Windows 7 Nuggets

In the past, I have been highly critical of Windows 7, but I have recently stumbled upon some handy features that are worth mentioning. For all I know, these features might also be present in Vista, but they are certainly new to all of us who are migrating from XP directly to Windows 7, thus bypassing Vista altogether.

• Calculator.
  

  Windows 7's calculator goes beyond simple arithmetic calculations. It has a scientific mode with such features as trigonometric values, roots and exponents, logarithms and natural logarithms, and factorials. It also has a statistics mode that calculates such values as simple summations and sums of squares; simple means and means of squares; and standard deviations of both population and samples. The calculator also includes features for date calculation and perhaps best of all, an impressive ability to convert a wide range of units of measure.

• WordPad.
  

  On the down side, WordPad now contains the same overblown, confusing "ribbon" menu system first encountered in Microsoft Office 2007. On the positive side, it does open Word's Open XML document (.docx) files as well as OpenOffice's OpenDocument text (.odt) files.

  Be advised, however, that the format of complex files might not be preserved. For example, I wrote a newsletter in a 3-column newsprint format which was totally obliterated when I opened the document in WordPad. However, even with the format destroyed, I could still deciper the basic sentence content.

  Aside from this shortcoming, WordPad now enables users to read Microsoft Word documents and OpenOffice text documents without having either Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed. How unexpectedly considerate of Microsoft to add such a useful function, flawed though it might be.

• Windows Explorer.
  

  In one sense, I consider the new Windows Explorer to be a step backwards because I miss the customizable icon bar at the top. Furthermore, the default settings fail to display all folders in the navigation pane to the left. Even worse, it also fails to display the full path of folders above the current folder, making navigation much more difficult.

  I know of no way to fix the icon bar deficiency, but the other two problems are eminently correctable. Simply open Windows Explorer and click on the menu sequence "Tools | Folder Options." In the resulting window, click on the "General" tab if it is not already highlighted. About half-way down the page, in the "Navigation pane" section, place a check mark in both fields marked "Show all folders" and "Automatically expand to current folder." Click the OK button to save your settings; that will restore the missing functionality. You will now be able to see the system folders that previously were hidden, and you will be able to see the full path of folders above the current folder.

  While you are still in the Folder Options window, you might also want to select the "View" tab. Then, in the "Advanced settings" field, scroll all the way to the bottom. Click the option "Use check boxes to select items" and click the OK button to finish. Now, whenever you hover your mouse over a file, a check box will appear to the left. You can simply select the check box to mark that and other files for subsequent action like copying, moving, deleting, etc.

  Before Vista, users had to first hold the control key with one hand and then click the desired files with the other. In Vista and Windows 7, with this "Use check boxes" feature activated, you can select multiple files using mouse clicks only. Simultaneous keyboard actions (i.e., holding the control key) are no longer necessary. This provides a more convenient way to select multiple files.

  Finally, there is one more Windows Explorer tweak you might find worthwhile. It irks me that Windows Explorer by default opens to the Libraries folder. If you do not use this Microsoft Libraries organization scheme, then being confronted with Libraries every time you open Windows Explorer quickly becomes a source of aggravation.

  Instead, open Windows Explorer by clicking on the Start orb and selecting menus All Programs | Accessories. Right click on the Windows Explorer entry and select Properties. In the Properties window, select the Shortcut tab if it is not already highlighted. You will probably see the default entry
  

     %windir%\explorer.exe
  

  in the Target field. Simply append the full path and name of the folder you wish to open instead. For example, if you have all of your meaningful data in folder C:\MyData, then change the entry in the Target field to read
  

     %windir%\explorer.exe C:\MyData
  

  Now when you click on the Windows Explorer menu entry, it will open to the folder you have specified.

  You can even take this one step farther. Click on your newly modified Windows Explorer menu entry. After Windows Explorer opens, minimize it to the task bar. Right click on the task bar icon and select "Pin this program to taskbar." The icon will remain permanently in the task bar, or at least until you overtly close it. Not only will you not have to drill down through the menu system any more, but the newly "pinned" Windows Explorer icon will itself also open to the folder you previously specified.

• Clocks.
  

  Users can add two additional clocks to the system tray. Simply click on the clock icon at the lower right corner of the screen and then click the "Change date and time settings..." link. Finally, click the the middle tab labeled "Additional Clocks." In the resulting window, check the appropriate "Show this clock" box, select a corresponding time zone from the pull-down menu, and enter a display name in the designated field. Click the OK button to save your choice(s).

  To display the additional clock(s), simply hover the mouse over the clock icon or else click on that same icon. In the latter case, a window will appear where the additional clock(s) you created will be displayed as smaller clock(s) beside the larger main clock for your own time zone.

  This method provides a fairly simple yet effective way to monitor the local time of friends or relatives located in distant parts of the world.

• Gadgets.
  

  Windows 7 offers a variety of desktop gadgets to enhance your computing experience. I found no life-changing applications here. Instead, all of the gadgets I saw fell into the nice-to-have, just-for-fun category.

  To access gadgets, click on the Start orb and select the menus Control Panel | Appearance and Personalization | Desktop Gadgets. You will probably see icons for a calendar, a clock, a picture puzzle game, and the weather, among others. You can download additional gadgets by clicking, of all things, the "Get more gadgets online" link at the bottom of the gadgets window.

  I was mildly amused by the Slideshow gadget which cycles through images stored in a designated folder and displays them in a small desktop window at a specified interval. Unfortunately for me, the gadget's 4:3 display ratio is not especially suitable for my 16:9 wallpaper, but the idea remains moderately interesting nevertheless.

  As Tom Zart famously wrote in the opening line of his "Garage Sale" poem, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Maybe you can find one or two treasures amongst all of my trash.

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I hope that at least some readers will find at least some of these tips at least somewhat useful. In my case, these discoveries help to partially ease my continuing disappointment with Microsoft operating sytems, of which Windows 7 is merely the most recent example.

O Come, All Ye Faithful

As a militant agnostic (it must be true: it says so on my Facebook profile), I have always been wary of anyone who wears their religion on their sleeves. Allow me to quote one of my favorite writers (namely, myself) from a previous blog article that I wrote in April 2010:

Ardent religionists have perpetrated as much evil as any other class of miscreant. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Protestant-Catholic strife in Northern Ireland to Al-Qaeda, religious extremism has wreaked havoc throughout history. We in the United States are certainly not exempt: the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and misguided individuals like Timothy McVeigh all claimed to be "doing God’s work."

Upon further reflection, however, I have come to a painful realization: I, too, am a religionist. The Green Bay Packers are in fact my religion. Consider the following:

• We have a patron saint: St. Vincent, as in Vincent Thomas Lombardi.
  
• We have a sacred shrine: our Mecca, if you will, located at 1265 Lombardi Avenue in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Its Anglicized name is Lambeau Field. Just as with Muslims, all true fans must make a pilgrimage to that shrine least once in their lives.
  
• We have a doctrinal theology: namely, "Run to Daylight."
  
• We have 11 disciples of that doctrine, not Christianity's 12, but that's only because football rules allow only 11 offensive players on the field at any one time. Just think how the course of religious history might have changed if Judas Iscariot had been excluded from supper by a similar 11-man rule.
  
• We had a wayward prodigal son who was forgiven his sins and ultimately welcomed home: Paul Hornung, who was suspended for the 1963 season for gambling but resumed playing in 1964.
  
• We had our own traitorous Judas Iscariot aka Brett Favre, who betrayed Packer nation by cavorting with arch-rival satans, the Minnesota Vikings. Favre then descended into purgatory when his refusal to cooperate prolonged the league's investigation into his lustful misdeeds just long enough so that his eventual (supposed) retirement rendered a suspension moot.
  
• Like almost every religion, we dress in special garments on Sundays before visiting our places of worship. Unfortunately, blasphemous worshipers in several other major cities like Detroit, Minneapolis, and especially Chicago, are misguided heathens who worship false gods and idols in the form of Lions, Viking Norsemen, and Bears. And, of course, everyone would do well to heed Willie Nelson's fateful warning: "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys."
  

As you can see, we do have all of the trappings of a formal religion. On the other hand, our religion has never executed anyone; never physically tortured anyone (I exclude the agony inflicted on Packer fans themselves by a starvation diet of just five winning seasons while roaming the desert wastelands during the 25-year-period from 1968 to 1992—and one of those winning seasons ocurred during the strike-shortened winter of 1982); and never started a major war. The only neighborhood invasions we have committed were to fill stadiums (stadia?) on road games to the point of having almost as many fans present as the home team's own fans. And the only territorial claim we have ever made is the following:

Q: What separates the best team in the NFL from all of the other teams?

A: The Wisconsin border.

So, there you have it: it turns out that I am a religionist after all. And though I and my fellow believers are as ardent as those of any other religion, my religion remains far more innocuous than most.

In that spirit of religious tolerance, one final note to the apostates who worship any team with the audacity to defeat the Packers in the upcoming playoffs: you may take comfort in the fact that there will be no fatwa issued—at least, not until after the Super Bowl.

Quick Take - Windows 7 (Revisited)

In my blog of 23 October 2010 entitled Quick Take - Windows 7, I ranted and railed against Microsoft's newest operating system for, among other things, not providing a mechanism for users to export their customized themes, especially cursors, sounds, and images.

Well, I was dead wrong. There is a way to export those settings to an external file and then subsequently import them into any another user account on any computer with Windows 7. Here's how:

1. Open "Control Panel | Appearance and Personalization | Personalization"
   
2. Pick an aero theme as a base
   
3. Make any changes you want to the desktop background, window color, sounds, and/or screensaver by clicking the appropriate icon(s) at the bottom of the screen
   
4. Make any changes you want to the desktop icons, mouse pointers, and/or screensaver by clicking the appropriate hyperlink(s) from the menu to the left of the screen
   
5. Click the "Save theme" link in the middle of the screen and assign a meaningful name for the theme
   

Your settings will be saved to a file in the following location:

     C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\
     Microsoft\Windows\Themes\
     [themename].theme

To make subsequent changes to your theme, open this .theme file with any text editor. At that point, you can change any or all of the settings within that text editor as an alternative to the control panel process listed above.

You can also copy your new file to the appropriate folder on another computer. By this simple process, you can implement your customized theme on any other computer operating with Windows 7—assuming, of course, that all sounds, cursors, and images referenced all happen to reside in the same folders on the new pc. To complete the transaction, simply open the "Control Panel | Appearance and Personalization | Personalization" window on the second computer and actively select the theme you just added.

Piece of cake, right? I'm sure you are wondering how I ever could have missed it. Me, too.

Changing the Subject

Have you ever received an e-mail with a blank subject line? Of course you have; everyone has. If you are like me, you want a way to provide a meaningful subject line both to identify the contents of the message and to help search for that message in the future whenever the need arises. Unfortunately, users of Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client cannot directly edit the subject line with the base program alone.

There is a Thunderbird add-on called TB Header Tools Extension that apparently used to work well in older versions of Thunderbird. Regrettably, it is no longer maintained, having been last updated in July 2005. As a result, it no longer works with any recent version of Thunderbird. Other developers have revised the original extension, but those unofficial versions are not supported by Mozilla, and they reportedly work in some cases but not others. I therefore generally steer clear of those unreliable, unofficial add-ons.

In the course of Googling this topic, I stumbled upon one interesting suggestion that did seem to hold promise at first blush. The writer's suggestion was encouragingly simple: copy the message to the Draft folder, then edit the message to change the subject line, save the change, and move the message back to its original folder.

That method appeared to work: it did succeed in changing the subject line. However, it also changed the sender's name to that of the mailbox owner (namely, me) instead of the original/actual sender, and it also overwrote the original time and date with the time and date of the edited change. If I were to later search for messages from the original sender, the e-mail in question would no longer even appear. Thus, this method does more harm than good.

Even though that approach ultimately failed, it did set me to thinking. I already have a marvelous add-on called ImportExportTools that is fully supported by Mozilla and is actively maintained. As its name implies, it allows users to export and import individual messages to and from the .eml file format. The beauty of this solution is that users can edit .eml files with any basic text editor. With this add-on, it becomes a simple matter to export the message, open the saved message in a text editor, type the desired new subject line, save the newly edited file to the same .eml format, and import back into Thunderbird.

Eureka! The subject line of the imported message now reads as I intended, and the message still reflects the original sender and date/time stamp.

So now whenever anybody tells you "Don't change the subject!" you can blithely ignore them and change the subject to your heart's content.

Microsoft Wireless Woes

I recently encountered a problem with Microsoft's wireless network connection. After buying a Toshiba laptop with Windows 7 for my own use, I gave my older Dell laptop with Windows XP to my son. The problem: the Windows wireless network connection on the XP machine worked only with my administrative account. It totally failed to connect when my children logged on under their limited accounts.

Whenever they clicked on the Windows network icon in the system tray, the expected listing of the available wireless networks that I saw in my admin account failed to materialize. Instead, the following message would appear: "Windows cannot configure this wireless connection."

I navigated to the control panel's wireless networks connection properties, selected the Advanced tab, and checked the box marked "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection." Still no luck.

I scoured Google for hours searching for solutions from other folks who had encountered the same problem. Some people suggested converting the limited accounts to admin accounts, but I refuse to do that for my two pre-teenage children: there's no telling what kind of mischief that would create. Others recommended uninstalling and re-installing the operating system, but that was way too radical for my taste. Other respondents recommended scrapping the current modem and purchasing a modem from a different manufacturer, another impractical solution. In short, I found no useful suggestions that I was willing to apply.

In sheer frustration, I continued to poke around my son's machine. Eventually, I stumbled on the fact that Dell had installed an Intel wireless network connection. It had not been readily apparent to me because the system tray icon was marked as "Always hide" and therefore was invisible to me. I suspect that I myself hid it when I first bought the machine in an effort to reduce the clutter in the system tray from all of the crapware that Dell installs on its machines.

While logged on under my own limited account, I unhid the Intel wireless icon and clicked on it out of sheer desperation more than anything else. Eureka! Much to my surprise and delight, the list of available wireless networks appeared as if by magic, including our own home network. I repeated the process on my son's limited account and successfully connected to the internet in the same way: by using Intel's connection rather than Microsoft's. My son has been a happy camper ever since.

As it turns out, I much prefer the Intel user interface anyway. In the main window, it lists only those networks that are currently within range. It also permits users to save wireless networks that they have previously accessed as separate profiles with meaningful names (for example, "motel@NewarkDE") for later use.

The Windows interface, on the other hand, lists all computers accessed in the past in the main window as if they were still within range even when those networks are hundreds of miles away and no longer accessible! For example, every Thanksgiving we travel to my sister's house in Pennsylvania, and Windows continues to list the wireless network connection to our public library 250 miles away in Richmond, Virginia. How silly is that?

Furthermore, the reported signal strength with Intel is much more believable than Windows. My son's wireless notebook is less than 30 feet from our modem, yet the Windows icon reports signal strength as "Low" whereas Intel reports it as a far more credible "Excellent."

Lessons Learned

There are at least two lessons illustrated by this experience. The first is to be wary of well-meaning but sometimes misguided on-line technical support "gurus." Be skeptical of extreme remedies like re-installing your operating system from scratch or buying replacement hardware. More often than not, there will be a simpler, more straight-forward solution to your problem. In my case, the answer turned out to be very close at hand. You might have to keep digging and consult with a variety different knowledgeable sources before you eventually stumble on a satisfactory method to fix the immediate problem.

The second observation from this episode involves Microsoft and the quality of its products. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we now have yet another case in a steadily growing list of examples where Microsoft produces an application for its own operating system that is markedly inferior to products of other vendors. You would think that as the originator of the operating system, Microsoft would have a distinct advantage in creating useful applications for that O/S. In reality, quite the opposite is true: for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Microsoft continually squanders its advantage and instead wallows in mediocrity.

As my favorite philosopher Yogi Berra once stated, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." In this case, if you come to a fork in the road with at least one branch leading away from Microsoft, by all means take it. Chances are favorable that you be happier with the non-Microsoft option.

---

One final note on the history and origins of wireless technology:

After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year, Japanese scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network one thousand years ago.

Not to be outdone in the weeks that followed, Chinese scientists dug 200 meters and headlines in the Chinese papers read: "Chinese scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibers and have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Japanese."

One week later, the Greek newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 800 meters, Greek scientists have found absolutely nothing." They have concluded that 3000 years ago, their ancestors were already using wireless technology.

Windows 7 - An Exercise in Futility (Or: More Questions Than Answers)

Wrestling with Windows 7 is sometimes as futile as bungee jumping without a cord. Nowhere is this more apparent than dealing with the logon default screen. The two primary elements involved are the default logon wallpaper (well, excuuse me: background) and the default logon screensaver. Let's consider each one in turn:

1. Default Logon Background/Wallpaper

A quick Google search will reveal any number of sources that describe the following method to change the default logon background manually:

• Open the registry editor (regedit.exe)
• Go to key HKEY-LOCAL-MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
• Select the value OEMBackground and change the value data to 1
• Close the registry editor and open Windows Explorer
• If it does not already exist, create a new folder C:\WINDOWS\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds
• Copy the desired JPG image file to the folder, then rename it to "backgroundDefault.jpg"

You can also provide additional resolution-specific background images for all screen resolutions honored by your computer. Name those files following the pattern "background[width]x[height]" in pixels: for example, "background800x600.jpg" or "background1280x720.jpg". In addition, all such image files must apparently be less than 245/250/256Kb in size. In the absence of the appropriate resolution-specific image file, the image "backgroundDefault.jpg" will be used and resized to the default screen resolution.

My new Toshiba laptop allows the following screen resolutions:

Toshiba Laptop Screen Resolutions

Resolution (in pixels)	Ratio (width to height)
1680 x 945	1.777
1600 x 900	1.777
1360 x 768	1.7708333
1280 x 800	1.600
1280 x 768	1.666
1280 x 720	1.777
1152 x 864	1.333
1024 x 768	1.333
800 x 600	1.333

It is a well-established fact that Windows 7 does not allow different users to retain different screen resolutions. If I log on and set my resolution to 1280x720, the next user who logs on after me will initially inherit that same resolution. If that second miscreant changes the resolution to 1680x945 for his or her session, then I in turn will encounter that new resolution when I log on afterward (much to the dismay of my 20-400 vision). The primary users of my new Toshiba—my two children and myself—all use the 1280x720 resolution. However, after any one of us logs off, Windows 7 unexpectedly reverts instead to the image I designated for 1360x768 (i.e., file "background1360x768.jpg") as the default background for the logon screen.

Clearly, a different default resolution is at work. That raises the obvious question: how does an administrator change the default resolution of the logon screen? I spent the better part of two hours per day for three straight days Googling this question with absolutely no meaningful results. Surely someone knows the definitive answer, but I have yet to encounter that person. If anyone reading this entry can shed any light on the subject, by all means add a comment to this blog. I will be forever grateful—with all the rights and privileges that entails.

2. Default Logon Screensaver

In Windows XP, adding the following three string values under registry key [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] causes the indicated screensaver to activate when no users are actively logged on:

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]

• "ScreenSaveActive"="1"
• "ScreenSaveTimeOut"="600"
• "SCRNSAVE.EXE"="C:\zBob\scrnsavr\JPEGsaver\JPEGsaver.scr"
  ...or...
  "SCRNSAVE.EXE"="C:\zBob\scrnsavr\picSaver\picSaver.scr"
  

I have two favorite screensaver programs: JpegSaver and PicSaver. Both work properly as the default screensaver in Windows XP, but the same registry entries fail miserably as the default screensaver in Windows 7. This despite the fact that both screensavers work correctly for individual users after they log on even as a standard user with no special administrative privileges.

The error message with PicSaver (to the effect that it could not find any image files) led me to suspect that for some reason the configuration file was not being read properly. PicSaver stores user configuration information in an external file "C:\Windows\PicSaver.ini" while JpegSaver stores its configuration data in file "C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\jpegsaver.cfg" where the user's name appears in place of [user name].

Because I created the files when logged on as administrator, I suspected a possible permissions problem. My hypothesis postulated that the default screensaver might operate with the limited privileges of the standard user and would therefore conflict with the admin only privileges inherited by the configuration files I created as administrator. Consequently, I attempted to revise the permissions of the configuration files with the intention of allowing all users full read and execute (but not write) privileges.

I first tried to edit the PicSaver.ini file using my trusty 32-bit file manager, 2xExplorer. I was able to edit the file contents just fine, but I could not change the user privileges. When I switched to the 64-bit Windows Explorer, much to my astonishment, I could not even see the PicSaver.ini file that I just edited in my 32-bit file manager!

I then turned my attention to the JpegSaver configuration files. I could see and edit those files with 64-bit Windows Explorer as well as 16-bit 2xExplorer, and I could even change the permissions using Windows Explorer. Unfortunately, adding users and then giving users read and execute privileges still did not succeed in displaying JpegSaver wallpaper images. In fact, I saw only a black screen without so much as an error message.

In light of these failures, I tried a different approach. An absolutely fantastic image viewer/editor called IrfanView allows users to create image slideshows and save them as a self-contained executable (file type .exe) or screensaver (file type .scr) file. By self-contained, I mean no dependencies on any external image files whatsoever: the images are embedded within IrfanView's output file. Employing this feature, I created my slide show and saved it as both file formats (.exe and .scr) as test cases. When I entered the names of my slide show files into the registry key SCRNSAVE.EXE discussed above, lo and behold: both files worked perfectly!

I was happy to have at least circumvented the problem even if I did not truly solve it. However, there are at least two mild drawbacks to this technique:

• To stop the slide show, users must click the escape key instead of wiggling the mouse as with a true screen saver
• More importantly, every time I find a new image that I want to add, I must recreate the entire slide show all over again. This process is a stark contrast to the standard screensaver, where the simple act of adding new files to any folder earmarked in the screensaver configuration automatically displays the new images as a matter of course.

Summary

At least three questions remain unanswered:

1. Why do the two screensaver programs with external configuration files not work as default screensavers in Windows 7, especially when the very same registry entries work so well in Windows XP? Does the problem lie with those external configuration files, or is the real problem something else altogether?
2. Why does the all-powerful and all-knowing 64-bit Windows Explorer not even display the one configuration file "C:\Windows\PicSaver.ini" when 32-bit file managers can? Both of my 32-bit file managers, 2xExplorer and FreeCommander, not only display the file in question but also allow me to edit the file contents even if I cannot edit the file permissions.
3. How does an administrator control the screen resolution of the default logon screen?

This situation is again reminiscent of the standing joke about economists: if you were to gather ten economists in a room to study a problem, you are sure to obtain at least eleven opinions. In this case, I began with just two problems yet wound up with three unanswered questions.

Just further evidence that computers are like air conditioners: they both stop working properly whenever you open windows.

Quick Take - Windows 7

In August 2010, I bought a Toshiba 18-inch laptop with backlit keyboard so that I can see what I'm typing even in a darkened room. So far, I love this computer because is lightning fast both when booting up and shutting down, to say nothing of day-to-day operations. Furthermore, the 18-inch screen is just gorgeous. Leaving it to return to my other 15-inch laptop is like going from a wide picture window to a tiny port hole.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the machine came with the 64-bit version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. In the first few days and weeks of experimenting with the new O/S, I have been struck by three revelations.

The first issue has no operational effect whatsoever but is mildly amusing nevertheless. It involves some apparent internal classification inconsistencies within Microsoft.

By way of background, I have Norton/Symantec anti-virus and firewall products on all of my older computers. However, I have grown tired of Norton's constant barrage of pop-up windows asking me to approve or disapprove a multitude of transactions. Because the price is right—namely, free—I chose to try Microsoft Security Essentials on my new laptop instead of Norton/Symantec.

This is where the fun begins. It appears that the update tab of Microsoft Security Essentials is totally unreliable. It often says "Up to date" even when the Windows Update panel shows a still-pending definition update! Furthermore, Windows Update classifies modifications to Security Essentials merely as "Optional", not "Important" or even "Recommended." At least the Windows Update module shows the needed update even if it does make a mockery of Microsoft's own title Security Essentials.

To further confuse matters, when I look in the System Restore window immediately after updating Security Essentials, it shows a restore point created in association with a "critical update."

In the strange, bizarre world that is Microsoft, three different elements of Windows 7 (Security Essentials, Windows Update, and System Restore) all assign different categories of importance to the same update. It's almost as if the individual elements of Windows 7 were developed by programmers on different planets.

I have encountered similar disparities in the past with regard to Microsoft Office, where the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) modules in Access and Excel do not always recognize the same basic commands. These collective disparities create the indelible impression that Microsoft must be a stove-piped organization where different software development teams within the organization do not appear to communicate very well with each other.

The second issue is a minor irritant that makes crystal clear how little regard Microsoft holds for end users. Fifteen years have elapsed since the introduction of Windows 95 which first allowed users to select from among multiple cursor schemes and sound schemes and to even create their own such schemes. That is all well and good. During that time, Microsoft has "progressed" through Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and now Windows 7. (I am a home user, so I will deliberately ignore the business-oriented Windows NT and Windows 2000.) However, in those fifteen years and five subsequent major software releases, Microsoft still has not implemented any provision for users to export those settings!

In Windows 7, there are 15 different cursors for users to select within a scheme; for sound schemes, there are 57 events for which to select sounds (30 in Windows, 11 in Windows Explorer, 6 in speech recognition, and 10 in Web Time). After all these years, users must still wrestle with drill-down menus to painstakingly hunt-and-peck for the desired cursor images and sound clips one by one. As an alternative, users may (and I did) scrounge through the registry and manually export relevant registry keys to create a .reg file which can then be executed on another machine. However, that process is just as agonizing as the manual entries.

It is past time for Microsoft to implement a convenient way for users to export these and other setting so that those settings can be easily transferred to and installed on new machines. It is sheer folly to have to re-invent the wheel every time users purchase a new computer.

The third issue is far more important operationally: that of backward compatibility. By that I mean trying to get all of my favorite 32-bit software packages to work in the new 64-bit environment. I have found at least four factors that influence how software will work.

1. Is the software written for 64-bit or 32-bit environment? And even when I can find a 64-bit version of my favorite software to replace my original 32-bit version, the 64-bit version still does not always work, possibly because of the next two issues:
   
2. Where is the best place to install software? By default, Windows 7 wants to install 64-bit programs in the folder "C:\Program Files" and 32-bit software in a separate "C:\Program Files (x86)" folder. Of course, all of my favorites were installed in yet another folder of my own designation so that I could more easily copy them to a new computer. Now I have to try each alternative with each program to determine the best location out of the three.
   
3. How best to launch a program? I have two file managers called 2xExplorer and FreeCommander which I refuse to abandon because they have two side-by-side panes that make file management, especially synchronization and backup, an absolute breeze. They are both 32-bit programs, and I am finding that opening a 64-bit program within a 32-bit file manager can sometimes produce quite different results than opening that same program using the 64-bit version of Windows Explorer. Similar problems arise with the converse: opening a 32-bit program in 64-bit Windows Explorer in lieu of my 32-bit file managers.
   
4. Are you running the program as administrator? Be aware that in Windows 7, even if you log on to an administrator account, you do not automatically inherit administrative privileges whenever you launch an executable! To insure that you are running a program as administrator, you might need to right-click on the executable file and select "Run as administrator" from the context menu. This applies not only to applications but also to system files like the command "cmd.exe" that launches the command console.
   
   As an example, I frequently use a marvelous utility by a programmer named Nir Sofer called Registry Scanner, or RegScanner for short. I especially like this program because it provides users the ability to search with a very powerful feature called regular expressions. RegScanner will list all the registry keys that match the search criteria. Users may then double-click on any of the elements displayed. At that time, in a normal 32-bit environment, the Windows registry editor will open for users to edit or even delete the selected registry key. In Windows 7, however, this last feature will work properly if and only if the user has launched RegScanner with the "Run as administrator" menu.
   

In short, experimenting with all of these different combinations and permutations for all of my favorite software is driving me nuts. I now have a greater appreciation for the reasons why businesses that are dependent on legacy software have been slow to abandon old reliable Windows XP. It is simply another manifestation of the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Physician, Heal Thyself

Physicians just do not seem to get it: their business and administrative practices drive customers away more than their medical skills. A few examples from my own life:

• I left my former ENT specialist because his office began charging five dollars extra for paying via credit card.

• We left our former children's dentist because his office insisted on total payment up front and consistently overcharged us. That forced me into the unwanted role of bill collector, wrestling with the task of collecting our overpayment after each visit. That same office also had the audacity to charge a late fee one time despite the fact that their invoice was dated and mailed two weeks after the supposed payment due date!

• We left our original pediatricians because of their completely unworkable scheduling system. With most physicians, when you are told to come back in x number of weeks, you schedule the next appointment before you leave the office. Not so with those pediatricians. Their scheduling system looked ahead only one month, so if you had to return in six weeks, you had to wait until the following month to even attempt to schedule the appointment. And invariably when we called on the first day of the next month to schedule a visit, somehow the schedule was already full.

  In fairness, the scheduling system was inflicted on them by their affiliation with a particular hospital. (I won't mention the hospital's name, but its initials are Southside Regional Medical Center (SRMC) in Petersburg, Virginia; more on them in a moment.)
  

  A year or two after we left, we were amused to received an advertisement in the mail from those same pediatricians touting the fact that they were no longer associated with that hospital—as if to say, "It's safe to return now!"

That same hospital deserves special attention in this rogue's gallery of medical administrators:

• One morning in July of 1993, my wife was rushed by ambulance to Southside Regional Medical Center after suffering severe stomach pains and eventually collapsing unconscious at home. My saga began at 6:00 am when we first arrived at the hospital. I was not allowed to accompany my wife into the emergency room's treatment area; indeed, there was an armed guard at the door to block any and all visitors. Furthermore, the hospital's ER personnel declined to provide any information whatsoever regarding her status. Despite my repeated attempts to elicit any tidbit of information, it was not until 11:30 that I was allowed to see her and talk to a doctor about her condition. The hospital staff held me totally incommunicado from my own wife for five-and-a-half hours. Absolutely unconscionable!
• In July 2003, my wife had x-rays taken at SRMC to diagnose a lump on her breast. The radiology department would not or could not deliver the resulting report to my wife's ob-gyn for almost three weeks. Excuses ranged from "Our fax machine broke down" to "We can't find a typist to type the report."
  
  At one point I myself called the radiology department and was told to have my wife appear between the hours of 8:00 and 4:00 on a particular Friday for her to pick up the report herself and personally deliver it to her physician. She showed up in mid-morning as directed only to be told, "Oh, we can't give x-ray reports out to patients."
  
  In short, the fumbling incompetence of the radiology department caused several appointments with her ob-gyn to be postponed. This in turn delayed the eventual surgery, and all the while the threat of possible cancer loomed large.
  
• As they say on the shopping networks, "But wait: there's more!" On the scheduled day of surgery, after my wife was already heavily sedated and ready to be rolled into the operating room, the surgeon casually dropped in to discuss surgical options. WTF??? That should have been addressed in the three office visits my wife undertook in the weeks prior to surgery. You can bet that when I myself needed surgery seven years later, I studiously avoided any surgical practice with that surgeon as a member.
  
• Even after the surgery was over, there was still no escaping the bungling ineptitude of Southside Regional Medical Center. They sent me an invoice dated 2 December 2003. I received the invoice in the mail on 8 December and mailed payment on 14 December. My bank received the canceled check on 31 December, so SRMC clearly must have received and deposited the check sometime before the last week of December for the check to have cleared the Federal Reserve banking system by the end of the December.
  
  Despite that, toward the end of January, we received a letter from a collection agency dated 20 January. If SRMC forwarded this account to the collection agency in December, then that is absolutely unreasonable because their invoice was not even prepared until early December, giving us almost no time to respond to the invoice. And if SRMC forwarded the case in January, then the obvious question is why? They already had payment in their possession in December and in fact had already deposited it.
  
  I continued to receive threatening telephone calls both at home and at work through the end of March. The collection agency refused to confirm with its own client that payment had been received, and staff at SRMC steadfastly refused to respond because their accounting was handled by a commercial contractor, not SRMC direct-hire personnel.
  
  In light of SRMC's non-response to numerous telephone calls, my wife even drove to their office in person in an attempt to resolve this problem. Astonishingly, SRMC's response was to blame the entire problem on me for entering the wrong account number in the memo field of my check.
  
  When I heard that, I was irate because SRMC's accusation was totally bogus for two reasons. First, I did not enter the account number on the check. I made no entries in the memo field because I refuse to do SRMC's clerical work for them, and even the most cursory scan of the check revealed that the handwriting in the memo field was clearly not the same as the handwriting on the rest of the check.
  
  Secondly, on behalf of whoever did transcribe the account number onto the memo field, that person transcribed it correctly: the number exactly matches the account number shown on SRMC's invoice. Consequently, any account number error lies with the invoice that SRMC's own people generated.
  

This last incident was the straw that broke this camel's back. In baseball, it's three strikes and you're out: Southside Regional Medical Center has had four strikes. Perhaps you can now begin to understand the reasons behind my unyielding policy that neither I nor any member of my family will ever again knowingly set foot in any facilty administered by Southside Regional Medical Center.

Postscript. There is an addendum to my first run-in with Southside Regional Medical Center involving my wife's severe stomach ailment. I strongly suspected that the cause of her illness was a jar of shrimp paste that my wife purchased from a small grocery store in Hopewell, Virginia. I had retained the jar in our refrigerator for later testing.

After we arrived home from the hospital, I called the governmental offices in the city of Colonial Heights where we lived. They directed me to Petersburg as the site of Southside Regional Medical Center where my wife was treated. Petersburg referred me to the city of Hopewell because that is where my wife purchased the suspect product. Hopewell claimed to have no authority to investigate because the contaminated product was not served at a sit-down restaurant.

In the course of speaking to all of the respective city governments, I learned that the only testing laboratory in the region was located in Chesterfield County. When I called that laboratory to ask if they could test our food item for pathogens, they told me I would have to tell them exactly what pathogen to test for. Well, if I knew what the offending organism was, I would not really need them to conduct a test, would I?

So, to all of you radical right-wing Republicans espousing the virtues of smaller government, I say "Hogwash!" The lesson I learned from this experience is that small, local governments can pass the buck and shirk their responsibilities every bit as well as any federal agencies can.

Final Postscript. Now that I have thoroughly castigated the medical community in our area, allow me to step out of my curmudgeonly character to highlight a hospital that does things right. In early August 2010, I underwent hernia surgery at John Randolph Medical Center in Hopewell. While I am still wrestling with the discomfort of the surgery itself, dealing with the administrative folks at John Randolph was a breath of fresh air, especially compared to the dolts at Southside Regional Medical Center.

Statements from the anesthesiologist, the surgeon, and the hospital facility all went to my insurer within a week or two after the surgery. I then received statements of benefits from my insurer followed soon thereafter by final correct invoices from each of the three medical offices, enabling me to settle all three obligations within a month. And best of all, I received no obnoxious inquiries from collection agencies seeking payment for bills already resolved!

It is a sad commentary on the state of American medical companies today that something so routine merits special praise only because it stands out in stark contrast to the fumbling inadequacies of other organizations. In any case, kudos to John Randolph for their swift and efficient administrative process.

Microsoft Stumbles Again

It never ceases to amaze me how a company like Microsoft—creator and distributor of Windows, the dominant operating system for personal computers in the world today—continues to produce the poorest, most feeble applications for that same operating system.

• Any number of free and readily available text editors (e.g., Jarte, Notepad++, and my personal favorite Win32Pad) run rings around Microsoft's minimalistic Notepad and Wordpad.
  
• Microsoft's imagers (Paint and Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) are similarly bare bones products. They pale in comparison with freeware image editors like FastStone Image Viewer or the fabulous IrfanView.
  
• The Windows archive (i.e., zip file) handling system is not only featureless but downright annoying. If you do not wish to pay for WinZip, you are still much better off with any one of the freebie archive programs 7-Zip, IZArc, or PeaZip.
  
• Even Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser lagged years behind Netscape, Opera, and other web browsers in introducing tabbed browsing. I even used the little-known Avant Browser whenever I needed to use IE because it used the same IE engine yet featured tabs long before IE itself did.
  

The latest Microsoft shortcoming is the Windows DVD Maker. Amazingly, that program ships only on computers with Vista/Windows 7 premium editions or greater. Perhaps that policy is intended to hide Microsoft's embarrassment by withholding it from the majority of users with more basic versions of Windows. It is just difficult for me to imagine how anyone would consider this an enhancement of any kind. Let me explain why.

My wife has a Flip Video Camcorder with 47 videos in mp4 format. She wanted to put those files onto a DVD that can be played on a standard DVD player for viewing on a large-screen television. My new laptop has Windows 7 complete with Windows DVD Maker, so I thought I was all set. However, much to my chagrin, I soon discovered that Windows DVD Maker does not accept mp4 format.

To overcome this shortcoming, I chose one of the larger mp4 files as a test case. I used the free software Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter to convert the file to avi format which Windows DVD Maker supposedly does recognize. Sure enough, Windows DVD Maker did convert the video—but it left out the audio portion entirely! A search on Google quickly revealed that this is a common problem: one particular user who tried to process multiple avi files through Windows DVD Maker reported that approximately 40% of his resulting video files had no audio.

Another Google search revealed a life-saver: a free, open source program called DVD Flick. This marvelous program accepts a much wider range of file formats, including both avi and mp4. I then ran both files through DVD Flick for comparison purposes. Lo and behold: both resulting DVDs contained the full audio.

Visually, the avi file seemed more pixelated. I do not know if the avi file lost significant data in the conversion process from mp4 or if avi files are just inherently more pixelated than corresponding mp4 files. That is a secondary concern; what matters most is that DVD Flick radically outperformed Microsoft's lame Windows DVD Maker by recognizing a greater variety of file formats and providing infinitely more reliable audio.

Bottom line: if you are stuck with Windows DVD Maker, do yourself a big favor. Download and install the far more robust and versatile DVD Flick.

You'll be glad you did.

Who Elected You President???

"This is what being president of the United States is all about. It's these tough, huge, monumental decisions… It's in a time of crisis making these executive decisions. It's just like our job… It's the same thing as being president of the United States."
— "Fox and Friends" co-host Gretchen Carlson

Boy, talk about an inflated sense of self-worth!