Core OS

Assuming you have supported video drivers and sound drivers for Windows 7, is anyone out there having trouble with DVD playback? Please let me know. I'm collecting data on a potential emerging issue and am trying to figure out the common cause/configuration involved.

Personally, I don't have any issues, which makes it hard for me to repro locally here!

If you do, please leave details in the comment section of this entry!

Mike Swanson's Theme Pack: This is a great Theme Pack for W7. If only you could set animated .GIFs or animated .PNGs as a background, I'd be 100% happy with the new slideshow background functionality. I used to use that with Active Desktop for graphics card burn ins.

30 tips and tricks for Windows 7: Not all of these are W7 specific, but most of them are relatively unknown. Very cool collection of tips and tricks, either way.

Both are worth looking into. Some of the W7 tips can also be used on Vista.

Actually, there won't be punch and pie, but there will be pizza and soda.
I'll be going over what is new, what is not, and the features that get me excited.

January 21, 2009 Meeting

Main Topic: Windows 7 Beta
Presenter: Aaron Tiensivu, Microsoft MVP

Open Discussion: Cool Tools, Cool Toys
Facilitator: Richard Kenyon

Food and Beverages provided by: WMNTUG Board

Meeting Location:
Partners in Dental Care
2565 Forest Hill Ave SE Suite #200
Grand Rapids, MI
(lower level - use side entrance from parking lot on North side)

Time: 6:00p.m. to 8:30p.m.

Windows 7 beta has been available for download since January 9, 2009 (earlier for some technicians) and it has been so popular that Microsoft increased its availability.
Join us when Aaron Tiensivu, Microsoft MVP discusses the latest version of the Microsoft Desktop Operating System - Windows 7 Beta. Aaron has been working with Windows 7 before its beta release and will provide our guests with valuable insight on its progress, advantages and what needs more tweaking.

Update: Click here for the PowerPoint presentation I presented at the meeting.

I ran into this error earlier today on my laptop and I figured I'd share the fix on here because it might happen to you after you have installed and/or uninstalled many programs on your Windows 7 computer. There is an ongoing discussion in the Technet forums here and a great blog entry with screenshots on how to fix it here.

Long story short, you need to delete the registry entries that may live under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions.
Hopefully, this will prevent you from uninstalling and reinstalling in desperation to get things working!

There is an interesting gotcha that can affect users when you are in the middle of an OCS 2007 R1 migration to OCS 2007 R2. If you migrate users to R2 and they attempt to log into Communicator with a pre-December 2008 release of the client, there is a chance they will have the program crash. This is also true for the original RTM release of the Communicator Mobile client. Thankfully, there is also an update available that you or your users can install before migrating.

Download links

Communicator R1 update
Communicator Mobile update

I wrote previously about the other updates related to the December 2008 Communicator release here.

If you are unsure of what versions of the Office Communicator client your end users are using, you can pull up a database report inside the R1 or R2 administrator console and view this data. Thanks go out to Andrew Hitchcock for showing me and reminding me that this was possible in both OCS 2007 versions.

In the example below, there are a few users still running the OCS R1 RTM Communicator release (v2.0.6362.0), a few are running the update from April 30, 2008 (v2.0.6362.64), and the rest of running the OCS R2 RTM client (v3.5.6907.0).



Another tip for migrating: You should also do a Microsoft Update on all your R1 servers before migrating users over to R2, because they will then download the other server-specific inter-op updates so that the R1 and R2 servers will be able to co-exist properly.

Don't leave home with them. Many OEMs are still shipping the older 10.x and 11.x revisions of this software, and are known to have bluescreen issues and other bugs that should be avoided.

You can easily install these drivers into Windows 7 by using the compatibility mode setting of "Vista" on the installation executables, or by simply pointing Device Manager to the directory you extract the archive to.

The amount of wireless chipsets supported by this driver pack is rather astounding:
Intel(R) WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350, Intel(R) WiMAX/WiFi Link 5150, Intel(R) WiFi Link 5300, Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100, Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN, Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG_, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

You can read the release notes for this version here and download the binaries here.

There are also Intel Wired Drivers - version 13.5 - available from here.

Even though you might be leery of trying a beta Cisco VPN client, you are technically running a beta OS, so what have you got to lose?

This version seems to fix the infamous NDIS.SYS bluescreen-on-post-VPNinstall-reboot. You can see the various workarounds documented for the earlier version of the client here.

Update: False alarm - v5.0.05.0280 still has the blue screen issue but JoshP's instructions works around the problem.

Daniel K is back with a set of modified drivers specifically for Windows 7 for Creative X-Fi sound cards. Of course, it is completely unsupported by Creative or Microsoft but it is great to see this available as an option for end users. You can read the thread about the drivers here. Thanks to SevenRules on the TechNet Forums for the heads up.

On a good note, build 7000 as a host has working VM guest bridged networking, but the VMWare NAT still seems to be not quite working.

There is a new an improved workaround provided by the comments in my original post about networking problems with older builds of Windows 7 and VMWare here.

Overall, this assumes you are going to bypass VMWare's NAT functionality and use the built-in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) inside Windows 7. As a side effect, you will have to 'reprogram' VMNet1 to use the 192.168.0.x subnet.

1. Run the Virtual Network Editor as Administrator (Use RunAS or right click and Run as Administrator on vmnetcfg.exe)
2. Goto Host Virtual Adapters and remove all VMNet instances (VMNet1 and VMNet8 typically).
3. Click Apply.
4. Add New and Assign it the new adapter to VMnet1.
5. Click Apply.
6. Select the Host Virtual Networking tab.
7. Click the > next to VMnet1 and change the address and subnet to the ICS network (192.168.0.0 / 255.255.255.0)
8. Click Apply.
9. Go to the NAT tab and select VMNet1.
10. Click Edit and change the Gateway to the ICS gateway IP (192.168.0.1)
11. Click Apply and restart the NAT service. (Counter-intuitive, I know.)
12. Go to the DHCP tab.
13. Add VMNet1 and remove all others.
14. Click Apply.
15. Select Properties of VMNet1 in DHCP Tab.
16. Enter a Start and End Address for DHCP Scope (192.168.0.50 to 192.168.0.75 as an example)
17. Adjust client lease to a few days to avoid potential DHCP client renewal timeouts.
18. Click OK / Click Apply.
19. Select Host Only Networking for every VM that needs NAT out to your host network/internet.
20. Enable ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on the W7 Host network card that provides connectivity. Select VMNet1 as the network card that needs access.

Everything should "just work" with the IPs coming from the mshome.net DHCP server of ICS.

When I get more time, I will work on turning this into a screencast because it isn't "obvious" unless you see it in person. With that said, I have fully functional VMWare bridged and NAT'd guest VM networks.

Updated with notes from JoshP - 100% working:
I have tried many--many different ways to get the Cisco VPN client install on Windows 7--all resulting in BSOD (ndis.sys). I have found the following procedure has worked 100% of the time on multiple hardware platforms (including VMware):

1. Install Cisco DNEupdate.
2. Reboot
3. Take ownership and delete ndis.sys (in c:\windows\system32\drivers).
4. Take ownership and delete ndis.sys.mui (in c:\windows\system32\drivers\en-us).
5. Install Cisco VPN Client 5.0.04.0300.
6. Reboot
7. Windows 7 will repair itself (should take a few seconds) and automatically reboot.
8. Cisco VPN Client should work without any other tweaks.

Original blog post below:

Method #1 (Need more reports on this one):
1. Install the Citrix DNE update before installing any VPN client.
2. Install VPN Client 5.0.4.0300. (or above if a newer version is available)
3. Connect as usual.

Method #2 (Does not always work):
1. Install VPN Client 5.0.4.0300. (or above if a newer version is available) Do not reboot yet.
2. Install the Citrix DNE update. Do not reboot yet.
3. Take ownership of %windir%\system32\drivers\ndis.sys
4. Delete %windir%\system32\drivers\ndis.sys
5. Reboot. System will try to fix itself. Leave all defaults and allow it to repair.
6. Reboot again and login.
7. Restart the Cisco VPN client service.
8. Connect as usual.

Thanks to the helpful people in this thread here, particularly htwnrver.

Method #3 (If Method #2 seems to fail):
#1. Perform method #2.
#2. If you still get blue screens from ndis.sys, press [F8] at boot and use 'Last Known Good Configuration' as the boot option.
#3. Repair the Cisco VPN Client.
#4. Connect as usual.

It is temperamental to get install, but I have it working 100% now, without manually entering DNS entries, default gateway or routes.

Update: Cisco VPN Client version 5.0.05.028 seems to fix the problem.

Update 2: It looks like v5.0.05.028 still has the blue screen problem.

This one should be pretty obvious to most people, but if you are in need of accessing remote hosted applications on your Citrix/XenApp farm with Windows 7, to avoid any potential version check errors inside the normal client .MSI, simply use the XenApp Web Plugin - Version 11.000 in .exe format. I didn't even have to run it in compatibility mode and it worked like a charm.

You can download the client from this page here.

Based on the thread here, DaemonTools does not work, but Pismo File Mount does and so does Virtual CloneDrive 5.4.1.4, although there are still some unresolved bugs with CloneDrive.

Go to the dedicated page located here. Of particular interest for LifeCam owners is that there is an updated version that works with 64-bit Windows 7. On an unfortunate note, there still isn't a 64-bit driver for the fingerprint reader.

Sick of the hassle of registering for a product key to download the ISOs?

Skip the middle man, go directly to the download links:

32-bit - X86: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

64-bit - X64: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO

Thanks go out to Lifehacker for the links.

This has to do with the digital signatures of certain 3rd party drivers. The typical error message you will see after upgrade is: "Windows cannot verify the digital signature for the drivers required for this device. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Code 52)"

This will not happen if you do a fresh install of Windows 7 Beta build 7000 64-bit.

To workaround the issue for now, press [F8] on boot and disable driver signature checking if you need access in the short term before a fix is available.

Do you have iTunes installed? Most likely, it is the curse of GearASPIWDM that iTunes uses. You can fix this by uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes. Another way, if you don't burn CD/DVDs with iTunes, is to strip the filters off like I outlined here in 2006.