaring factual errors in the post that completely strip Shipping Seven of any authenticity or authority it may have on the topic of Windows 7:

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

Correction: OS X is powered by a rewrite of the XNU kernel which is a modified version of the Mach kernel which, in turn, is a complete rewrite of the original BSD kernel. And, of course, Ubuntu isn’t an OS in and of itself, rather it’s just a distribution of Linux.

While it can be argued that not every developer at Microsoft is expected to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of other operating systems, no one in their right mind would believe that the Windows kernel programmers don’t even know what kernels their strongest competitors are currently using.

We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything ‘componentizable’ – So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008).

….

You already have MinWin – It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose – you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don’t know what the hell you’d do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.

Assuming you can get past the way that the post was written (with references like “using the command line” which indicate a general lack of knowledge about computers in general; treating the command line as if it were a “god mode” that can be used to do just about anything), there’s still the matter of factual inaccuracies – and inconsistencies in the article itself.

You can’t change/modify/revert pre-build settings by running commands in the command line. Components that are integrated at compile time simply cannot be removed by running a bunch of commands afterwards – especially not from within the resulting OS itself.

Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it. As a matter of fact, anyone who’s built anything at all should know this – the same rules apply to any other program as well. For example, you can’t remove PHP support from Apache if you’ve compiled mod_php directly into the binaries.

Shipping Seven is a big, fat fraud. It’s written by someone with only the most basic knowledge of computers, zero knowledge of coding concepts, and absolutely no experience with kernels and operating systems. Shipping Seven is most likely written by the equivalent of script kiddy, eagerly awaiting the first leaked builds of Windows 7 to appease an inner itch – most likely all the while lamenting his lack of involvement in the Longhorn beta. It isn’t worth the time it takes to read, and definitely doesn’t deserve even the questionable authority it now has on the topic.

iReboot isn’t by any means a major application, but it’s gathered a pretty strong following over the months, mostly by people interested in boosting productivity (or increasing laziness) to the max. But there was one flaw in iReboot that made all the hard work we put into making it as unobtrusive and minimalistic as possible almost meaningless: if you had UAC enabled, iReboot will not run automatically at startup, no matter what you do.

This behavior comes as a result of the architecture that Microsoft used to secure Windows Vista, which doesn’t allow for applications requiring admin approval to run at startup. It doesn’t matter what your application does or if you absolutely trust it beyond the shadow of the doubt, Windows Vista simply won’t let an application that runs in elevated privileges mode to launch at startup – end of story.

Users of iReboot were quick to point out that this is a major drawback that made it almost useless – after all, it’s far less productive to have to manually run an application when you want to reboot than it is to wait for that startup screen to appear and select the OS you want. So we set about finding a solution.

We’ve just released iReboot 1.1, a UAC-free implementation that doesn’t require admin approval, elevation, etc. past the initial installation. And, yes, it does run automatically at startup too!

The Gory Details (feel free to skip below to the download links!)

In order for iReboot to be of any use, we had to get around Microsoft’s UAC limitations. For iReboot, it was of the absolute importance that it run at startup, and that it be allowed system access from normal user accounts. On Windows XP – where everyone runs as an Administrator and there are no annoying UAC prompts – it was a non-issue. But on Windows Vista, the new architectural requirements for running applications in elevated privilege modes made it near impossible.

While digging around for possible solutions, it became clear that the only possible fix would be to split iReboot into two parts. One would run in the background as a service, running under the SYSTEM or LOCAL SERVICE accounts and having privileged access to the OS without requiring admin approval or UAC elevation, and with the second half running as an unprivileged userspace client program which interacts with the service backend to get stuff done.

The resulting application has an installer – which requires admin privileges, of course – which installs and launches the background service. The background service has full permission to do what we need to get operating system XXXX to be the default option for the next boot, but – in line with the Windows Service Model – cannot be interacted with by end users.

The installer also adds a normal UI application which sits in the taskbar (from where end-users may interact with and use iReboot) and communicates with the backend service via a custom API which must not require the execution of any privileged code. The service can do whatever it wants (well, whatever we want it to do, but lets not get picky here!), but the client program must only perform actions which normal, unprivileged users have permission to execute.

By using a standard inter-process communication API we avoided the need for any special actions on behalf of the client application, effectively separating logic (residing and executing on the backend service, free from the many limitations of UAC) and presentation/design (the client application, bound to obey UAC’s every wish).

The Bottom Line

Anyone running Windows XP or Windows Vista – with or without UAC and/or admin approval mode enabled – can now run iReboot at startup and use it to boot into whatever OS they like (in conjunction with EasyBCD, of course!).

But getting this far wasn’t easy. With Windows Vista, what should have been 100 lines of code maximum ended up being a dozen times longer, split across two different processes, and requiring way too much man-hours to write the most minimalist and to-the-point piece of software we’ve released to date.

Perhaps most importantly though, is the fact that Windows Vista’s newly-implemented security limitations are artificial at best, easy to code around, and only there to give the impression of security. Any program that UAC blocks from starting up "for good security reasons" can be coded to work around these limitations with (relative) ease. The "architectural redesign" of Vista’s security framework isn’t so much a rebuilt system as much as it is a makeover, intended to give the false impression of a more secure OS.

With the current Windows Vista security models, Microsoft can claim that Vista blocks system-modification tools from running at startup; but the truth is, there are still many ways to get them to run. At the end of day, our experience with iReboot and Vista’s security implementations brings us to the sad conclusion that with Windows Vista, Microsoft has made ISVs’ jobs more complicated without actually providing any any further protection for end users from malware authors – which certainly isn’t the best way of going about this task.

Anyway, the fruits of our efforts:

Download iReboot 1.1 (248 KiB)

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As always, NeoSmart Technologies remains committed to providing accurate and verifiable information from trustworthy sources. We’re also dedicated to providing reports/articles regarding content that our readers deem important and newsworthy; so you’ll always be able to find the latest accurate information regarding the Microsoft’s next OS at The NeoSmart Files.

The screenshots: http://neosmart.net/gallery/album/view/apps/Internet+Explorer/IE8/

We’re still working on an in-depth review and analysis of what IE8 brings to the proverbial web browser table.