Technical How-Tos and money saving tips
Bit Locker was a feature first introduced in Windows Vista Ultimate that provided you the ability to encrypt your whole hard drive. No one knows my Microsoft didn’t make this a standard feature of all versions of Windows. If they really were concerned about security, they’d have done this. Nevertheless, they did not.
Now that Windows 7 is out, it’s still restricted to the Ultimate version (or “Enterprise” version… same thing).
A virtual hard disk is a “fake” hard disk. It’s usually just a file (or a list of files in a folder) that is treated as if it were an entire hard disk when using Virtual Machine software such as VMWare, Virtual PC, or Xen. All of these products are programs that you can run, just like any other program on your computer, but instead of opening a document, like a spreadsheet, image, or text file, they open a virtual hard disk. In fact, the program window displays what looks like your machine booting up from a complete power off state, showing the BIOS setup options, memory checks, the operating system booting up, until it eventually gets to the desktop. But, it does all this, in a window!
For example, below, is screen shot of my Windows 7 Ultimate desktop, with FireFox open to my blog, and in the middle of the screen, a Virtual Machine that’s been booted up to the Ubuntu 8.10 Linux desktop. Inside of that virtual machine, is the Linux version of FireFox open to a web page describing Ubuntu.
Now, my real boot drive does NOT have Linux on it. It boots directly to Windows 7. So the question is how does the virtual machine boot up to anything different? Instead of booting up on a real hard drive, when I set up the Linux virtual machine, I told it to use a file instead of a real hard drive. From my Windows 7 host machine, it’s just a file (a large file, but just a file, buried in a folder of my choosing). When the virtual machine goes through its simulated boot cycle, the virtual machine software (VMWare in this case) tricks the VM (virtual machine) into thinking that the file is an actual hard drive and Linux happily uses it as such. That file that’s on my Windows 7 machine, is the “Virtual Hard Disk”.
Windows 7 has a new feature that let’s you really boot from a virtual hard drive file. But, it has to be a Virtual PC compatible hard drive file. I couldn’t do it with my VMWare compatible virtual hard drive file that I created for the ubuntu Linux VM in the image above.
Windows 7 provides a new security model that can restrict what applications can run on a PC. This new model is called “App Locker”. This is a feature that’s more likely to be used in an enterprise environment that in home computers.
You can create rules based on executables and installers and can white list DLLs. Publish rules using information in a digitally signed app. You can restrict apps based on version and per user basis. For example, you can block an administrator from running certain software, in spite of the fact that they’re an administrator. White listing is blocking all software except for a list of apps you will allow as opposed to black listing which means everything can run, except for explicitly stated apps.
User local group policy editor to set up these rules.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJT802mD8KU]
Windows 7 doesn’t come with Windows XP Mode, but you can download it for free from here. Essentially, Windows XP Mode is virtual machine software (called Virtual PC) that can emulate a whole other computer even running a completely different operating system than what your computer booted up to. AND, it can run this other operating system AT THE SAME TIME as your primary (called “host”) operating system. Windows XP mode is Virtual PC running a Windows XP virtual machine.
Here’s a video demonstrating how it works:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNFczLYBtrA]
The purpose of this product is to allow you to go ahead and make the switch to Windows 7, but without losing compatibility with older software that may only work on Windows XP.
Windows Media Center is a program that provides a DVR like user interface to all of your videos, music, CDs, DVDs, photos, recorded TV, & FM Radio. It, itself, is a DVR, if you have a TV Tuner card in your computer. You can use it to schedule recordings for TV shows and movies. Any computer hosting Windows Media Center can stream content to other computers AND to Windows Media Center compatible hardware like XBox and XBox 360 (called Windows Media Extenders). In other words, you can stream content from your home PC to your big screen HDTV in the living room. This works quite well, but getting the connection configured can be frustrating, especially if your computer is on a different floor in the house than your XBox and TV. For streaming HD content, you’ll want a 100mb network connection or better.
Windows Media Center used to be an off-shoot version of Windows XP called Windows XP Media Center Edition. With Windows Vista, Windows Media Center came with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate. With Windows 7, it comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate.
Windows Media Center is great for archiving all of your home movies and using a Windows Media Center Extender (Like XBox 360) to stream your movies to your living room TV.
“Home Group” is a new feature of Windows 7 that allows multiple Windows 7 machines on the same local area network to more easily share files, music, printers, and such. Any Windows 7 computer on the network can create a home group and set a password. Other Windows 7 computers on the network can easily find these home groups and connect to them with the same password. Each computer can control what’s shared from it to the other computers.
Modern PCs have 1 CPU, but multiple cores. Most people don’t really understand what that means. Here’s an explanation:
First, until a couple of years ago, most computers had one CPU with one core. A CPU is an acronym for “Central Processing Unit”. It’s that big chip with a big fan mounted on it inside your computer. It’s what Intel and AMD make. It’s essentially the brain of your computer. It’s where all the thinking occurs. When you run a program, whether it’s a game, a word processor, a spreadsheet, or just booting up the computer to load and run the operating system (Like Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, etc…), what happens is the CPU activates the hard drive and starts it activating the motors to spin the disk, to move the read/write arm back and forth to read the magnetic bits on the surface of the disk, then translates those positive and negative recordings into bits or 1’s and 0’s and copies them into the computer’s memory, which it then looks at them, one byte at a time. Each one is a specific instruction for the CPU to do, like copy a byte of data from one memory location to another, add 2 numbers, etc… The CPU can do millions or billions of these instructions per second, but it can only do ONE at a time.
Newer CPUs now have what are essentially 2 or more CPUs on the same chip. But, they don’t call these CPUs anymore. They call them “cores”. You can now have multiple cores on one chip. The chip that contains all the cores is now called the “CPU”.
With a multi-core CPU chip, all of them run, independently, at the same time, all executing their own set of instructions, without waiting on the other cores to finish theirs. So, if your CPU has 2 cores, your CPU can actually do 2 things at once, If your CPU has 3, 4, 6, or 8 cores, your computer can execute that many instructions at once. In general, the more cores you have, the more things your computer can run in parallel, and hence, is faster.
A multi-core CPU is not to be confused with a Multi-CPU computer. A computer with 2 or more CPUs actually has 2 more actual CPU chips on the motherboard, with a big fan mounted on each one. Each CPU may have 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 cores. Generally an operating system recognizes all these cores as separate CPUs. OS’s don’t generally care wither the cores are one per chip or multiple cores per chip. The only time that really matters is if the operating system provider has implemented some bizarre licensing rules that says if you don’t pay up, then they’ll limit your installed operating system from using more than one physical CPU chip, but will allow multiple cores on that one chip. Windows 7 Home Starter Edition is one of many examples that implements this simply for a licensing reason.
It actually gets much more complicated and involved in that and there are exceptions to these rules of speed, but for a simple explanation, this suffices.
In general, more cores = faster and better.
If you’re a Windows user, this year, more than at any time in the past, you’ll be presented with the dilemma of deciding whether or not you want to install a 32 bit version of Windows or a 64 bit version of Windows. Here’s an explanation of what it means:
When a program is executed by the machine’s hardware, the hardware looks at instructions in the software that ask it to store or retrieve data to and from the computer’s memory. How much data it can store and retrieve in one instruction is called its Data Bus Width. Most modern PCs have a 64 bit data bus, so they can store or retrieve up to 64 bits in one instruction (or 8 bytes). Generally, the more bits that can be stored or retrieved at once, the fewer instructions it takes to move a large chunk of data, so it’s generally faster. This is not a hard rule though. Sometimes it’s slower.
Additionally, the total amount of memory that the PC’s Central Processing Unit (CPU) chip can access is determined by its address bus width. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the same size as the data bus width. Most modern processors though, have a 64 bit address bus. A 32 bit address bus can only access about 4GB of RAM, so even if you added more memory, your processor couldn’t use it. A 64 bit address buss can access 2^64 bytes of memory (or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes). That’s significantly more than any amount of memory you’ll have in a PC for a good long while. So, with a 64bit address bus, your CPU can access as much memory as you can afford to install.
There are other, individual hardware architecture pieces that can be 32 or 64 bit, but I won’t get into them here.
In short, whenever you have an option, always go with 64 bit, unless, you know for sure, that a critical piece of software you need just won’t work in 64 bit. But, in that case, I’d recommend still going with a 64 bit OS (Operating System) and using virtual machine software, like Windows XP Mode in Windows 7, or VMWare and install a 32 bit OS inside of the virtual machine, just for that old software that hasn’t been updated.
There’s been a lot of media hype about so called “netbooks” this past year. All a netbook is, is a small notebook computer with a slow processor, a slow and low capacity hard drive, a small screen with a low resolution, and usually a scaled down version of Windows (like Windows Starter edition) or with Linux installed.
Netbooks are not generally considered “netbooks” unless they’re under $500. Most of them are right around that price range, but with the severely limiting capabilities. People get excited about them because they assume that since they’re so scaled back, capability wise, that they’re cheaper than more powerful notebooks. The truth is, you can get a very nice notebook computer in the $300-$500 price range that will absolutely run circles around any netbook performance wise, storage wise, screen size wise, resolution wise, Windows version wise, etc… etc…
Although, people that have netbooks, seem to love them. I wonder if they know that they can get a much more power computer at an equivalent (or lower) cost.
There is one legitimate reason I can see for getting one though: Size. They’re much smaller than a normal notebook. So, if a smaller size is more important than all of the other capabilities, a netbook just might be right for you.
On 10/22/2009, Microsoft officially released Windows 7 to the general public, but did you know there are 6 different versions (and a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of each of those (except for Starter edition which is 32 bit only))?
So, which do you buy? First, let’s list what versions are available, then we’ll describe each one:
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Now, the details of each:
You can purchase them directly from Microsoft’s web site here, but I strongly advise finding it at a local store. Most large retailers will sell it below the MSRP (Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price). Of course, if you’re a business buying multiple copies, you may want the Enterprise licensing, which you can’t get at retail outlets. You’ll need to continue to purchase through the vendors you’ve been going through.
I’ve been running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit since early August. Read my reviews (pros and cons) and other articles about Windows 7 here: