Tag Archives: Windows 7

Weekly output: post-TWC Comcast, airport lounges, Windows 7 PCs

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I’m off to Chicago Tuesday morning for the cable-industry conference formerly known as just the Cable Show and now branded as the Internet & Television Expo, “INTX” for short. It’ll be my first visit to this gathering since the 2012 edition in Boston, and recent news developments in the pay-TV business should make it an interesting event.

4/28/2015: What Comcast Giving Up on Time Warner Cable Could Mean for You, Yahoo Tech

Comcast giving up on its ambitions of buying Time Warner Cable gave me an excuse to suggest a few things it might want to do now that it won’t spend the next year in a post-merger food coma.

redesign Amex lounge post4/29/2015: redesign | travel: Amex tries to reinvent the airport lounge, redesign | mobile

My pal Rocky Agrawal launched this site this week as a marketplace to connect professionals with potential clients (see VentureBeat’s writeup). A few months back, he’d asked if I’d like to write about American Express’s attempt to get into the airport-lounge business; as a fan of making travel more comfortable, I had no problem taking on that gig and cashing that check. And if, in keeping with redesign’s ambitions, this post connects me to more travel writing, that would be okay.

I had meant to do my usual social-media marketing for this post when it appeared, but Wednesday ran away from me as the days sometimes do, and Thursday and Friday were just as bad.

5/3/2015: Windows 7 still a safe alternative to Windows 8, USA Today

It had been two years and change since I’d answered about the same question in my USAT column. But since then, Windows 7 has exited “mainstream support,” which gave me a chance to explain Microsoft’s support-lifecycle policy. Big surprise: How many commenters have testified that they’d rather use Windows 8 than Win 7.

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Weekly output: Web radio, Facebook privacy, Windows 7, Windows 8 backup

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The good thing about driving home from Thanksgiving on a Monday is skipping the Sunday traffic. The bad thing about that strategy is giving yourself a four-day week when five days is the legal minimum to catch up on everything that got shoved aside in the previous week. And then I had to burn half a day on a solid-state-drive upgrade for a laptop that remains unfinished… but I’ll save the ugly details for later.

IRFA post11/26/2012: The Internet Radio Fairness Act, And Two Things I Hate About Copyfights, Disruptive Competition Project

It had been a few years since my last rant about the illogical and unfair royalties charged to Web radio outlets (as compared to satellite and, especially, FM and AM), so I was already due. Then a few weeks of seeing Pandora demonized in ads and Congressional testimony further set me off, resulting in this essay about the inanity of intellectual-property absolutism. Fortunately, I’m not the only one thinking such subversive thoughts.

11/28/2012: Facebook Privacy Changes Not as Bad as You Think, Discovery News

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, something else irked me: Yet another round of uninformed panic over a proposed change in Facebook’s terms of service, this time featuring Facebook users sharing copied-and-pasted gibberish asserting their rights under the nonexistent “Berner Convention.” I hope this post didn’t make me sound like an apologist for a company I don’t trust completely.

12/2/2012: Tip: You can still buy a Windows 7 PC, USA Today

A reader wrote in to ask about putting Windows XP on a Windows 8 computer, which my editor and I thought a bit out there. (Seriously, about XP: Let it die already.) But we did see sufficient interest in a piece about getting a new computer with Windows 7. The column wraps up with an item about Windows 8’s backup options, which are sufficiently complicated that I may have to revisit them at greater length later on.

How to test laptop battery life in your sleep

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The most boring task I have as a gadget reviewer is testing battery life. First I tediously configure a phone, tablet or laptop to run a few Internet-connected apps and keep its screen on instead of dimming automatically. (To Android vendors who remove that option from Google’s Settings app: Try tapping a mobile device’s screen every 10 minutes for six hours straight, you jerks.) Then I have to sit there until the gadget in question throws up its hands, electronically speaking, and powers down or enters a last-ditch sleep mode.

But on most laptops, I can stop paying attention once I unplug them. That’s because Windows and Mac OS X each automatically log all system events, including low-battery sleep, and make that data reasonably accessible to the user.

In Windows 7 and 8, open the Control Panel (in Windows 10, open the Settings app) and search for “event log,” then click the “View event logs” link. In that app, click the “Windows Logs” category at the left, then its “System” listing. In a second or two, the center of that window will fill with entries.

Click there, hit Ctrl-F to open a search window, and type “Kernel-Power.” Click the search dialog’s “Find Next” button until you spot an entry whose description reads “The system is entering sleep. Sleep Reason: Battery.” That time is when the battery ran out.

On a Mac, the menu bar will show the last time the computer was on for a few seconds  after you power it on again. After that, the following routine applies.

Hit the Apple-icon menu, select “About This Mac” and, in that About window, click its “More Info…” button; in the next window that opens, click “System Report…” That will open the System Information app (formerly known as Apple System Profiler, also available in the Applications folder’s Utilities sub-folder). In its left-hand column, scroll down to the “Software” heading and select “Logs”; from the list that will present in the app’s top-right pane, select “Power Management logs.”

Click in the the pane below that heading, hit Cmd-F and search for “low power sleep”; you should see an entry including that phrase, preceded by a timestamp and followed by a note in parentheses that the battery was at “Charge:0%”

(I don’t expect many of you will need to employ this knowledge. But at least I won’t have to research this stuff all over again the next time I test a laptop.)

Updated 9/14/2016 with Windows 10 instructions.

How Windows (may have) killed my laptop

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Little-known fact about me: For the past two weeks or so, I haven’t been able to use the ThinkPad I bought last summer. Here’s what happened, in 10 painful steps.

1. Months after successfully installing the Customer Preview of Windows 8 in a separate partition of my  ThinkPad X120E (and somewhat regretting that it required me to wipe out Lenovo’s recovery partition), I finally got around to trying to install the Win 8 Release Preview Microsoft shipped at the end of May.   At the tail end of a seemingly-nominal installation, the Release Preview installer, it got stuck at the “Finalizing your settings” screen. After waiting a few hours, I forced the machine to shut down and got a prompt at startup saying that Windows would undo the RP installation and return me to CP.

2. Because I am an idiot, and because I was getting fed up with some networking problems in Win 8 CP, I decided I’d try installing Release Preview again the night before I was heading out to San Francisco to cover Google’s I/O conference. Once again, the installer couldn’t get past “Finalizing your settings”–which is a funny place for Win 8 RP to halt, since it doesn’t preserve any of your settings in the first place.

3. Because I’m an idiot, I then tried wiping the Win 8 partition and doing a clean installation. The results were much worse:

4. After yet another restart that night–which by now counted as “early morning,” I got as far as the setup screens where Windows 8 asks you to set a live.com user account. It said mine was already in use on the machine. Trying different usernames only resulted in yet another stall

5. With no Win 8 system available and less than six hours remaining before my 8 a.m. departure from National Airport, I gave up, reverted to Windows 7, and resented its slower performance all week long.

6. Back home, I took yet another stab at installing Win 8 RP in early July. I got the same failure: a bogus report that somebody else was trying to use my Windows Live account on the system. (By then, I had gotten a few sympathetic e-mails from a Microsoft publicist promising help from people on the Windows team, but I never got more than an initial, friendly “what can I do to help?” response from them.)

7. For reasons I don’t remember precisely, I elected to switch back to Windows 7, saw that the system had a round of updates to install, and thought I’d proceed with them. Bad idea: The installation failed, leaving the computer unbootable in two different versions of Windows.

8. Successive attempts to use the disk-repair tools in Windows 7 failed; a Lenovo troubleshooting utility came up, complained that it needed me to log in, and demanded a reboot with an “Okay” button. No, it’s not okay. The disk-repair tools on the Win 8 installer’s flash drive didn’t do any better.

9. Because I’m not a complete idiot, I had a complete drive-image backup of my pre-Win 8 system (plus incremental backups from mid-July). But I can’t recover it: The Win 8 installer flash drive said it couldn’t restore a 32-bit disk image–even though there’s nothing bit-specific about that job. (Sometimes I think the only way the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows could get along worse is if Microsoft farmed out the development of each to the Israeli Defense Forces and the PLO.) Edit, 2:43 p.m. And as of this morning, booting up the laptop yields the results you see in the photo above.

10. A 32-bit version of the Windows 8 Release Preview installer then said it couldn’t restore an image from an earlier version of Windows. So now I need to generate a Windows recovery-tools flash drive from a 32-bit version of Windows 7. And thanks to Microsoft’s unwillingness to offer a download of that program, this job apparently either requires a machine with CD or DVD burner or a painful amount of monkeying around with DOS commands.

But things could be worse. Wired writer Mat Honan, one of the smarter observers of technology around and one of the more decent human beings on the Internet, had somebody break into his iCloud account and use its remote-wipe feature to nuke his MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone–while also laying waste to his Twitter and Google accounts. So I’m not going to whine too much about this self-inflicted wound. Besides, I can always install Linux on the machine.

Epilogue, 10/21: In case anybody was wondering how this turned out, I was able to generate a USB-based, 32-bit Windows 7 system-repair volume using Into Windows’ directions. My only hangups involved having to disable Parallels Desktop from sharing USB volumes with OS X, followed by the exceptionally long time it took to format this USB flash disk in NTFS from the command line. Things worked as advertised otherwise, and I once again have a working Windows laptop–ready for me to try out Windows 8 once again when it ships next week.