As someone that’s been using both C/C++ and .NET extensively over the past years, I found there was one very important point that Sutter glanced on, danced around, and did everything short of actually naming in his talk and it’s that if you’re doing anything remotely intricate or complicated, leaky abstractions in managed languages will bite you in the ass, and end up lowering your productivity, some times (and if what you’re working on is truly complicated, often times) to a point where you’d have been more productive using C or C++ in the first place.

The concept of leaky abstractions isn’t anything new and I’m hardly the first to point out how it can turn a knight in shining armor into a harbinger of doom and destruction. It’s the number one problem fundamentally present in almost any framework, but even more so in managed languages where the framework is all you have, and you’re not allowed to side-step it and build your own foundations to work with (p/invoke and interop aside). But lately it’s becoming more and more of a problem as the “push” for innovation that Sutter speaks of has become a fundamental requirement in just about all corners of the industry.

5 years ago, few in the .NET community could tell you what p/invoke was and how you’d use it. Now, it’s considered fairly basic knowledge and a working familiarity with the underlying C WIN32 API is a must for any desktop software developer looking to make a memorable, high-performing product in the world of .NET. Pretty much each and every WIN32 API documentation page on MSDN has a comment from someone on how to import that particular function into .NET with an interop definition, and people are running into the limitations of the managed framework far more often than they used to.

I’m still a big fan of .NET in general as it makes it really easy to quickly jump from idea to prototype to finished product for quick, one-off applications or basic tools and utilities. Even for huge products and projects, .NET’s GUI tools far exceed any C++ offerings in terms of ease-of-use and even functionality when it comes to having standard controls and features a single click away. But the leaky abstractions in .NET are proving to be a real pain in the back, and sometimes even interop just doesn’t cut it for the most trivial and basic of things.

Recently, I hit a wall with .NET in attempting to make EasyBCD support the parsing of internationalized BCD output in the form of bcdedit’s stdout. bcdedit, like many other Microsoft tools and utilities, is only UTF8 or Unicode aware if the console codepage is explicitly set in the application’s console window. I spent an entire day trying to shoehorn this functionality via various .NET hacks and failed interop attempts, a week off-and-on testing and debugging my various incomplete solutions, and in the end my solution was to create a C++ “proxy” application that would create a console, set the codepage to UTF8, run the command line utility, and pipe the output back to the host (source code here, MIT license: UtfRedirect). It was a guaranteed fix, took all of half an hour including testing it on 4 different platforms and experimenting with various internationalized stdout texts.

I personally believe the “best” compromise for medium-sized projects is to use C#/.NET to create the GUI and small helper scripts/utilities, but to build the core in C++ with an exposed C API or commandline interface. The short and long of the matter is, making a language truly and properly productive is a lot more work than just providing a sandbox with prettied-up API calls. You have to organically add improved productivity into a language from the bottom-up, making sure that the productivity goes hand-in-hand with power and flexibility, that it always second fiddle to being able to get the job done; after all, what use is a one-liner code if no mater how you twist and turn you can’t get it to do what you want?

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)

However, there are a few things that have forever irked us about the ln lookalike called mklink.exe:

• It’s called mklink and not ln. (I mean, you just get can’t get around that fact)
• The arguments are switched around. `mklink something_doesnt_exist actual_file` is just…….. wrong!
• By default, mklink will create softlinks and not hardlinks. ln requires the /h flag to create a hardlink.
• mklink isn’t smart enough to distinguish between files and folders. You need explicitly tell it via the commandline.
• Even then, mklink has two different switches depending on the type of directory link you want. /D for softlink’d directories, and /J for hardlink’d directories.
• mklink can’t be used outside of cmd.exe (such as in PowerShell). (Hat tip: Jason)
• And, of course,  mklink isn’t open source.

So we made our own.

ln-win is available in 32-bit and 64-bit, uses the same syntax, names, switches, and argument ordering as ln on *nix. And pursuant to our promise to contribute more to open source, ln-win and our Junction Point library is 100% open source, freely licensed under the generous terms of the MIT license.

Perhaps more importantly, ln-win contains an open source Junction Point library. While Win32 APIs exist to create symlinks (on Vista and up), there is no API for creating hardlinks of any kind (for files or folders). The NeoSmart JunctionPoint library provides the following APIs:

	bool CreateJunctionPoint(LPCTSTR origin, LPCTSTR junction);
	bool IsDirectoryJunction(LPCTSTR path);
	bool GetJunctionDestination(LPCTSTR path, OUT LPTSTR destination);
	bool DeleteJunctionPoint(LPCTSTR path);

As you can see, the NeoSmart JunctionPoint library provides all the APIs you need both to create and interact with hardlinks. IsDirectoryJunction can be used for both symlinks and hardlinks, making it a snap to make your code symlink/hardlink aware, letting you intelligently avoid cyclic paths and data duplication for any filesystem traversal needs.

Binaries for Windows x86 and x64

ln-win Source Code on GitHub

We’d previously finished the tutorials for dual-booting Windows 7 with Windows XP and with Ubuntu 10 (complete with picture-by-picture steps!), but now we’re getting started on the real meat: the technical details of just what exactly is going on behind the scenes. The normal OS boot process is one of the most complicated parts of an operating system with just one OS in the mix – with multiple operating systems, each that works in its own way, things get that much more complicated, and it’s always good to have a nice, illustrated guide to refer to.

The first part of the updated documentation is now available in the form of an explanation of how a dual-boot between Windows Vista/7 and Windows XP normally works, plus a NeoSmart exclusive: EasyLDR and its support for multiple top-level legacy NT entries without needing to go through a second NTLDR boot menu, a long-awaited feature that was finally added with EasyBCD 2.0.

EasyBCD Documentation: The Windows XP Boot Process

EasyBCD 2.0 features a number of exciting new features, but some of the most technically interesting details lie in the improved Windows XP support. Besides the linked article which explains the mysteries of EasyLDR and how EasyBCD accomplishes top-level Windows XP support, a large amount of research went into the creation of BootGrabber.exe, a command-line application that we wrote to automatically configure everything needed to set up easyldr or ntldr, complete with automated detection of all Windows NT – 2003 installations on mounted disks, the generation of a corresponding boot.ini/ebcd.00x file, the copying of ntdetect.com and boot.ini to unmounted and unlettered partitions, and changing the active partition.

Hopefully another article will be added really soon to the EasyBCD documentation explaining the powerful command-line features available to users in BootGrabber.exe, which may be accessed via the “Power Console” under “Useful Utilities” in EasyBCD 2.0 and up.

The changes in EasyBCD 2.0.2 correlate to 21 issues in the bug tracker, and can be seen after the jump.

Download EasyBCD 2.0.2 (1343 KiB)

Alas, with this update the EasyBCD setup is no longer 1337 KiB. But that’s OK, we figured you guys would rather the new features and bug fixes over a really, really cool download size. And here are the changes. (Important changes or high-frequency bugs are in red, and the complete changelog to date can be viewed here)

• [EBCD-385] – EasyBCD will crash if an operation that it expected to take a long time finishes instantly
• [EBCD-386] – EasyBCD crashes if you attempt to save entry settings with no entry selected
• [EBCD-387] – Cannot add multiple WIM entries
• [EBCD-388] – EasyBCD crashes if Segoe UI is corrupt
• [EBCD-389] – EasyBCD options dialog crash on international computers that don’t support mm\dd\yyyy format
• [EBCD-390] – EasyBCD crashes if an invalid path to a WinPE image is specified
• [EBCD-391] – EasyBCD doesn’t show actual DEP, SafeMode, Pae in Advanced Settings
• [EBCD-392] – EasyBCD crashes if an invalid path to a VHD image is specified
• [EBCD-393] – Improved boot.ini partition detection
• [EBCD-394] – EasyBCD crashes if corrupt WinPE entry with no ramdisk is present
• [EBCD-395] – Use BootGrabber to set active partition instead of relying on diskpart
• [EBCD-396] – BootGrabber /setactive switch
• [EBCD-397] – Try to get partition information from bootsector, not just partition ID
• [EBCD-398] – EasyBCD crashes if adding a WinPE or VHD entry fails in the AddWindowsVista stage
• [EBCD-399] – Crash removing NeoGrub immediately after adding it
• [EBCD-400] – Select correct disk for boot-partition related operations when editing external BCD
• [EBCD-401] – Update GRLDR to 0.4.5b-2010-07-25
• [EBCD-402] – Crash if bcdedit output contains null character
• [EBCD-403] – Handle IO Exceptions in creation of NTLDR/EasyLDR
• [EBCD-404] – EasyBCD crashes if bcd timeout is greater than 10000
• [EBCD-405] – Ignore exceptions when deleting stub loaders

Special thanks goes to joevt for his help and patience in fixing EBCD-393.

Hello and welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!!

It’s rather hard to believe, but EasyBCD 1.7.2 has been out for over 2 years now, and we’ve been working on Version 2.0 ever since. In that time, a lot has happened. Windows 7 has shipped, ext4fs is the new cool kid on the Linux block, GRUB2 is finally seeing some adoption, VHDs are the new wow, and everyone and their grandmother want a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Worry not, we haven’t been sitting on our (not-so-proverbial) behinds this whole time. In fact, the entire NeoSmart team – developers, supporters, testers, and all – have been working around the clock to make EasyBCD 2.0 the biggest, coolest, greatest, and awesomest thing ever since the invention of the MBR. And now, over a 150 beta builds later and 2 years in the making, we’re super-pleased to introduce you to EasyBCD 2.0. It’s so incredibly overhauled and improved, so stuffed-to-the-brim with features, so much of a true one-click dual-boot experince, so customizable, so powerful, and so EASY that it took a lot of self-restraint to keep from calling it EasyBCD 10.0!

What’s new, you ask? We’ll get to it. But let’s just first give you the download link, because we know you just can’t wait to get your grubby, geeky paws on it ASAP:

Download EasyBCD 2.0.1 (1337 KiB)

(Yes, it really is 1337 kibibytes in size. And, no, we didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just übercool that way!)

So, what’s new? Lots. Lots, lots, and lots of new. And lots and lots of improved. With less and less and less bugs, too. The official changelog is miles long, but here’s the stuff that we feel really shines. It’s so hard to sort them in a way that doesn’t leave one feature in the shadow of the other, but here goes:

• Complete Windows 7 support (including the pretty-boot screen!)
• Total redesign of the user interface to make the stuff you use more often easier to get to and easier to understand
• Automatic configuration and one-click setup of Windows XP dual-boots. No more mucking around w/ boot.ini and NTDETECT + NTLDR
• Support for multiple top-level Windows XP entries. You no longer need to go through a second NTLDR menu no matter how many XPs you have installed!
• Support for GRUB2 and ext4fs (we’re looking at you, Ubuntu *glare*)
• Boot from ISO images and Virtual Harddisk (vhd) files!
• Create bootable USB drives!
• Change the boot drive on your system (including all the partition management stuff) with one click!
• Rewritten OS X support (yes, again *sigh*)
• EasyBCD BIOS Extender to let you boot from network devices, specific hard disks, USBs, and more even if your BIOS doesn’t support it (thanks to PLoP integration)
• Support for multiple top-level GRLDR entries (in the same vein as XP entries above)
• Improved boot device detection, EasyBCD always runs, even if your boot device is inaccessible or the BCD isn’t installed!
• Loading indicator for lengthy operations
• Better support for loading and managing external BCD stores
• Complete EasyBCD portability. Just tell the installer where to stick it, and you’re set!
• Improved high DPI support
• Ability to create safe-mode entries
• Improved MBR repair, BCD repair, and more!

It’s been a real blast working on EasyBCD 2.0, and we’re really excited to have something we can finally share with the general public. Before we leave you and EasyBCD 2 alone together, some final words need to be said: EasyBCD 2.0 would not have been possible without the help of the entire NeoSmart team, testers, and of course, donors.

A big shout-out to Terry (Terry60), Justin (Kairozamorro), Jake (Coolname007), Alex (Mak 2.0), and everyone else that helped in providing support over the past 2 years. Crazy props to the Grub4Dos team and the PLoP developers.

And some links to keep you busy:

• EasyBCD user manual (it’s severely out-of-date, we’re updating it for 2.0 now)
• EasyBCD 2.0 screenshots
• Support forums

Follow us?

Keep in touch via twitter @neosmart or facebook for constant info and updates!

A Token of Appreciation?

Have we saved you a lot of time, effort, problems, and loss of limb, life, or worse? How much have you saved in support and repair costs? Do you want to say thank you? You can make a donation here:

[donation]

We’ll be following up some more on this topic from a technical side later in another article, but for now, an example that most of you are sure to have come across if you’ve ever tried to map network drives before:

This popup is shown at system startup if you have any mapped network drives to UNC shares which are not protected with a username and password. If you map a network destination that does require authentication, Windows will map the drive OK. To further complicate matters: this message is shown only when you startup from a cold boot! If you restart your PC (vs shutdown and powerup), it won’t appear.

Resolving the issue is straight-forward enough: just double-click on the network drive in My Computer and it’ll automatically, instantly, and silently connect. Which makes one wonder why Windows couldn’t connect in the first place.

Good question.

While working an update to Genie Timeline, I ran across this issue. Windows wouldn’t connect a mapped network destination at startup for some of our customers, meaning that our backup couldn’t continue (assuming you’re backing up to the network drive) until you manually intervened and opened the mapped drive yourself. Definitely not cool.

As an in-house R&D test, we attempted to manually re-establish the connection via the command-line. By running

net use Z: \\remote\path\

we were able to re-establish the “disconnected” network drive. But when we tried to implement this in code, we came across a funny issue. If you try to run this very early on during the logon procedure, it will fail with error code ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND – basically, it’s unable to contact the network path. The funny thing is, explicitly testing to see if we can connect to the network path [GetFileAttributes(networkPath)] doesn’t return any error. But Windows itself is unable to establish a connection. Using ‘net’ from the commandline was just a workaround for R&D purposes, so we turned to the trusty old WNetAddConnection2 function – and it too failed with ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND even though the network path both definitely existed and was perfectly accessible as a UNC location!

Attempting either of these techniques to establish a mapped network drive connection later on – say 2 or 3 minutes after logon – works just fine. As does attempting to establish a connection to a UNC path that requires authentication. Or attempting to connect to the network drive after a restart and not a cold boot.

In the end, we resorted to calling WNetAddConnection2 at timed intervals after startup if the UNC path is accessible and the mapped network drive is not. It got the job done, but it really does speak volumes when developers have to run through hoops to address issues that have been out 2 OS releases and 5 years ago. We have no such problems with Windows XP.

I’m pleased to announce that the EasyBCD 2.0 beta program, years in progress, has now reached a release candidate build with EasyBCD 2.0 RC1 Build 100.

Please help us make the 2.0 gold release a perfect build by downloading and testing EasyBCD 2.0 RC1. There’s a very long list of changes, you can view the build-by-build changelogs in the link above.

If all goes well, we can expect a 2.0 RTM release in the very near future, God willing.

Thanks!

Those keeping track of Apple’s purchases will remember that, almost exactly 2 years ago to the day, Apple bought California-based CPU designer PA Semiconductors. However, PA Semi specializes in PowerPC-based designs – a platform that Apple abandoned almost 5 years ago now. But Apple’s most recent acquisition is directly applicable to its current needs in the hardware market, and in particular, its forays into the ARM market. In the official iPad video, Apple engineers and executives discuss their need for a custom CPU in order to let them dictate where the ooomph and power will go, and to what purposes the transistors will be biased.

With all these buyouts and different chipsets in question, it’s easy to get confused. So what is the difference between the ARM, the PPC, and the x86, and where does it matter?

The world of CPUs is a dark, deadly, and dangerous place. After all, the CPU is said to be the literal “heart” of the PC – and as such, it’s the single most-heavily engineered component. Billions of dollars and manhours have gone into the design of these various chipsets and they’ve all been researched, optimized, fabricated, and sold in order to make your computer… better.

The biggest difference between these platforms is the design dogma they follow. The x86 is a CISC architecture: Complex Instruction Set Computer. The other two (PPC and ARM) are RISC-based designs: Reduced Instruction Set Computers. What does that mean? Well, to the end user, mostly nothing. But to the CPU designers and developers, it makes a world of a difference.

CISC architectures can have up to thousands of individual commands supported by the processor that can be used in machine code. Each of these assembly commands can range from a single operation to several hundred or more in length. On the other hand, RISC-based CPUs understand only a handful of different instructions, the minimum necessary to get the job done.

However, this in no way means that CISC is more powerful or that RISC is limited. The difference in the amount of supported instructions is easily explained away by two factors: supported modes, and wrapper operations. All the data dealt with in any computer program is stored in the memory. But in order for the CPU to actually use any of it, it needs to place variables in super-fast (but small and limited) memory locations built into the CPU itself, called registers.

Imagine trying to run the following line of code:

z = x + y

Each of the three variables in the above example is located in the memory. But in order to carry out the operation, x and y will need to be copied from the memory to the CPU, the addition instruction carried out, and the result then copied from the CPU to the location of z in the memory.

A CISC-based CPU like the x86 would have a single instruction that – when given the address of X, Y, and Z in the memory – would do just that. But in a RISC-based CPU, the assembly code would have to explicitly spell out the individual steps: first copy x to a register, then copy y to a register, then add them together, and finally copy the result back into the memory.

At first blush, it would seem that CISC is a much better option. After all, one instruction and the entire line of code is done. But it’s not about operations, it’s about time. Sure, a RISC-based program will need to carry out four distinct operations in order to do the same, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take any longer. In fact, RISC CPUs are consistently faster than their CISC counterparts.

If CPUs were day laborers, it would make sense that CISC is more efficient. After all, a single instruction gets the job done. But, thankfully, CPUs aren’t underpaid interns, they’re over-engineered miracles. The simpler design of the RISC CPU allows it to more efficiently optimize and carry out long sequences of code. The way things are broken down into short, simple, and clear instructions lets it carry out multiple operations at the same time (pipelining) and with less effort.

In fact, it’s now a universally accepted truth that RISC is better than CISC! Actually, because of how much more efficient RISC machines are than their CISC counterparts, most CISC CPUs convert their CISC instructions into RISC instructions internally, then run them!

So why are we still using x86? That’s mainly because of business matters. Intel had x86, Intel had money, and CISC won out. Today, with the optimizations and internal RISC conversions that take place, CISC vs RISC isn’t really about the performance any more. It’s about the business, the politics… and the power consumption.

The complexity of the CISC datapath and pipeline mean that it takes more power to get things done. Intel has worked some incredible miracles and accomplished some amazing things to get the power consumption down, ranging from dynamic scaling of the CPU clock to shutting-down parts of the CPU core when they’re not in use. But x86 remains a power hog. Intel’s Atom platform was an attempt at re-engineering the x86 to make it fit for mobile devices, but at the cost of performance.

There’s no reason that RISC can’t be used for the desktop. ARM or no ARM, there’s a plethora of RISC-based CPUs out there that can be easily adapted for desktop use. But the problem isn’t with the hardware: it’s with the software. Programs written for x86 aren’t compatible with anything else, even other CISC CPUs. That has prevented just about the entire world from trying any other platforms, mainly because Windows only supports x86 on the desktop. The last copy of Windows to support different CPU architectures was Windows NT, which shipped with versions for Intel’s x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC.

For anyone not on the Windows platform though, there’s nothing really binding them to the x86 platform. Apple chose x86 because, with PowerPC out of the running, x86 was the only viable option back in 2005. Keep in mind, just because ARM can run on the desktop, that doesn’t mean that ARM will run on the desktop: optimizations in the CPU world are always a compromise between performance and power consumption. And the current generation of ARM and other RISC-based CPUs is meant for portable equipment.

It would take some work to create a high-performance ARM CPU meant for the desktop, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. With Apple’s just-declared purchase of Intrinsity, it’s clear that it’s a possibility. With the tight grip Apple has over its platform and the strong hardware-software bond, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the switch to yet another platform – after all, they did it 5 years ago and things worked out. But will they? Most likely not, it’s not exactly in their customers best interest and x86 really is a decent platform. But for the myriad of mobile devices that Apple is getting itself into, x86 isn’t the key. So look forward to more ARM goodiness for your iPad and iPhone in the years to come, but your MacBook is safe in Intel’s loving hands.

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.

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.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:

ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.

Now for the good stuff: the number one request we’ve had was to eliminate the Microsoft .NET Framework as a requirement for using ToolTipFixer. As a matter of productivity and preference, Microsoft’s .NET Framework has a special place in our hearts, but we realize that many people would prefer something a bit… lighter and as such ToolTipFixer 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch in C++ with no dependencies – not even the MSVC++ runtime libraries.

The second oft-made request was improvements to ToolTipFixer’s memory usage. This particular component is tightly-tied to the development platform of choice, and with the switch over to unmanaged C++, it’s become possible to further-tune the amount of memory that TTF uses and bring it down as much as possible, something that’s not in the developers’ hands when using the .NET Framework – which, with its automated garbage cleanup, makes memory usage highly variable at best.

TTF 2 has drastically improved memory management – it’ll take so little memory, you won’t even know it’s there (from 0.3 to 1.5 MiB in our extended testing, depending on OS and platform).

Then there are those 64-bit Windows users, and more of them than ever before. Just because you have 4+ GiB of RAM in that machine of yours doesn’t mean you can’t get rid of this bug too – ToolTipFixer 2.0 has full support for Windows XP/Vista x64!

And to save the best for last, ToolTipFixer can now be run in what we call “standalone mode.” During setup, you’ll have the option of either installing TTF the traditional way – as a system application sitting silently and invisibly in the background – or as a standalone module that you run only when you need it. Some people experience the tooltip corruption problem less often than others, and if it doesn’t bother you incessantly then you can choose to only run TTF when you need it!

Download: ToolTipFixer 2.0

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.