Windows 7 RC Status Update

I was forced to rebuild my last Windows 7 Beta machine (an HP TX2510 convertable tablet pc) to the RC last night, as on July 1 it started shutting down every two hours in order to gently remind me that it was expiring. Oh bother! As I wasn't really that worried with preserving the state of the machine, I just reinstalled the OS, leaving the drive intact, so that I could reinstall everything necessary and still have it local.

I was amazed at the difference that just a few months could make in the smoothness of the process. This was the very first machine I moved to Windows 7, and while a fairly new technology, it nevertheless required a substantial amount of work to get drivers to work (well). This time, however, every single driver loaded during the install, including a third-party beta for the fingerprint reader, with one tiny exception. That being the driver for the commercial infrared sensor for the pop-out media center controller. One stop to HP.com was all that was required to solve that. Even the video drivers were correct, although it has ended up show the screen as 1-2 monitors in one. A little digging revealed that this is actually how HP implemented the hardware. Oh well, it seems to work just fine.

I am really looking forward to next March, when I get to upgrade all these machine yet again.

My WHS Has a Tweeter Account!

A couple of days ago, while doing my occasional review of Add-ins at WeGotServed.com, I found an add-in that allows my WHS to send out status updates as tweets, rather than email [http://www.whsplus.com/2009/06/10/whstweet/]. This has several benefits in that it doesn't clog up my Blackberry with personal messages that I have to manage, yet still allows me to have fairly instantaneous notification of issues on my home network, through my UberTwitter client. To do this, I had to create @jbharmanWHS account for my WHS to use to send, so that I don't spam my work colleagues with status notifications. So far, so good. We shall see how this lasts. Oh, by the way: in just 48 hours, @jbharmanWHS has already received 4 bogus (spam/porno) follow requests. Good thing I have my settings set to protected.