New Microsoft Online Business Reality Show Via MSN

A new Microsoft online business reality show is scheduled to debut today, June 15th, via MSN. The first episode of “It’s Everybody’s Business with Jack & Suzy Welch,” will welcome viewers to an online business designed as the “la piece de resistance” of an interactive website dedicated to business customers. For this endeavor, the Redmond
company has partnered with advertising agency JWT, production company Reveille, as well as General Electric CEO Jack Welch, and his wife, business journalist Suzy Welch.

“We've all sat in those less-than-pleasant meetings where people don't agree,” said Gayle Troberman, the advertising general manager in charge of the “It’s Everybody’s Business” campaign. “Tough decisions and choices have to be made. This first episode shows how one company and one business guru, Jack Welch, approach decision-making, particularly in this economy.”

Troberman explained that the new online business reality show was designed to reach out to customers, and also to get them engaged and involved, through commercial advertisements that have evolved into a comprehensive series for the campaign. In addition to the episodes featuring the Welches, users will also be able to access a variety of resources including case studies, technology solutions, white papers, and even social media commentary, Microsoft informed. Troberman, who is also leading the efforts behind the “I'm a PC” campaign, indicated that in the end, the focus of both marketing efforts was to illustrate to customers what they could do if they picked Microsoft as their partner.

“The relationship we want to have with business customers involves authentic, strategic partnership and counsel,” Troberman added. “This show is designed to help IT and business people learn through the real experiences of other companies. It’s an amazing moment in marketing when we can use technology to bring this type of behind-the-scenes business experience to millions of people who might never have the chance to go toe to toe with the Welches on their own business challenges.” Read More .....

Windows 7 Compatibility

With the next iteration of the Windows client, Microsoft is hard at work from day one to ensure that the development of every element of Windows 7 has Application Compatibility at its core, even though this was synonymous with changed features and designs that needed retouching. Grant George, the corporate vice president for testing in the Windows Experience team, has revealed that as far as Application Compatibility goes, Microsoft has just one purpose with Windows 7, namely ensuring that all the programs that currently work with Windows Vista will also work with its successor.

“Our engineering process includes automated quality checks to assure public APIs don’t change, and our test engineers have the right tools, engineering time and information that is used to find application issues as early as possible in our development cycle. Telemetry information is collected to assess and prioritize the breadth of applications our users depend on, paired with market data and install base information, across a wide variety of software categories to make sure they work as expected in our new OS version,” Grant said.

At the same time, Microsoft is carefully handling the fabric of Windows 7 in order to make sure that the evolution of the platform will not impact compatibility. One illustrative example in this regard is Legacy Code Removal. Stripping down legacy code in Windows 7 is a process involving extensive documentation, as well as Microsoft working directly with application developers that are impacted in order to resolve the issue. The Windows engineers also build automated tests designed to evaluate applications that are flagged as problematic from telemetry data.

“Throughout the development process we are running tests in the background creating an ongoing validation of new code relative to application compatibility,” Grant explained. “As code is getting ready to be checked into the main build, if a compatibility failure is detected in an automated regression test the checkin is halted. At that point the code is scanned for known compatibility issues and if an issue is detected the developer is asked to fix the problem. Of course we also develop new tests throughout the course of developing Windows 7 in order to broaden our coverage of third party software.”

But Microsoft is by no means limiting the app compatibility testing of Windows 7 to third party programs alone. The Redmond company also analyzes middle tier technologies including Java, the .Net Framework, and so on and so forth in order to ensure that they will all play nice with Windows 7. What the software giant is doing is actually isolating approximately 4 to 6% of applications belonging to the same family, namely with similar technology, data processing, etc. By ensuring compatibility with the set of 4-6% of applications in a certain family, the company provides assurance of compatibility for all similar apps.

“In addition to 3rd party stand alone applications we test a subset of OEM pre-installed software and their inbox applications for compatibility. The software tested come from the engagements we have with our OEM partners and their submitted installation images. These images are tested on clean installations of Windows 7 and upgrades from Windows Vista on OPEM standard hardware. This level of coverage allows us to best replicate the initial experience with Windows 7 for many of our customers. Because many of these applications are closely aligned with the OS, hardware and drivers, it is not unusual for an OEM to provide updates to this software with a new OS release,” Grant stated.

But in the end, Microsoft has also equipped Windows 7 in order to help end users deal with the compatibility issues that will get away. The next version of Windows will be able to detect failed application installations due to incompatibility problems. Following such a failure, the operating system will provide the user with a wizard designed to help identify a compatibility mode for a problematic app. Read More .....

Windows 7 Performance and Productivity Tips

1. Find bottlenecks

From what we’ve seen so far Windows 7 is already performing better than Vista, but if your PC seems sluggish then it’s now much easier to uncover the bottleneck. Click Start, type RESMON and press [Enter] to launch the Resource Monitor, then click the CPU, Memory, Disk or Network tabs. Windows 7 will immediately show which processes are hogging the most system resources.

The CPU view is particularly useful, and provides something like a more powerful version of Task Manager. If a program has locked up, for example, then right-click its name in the list and select Analyze Process. Windows will then try to tell you why it’s hanging - the program might be waiting for another process, perhaps - which could give you the information you need to fix the problem.


2. Keyboard shortcuts
Windows 7 supports several useful new keyboard shortcuts.


Alt+P
Display/ hide the Explorer preview pane

Windows Logo+G
Display gadgets in front of other windows

Windows Logo++ (plus key)
Zoom in, where appropriate

Windows Logo+- (minus key)
Zoom out, where appropriate

Windows Logo+Up
Maximise the current window

Windows Logo+Down
Minimise the current window

Windows Logo+Left
Snap to the left hand side of the screen

Windows Logo+Right
Snap to the right hand side of the screen

Windows Logo+Home
Minimise/ restore everything except the current window

3. Faster program launches

If you’ve launched one instance of a program but want to start another, then don’t work your way back through the Start menu. It’s much quicker to just hold down Shift and click on the program’s icon (or middle-click it), and Windows 7 will start a new instance for you.

4. Speedy video access

Want faster access to your Videos folder? Windows 7 now lets you add it to the Start menu. Just right-click the Start orb, click Properties > Start Menu > Customize, and set the Videos option to “Display as a link”. If you’ve a TV tuner that works with Windows 7 then you’ll appreciate the new option to display the Recorded TV folder on the Start menu, too.

5. Run web searches

The Windows 7 search tool can now be easily extended to search online resources, just as long as someone creates an appropriate search connector. To add Flickr support, say, visit I Started Something, click Download the Connector, choose the Open option and watch as it’s downloaded (the file is tiny, it’ll only take a moment). A “Flickr Search” option will be added to your Searches folder, and you’ll be able to search images from your desktop.

6. Schedule Media Centre downloads

You can now tell Windows Media Centre to download data at a specific time, perhaps overnight, a useful way to prevent it sapping your bandwidth for the rest of the day. Launch Media Centre, go to Tasks > Settings > General > Automatic Download Options, and set the download start and stop times that you’d like it to use.

7. Multi-threaded Robocopies

Anyone who’s ever used the excellent command-line robocopy tool will appreciate the new switches introduced with Windows 7. Our favourite, /MT, can improve speed by carrying out multi-threaded copies with the number of threads you specify (you can have up to 128, though that might be going a little too far). Enter robocopy /? at a command line for the full details.

8. Really remove the sidebar

At first glance you might think Windows 7 has got rid of the sidebar, but don’t be fooled. Gadgets are still hosted by the Sidebar.exe process, it’s just that this is now launched automatically when Windows boots. If you don’t plan on ever using gadgets then you could delete the Sidebar Registry entry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, and recover a small amount of RAM. That might be a little risky, though, as we’re not quite sure what else the sidebar process does in Windows 7. The safest approach is to disable it temporarily by launching MSCONFIG.EXE, clicking the Startup tab and clearing the box next to the Startup entry. Now reboot and test Windows 7 for a day or two to confirm everything is still working, before finally deleting the sidebar Registry entry.

9. Load IE faster

Some Internet Explorer add-ons can take a while to start, dragging down the browser’s performance, but at least IE8 can now point a finger at the worst resource hogs. Click Tools > Manage Add-ons, check the Load Time in the right-hand column, and you’ll immediately see which browser extensions are slowing you down.

10. An Alt+Tab alternative

You want to access one of the five Explorer windows you have open, but there are so many other programs running that Alt+Tab makes it hard to pick out what you need. The solution? Hold down the Ctrl key while you click on the Explorer icon. Windows 7 will then cycle through the Explorer windows only, a much quicker way to locate the right one. (And of course this works with any application that has multiple windows open.)

11. Block annoying alerts

Just like Vista, Windows 7 will display a suitably stern warning if it thinks your antivirus, firewall or other security settings are incorrect.

But unlike Vista, if you disagree then you can now turn off alerts on individual topics. If you no longer want to see warnings just because you’ve dared to turn off the Windows firewall, say, then click Control Panel > System and Security > Action Centre > Change Action Centre settings, clear the Network Firewall box and click OK.

12. Parallel defrags

The standard Windows 7 defragger offers a little more control than we saw in Vista, and the command line version also has some interesting new features. The /r switch will defrag multiple drives in parallel, for instance (they’ll obviously need to be physically separate drives for this to be useful). The /h switch runs the defrag at a higher than normal priority, and the /u switch provides regular progress reports so you can see exactly what’s going on. Enter the command

defrag /c /h /u /r

in a command window to speedily defrag a system with multiple drives, or enter defrag /? to view the new options for yourself. Read More .....