dennis' blog

Since writing Searching in Windows (part one), I have been doing more research on this. All recommendations I have read state not to index full hard disks as I suggested because it will slow down the index too much.

The next logical question is how do I find files that are not indexed?

The Search in Windows Vista had an Advanced Search button, which would allow you to check the option “Include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)”. I see no way to do this in Windows 7.

One way to be able to actually find a DLL file is to go to the folder it is in (in this case c:\Windows\SysWOW64) and then search for it. In other words, if you know where a file is, Windows can help you find it. Very helpful. Actually it’s worse, it will only help you find it in that folder.

It is very weird how difficult it has been to find a solution to this question. I figured out one answer myself:

dir c:\msxml6.dll /s

Has it really come to this? Do I need to revert back to what I last did in DOS to find a file while running the latest Windows operating system in 2010?

In part 1 of exploring the Windows 7 search I thought it was simply unintuitive but had potential. Unfortunately, after more research, things have turned for the worse. I can’t see myself relying on this search for anything. I will have to resort to Google desktop for file content searches and the command prompt or some other tool for file searches.

I have been running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on one of my two main PCs for about 3-4 weeks now. I like it, it seems like an improvement from Windows XP and Vista (admittedly, I only worked on Vista part-time and only felt the real pain when having to figure out how to do things on my wife’s PC and my test virtual machines).

I really want to like the Windows 7 search. It certainly allows you to perform more, faster, and more thorough searches than previous Windows versions. It is also far more versatile. It’s just really unintuitive if you want to do anything other than the default. I want to try to use it as much as possible; sometimes new features turn out better than your first impression once you really use them.

Thus far, I ran into a couple of gotchas, and here are solutions to both:

• Searching full local drives

  I typed the file name into the search window for example:

  msxml6.dll

  Out of the box, this returned all documents containing that file name as text, but not the locations of that file on my PC, such as the Windows system32 folder. The problem was that the predefined libraries did not include my complete local hard drives, but only some predefined locations, such as My Documents, Music and Videos. As a programmer, I often search for the locations of specific files on my entire local drive(s), just to make sure I don’t have a stray copy in the wrong place.

  I added a new library named All Local Drives and added C: and D: (both local drives) to it. Now the search finds all copies of this file on both local drives, as well as all files that contain the file name as text.

  Caution: Your libraries are also used as default locations for the built-in Windows backup, so adding more locations as libraries for searches will also back up those locations by default. You can go in and change locations to back up in Control Panel > Backup and Restore.

  I had expected this to be automatic after adding C: and D: to my indexed locations in Control Panel > Indexed Locations.

  Caution: By default, Windows will exclude some locations such as the Windows and AppData folders from the Index and it’s quite cumbersome to even figure out what some of these locations are and include them. This really ought to be simpler!

  Update: It turns out that this issue is far worse than I thought. Please see Searching in Windows 7 part 2 for more.

• Filtering searches

  You can use a filter to constrain the search results to only display files, and not files containing the text. For example:

  msxml6.dll type:=.dll
  

  Now the search finds all copies of this file on both local drives, but not files that contain the file name as text.

• Searching multiple Exchange mailboxes

  I have a personal mailbox on our Exchange server, but I also have access to 2 additional mailboxes that I frequently need to find emails in. Windows 7 does not allow me to search these additional mailboxes.

  I had really hoped not having to install Google desktop on my Windows 7 machine (why use two searches if one will do?), but this item is a big deal to me and that was ultimately the solution.

It seems to me that “remote control” technical support (using some version of Citrix or similar technology) is making computer support even worse than it was before. I have now been on the receiving end of remote support 3 times in as many months and I am quite unhappy with it. Without fail, technicians using remote support have wasted a lot of my time and not in a single case did they actually solve the problem.

During the same time period of time, I spoke to 2 support technicians via chat or telephone without them logging on to my system. They actually listened to my explanation of the problems and solved them, both in a brief amount of time.

It just seems like remote control gives bad support technicians an excuse to waste a lot of time poking around on a PC, hoping that they will stumble over some really obvious cause for the problem. In all 3 cases where this has happened to me, the techs did not listen very well to my problem description and were falling all over over themselves to try and get access to my PC so they could poke around.

The latest incident was after switching to a new internet service provider (ISP) a few days ago. Outlook was stuck in the Outlook Send/Receive Progress window, with all of my email accounts not showing any progress. To me, this appeared to be a systemic issue affecting all accounts, like the ISP blocking port 25 (Googling this a bit and looking back at my notes from similar issues with other ISPs confirmed my suspicion).

When I called the ISP’s tech support, the first level tech had no clue what I was talking about (this in itself was a big warning sign to me, since this is clearly a very common problem that every ISP tech should be aware of). After I explained the problem, the tech just absolutely wanted to access my PC. No additional questions, no listening to what I was saying, just “let me take a look”. So I indulged him for about 20 minutes, during which he poked around my email account settings and changed the outgoing server settings for my gmail account (the only one I allowed him to look at) to some other account with the explanation that all outgoing email had to go through their servers first (What the #### ?!?). Eventually, after not being able to get that going, he relented and connected my to the next tier tech support person.

The second tier tech, after listening to my problem description said “sounds like we need to unblock port 25 for you” and did just that. About a minute later, my email was working again. Magic!

Now, to be fair, the first level tech was clearly clueless and could have wasted just as much of my time without remotely connecting to my PC. I also understand that many callers to tech support aren’t necessarily computer savvy, but that would have made no any difference in this case in solving the problem (other than that a less experienced customer might have been stuck with a bad solution, like channeling all outgoing emails through this ISP’s servers, or even have their working email settings completely messed up by this tech).

I’m not saying that being able to remotely access a PC is bad; I use this technology myself and I love it. However, it should be used to aid, not substitute for, proper problem solving techniques. Ask relevant questions, analyze the problem and go from there.

Once in a while, I try to send an email in Outlook and I get an error

An internal support function returned an error.

How is this error helpful in any way?

What function and what error and what can I do about it? If you’re not going to tell me that, then why bother telling me anything?

It tells me, the user, that the email wasn’t sent, but beyond trying it again, there’s absolutely nothing useful this error tells me. It’s not telling me a reason for the error and it’s not giving me any information for improving what I did to improve the outcome the next time I try to do the same thing.

So, what do I take away from this experience as a programmer?

• If I create an end-user type of message, I’ll try to limit the amount of technical information in the message and try to tell the user what to do to resolve the error if that is not apparent from the message itself.

  For example, for a typical end-user, a more appropriate message might have been:

  An error occurred when trying to send this message. Try sending it again.
  

• If I create a more technical message, one that contains more useful information for the programmer (me), I’ll try to expose enough technical detail information so that when the message gets back to me, I’ll know where to look in my code to find the problem.

  For example, a better technical message might have been:

  Internal function XYZ returned error 1234. Please report this error detail to your developer. Try sending the message again.

  
  

I get a lot of screen shots in my email, most of error messages. Don’t even get me started on Word documents containing 4 MB BMP screen shots and then attached to an email. Or better yet, a Word document with a bunch of screen shots, which are then discussed in the email, so I have to keep switching back and forth.

The apparently best kept secret of a standard Windows error message is that it can be captured as plain text using Ctrl+C, since at least Windows XP. This is far better for emailing off to report an error, since it produces a far smaller email message, and it allows the recipient to select and copy text.

Typically, when someone sends me an error message screen shot, the first thing I do is to search for the exact error message text in one or more places (e.g. help, KBase, forums, etc.) If the error was sent to me as a screen shot, I now have to type in the whole error message. If it was sent as text, I can simply select and copy it, reducing the time it takes and the likelihood of transcription errors.

This works for any Windows message box. For example, this line of C# code

MessageBox.Show("This is error # ZAV45273###Y: you forgot to finagle the gizmo", "ERROR");

Displays this Windows message box:

When this message box has the focus, you can press Ctrl+C to copy it, resulting in this text:

—————————
ERROR
—————————
This is error # ZAV45273###Y: you forgot to finagle the gizmo
—————————
OK  
—————————

Now, if someone sends me the text version of the above error, it’s really easy to copy the complex error number and be sure I got it right.

I never use my keyboard’s Insert key; well, not never, but never on purpose. Usually if I use it, it’s like this:

type type type, type type type, type (accidentally hit Insert) type, type type oh man!

Then I wind up doing one of these:

• Undo undo undo, press Insert again (intentionally this time to un-toggle over type mode), then retype what I just undid, then continue typing normally.
• Copy what I just typed because I don’t want to lose it, then undo undo undo, press Insert again, then paste what copied from before, then continue typing normally.

So this is usually a wonderful way to derail my train of thought.

My Cyberpower PC came with this great Logitech Y-SU61 keyboard, which is quite simplistic (no extra function keys, lit-up buttons, just a nice, full size keyboard, yet light with a small footprint) and replaces the typical Insert-above-Delete key arrangement with an extra tall Delete key. I love it! When I got it, I had high hopes this would become the new keyboard standard; however, this PC and keyboard are probably around 4 years old now, so it appears a new standard has not taken root.

Yet, I’ve been to cheap and lazy to go out and buy 2 more for the other 2 PCs I use on a daily basis. When I searched for this keyboard today, it appears to be discontinued, but there must be others with this feature.

The other alternative would be some way to simply disable (like the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock keys, neither of which I ever use) or reprogram the Insert key.

As you may know, I take backups seriously. I have been trying to find a reliable drive image backup solution for Windows Vista. Since Vista comes with a built-in backup offering, I decided to try it. While it works, there are still too many limitations that commercial (and even some free) backup products simply don’t have.

Issues

• Limited availability
  The ‘backup your entire computer’ (drive image) option is only available on premium versions of Vista. Since I don’t consider anything less than a full drive backup a “real” backup, Vista Home users need another solution anyway. 

• No compression
  Believe me, with the size of Vista image backups, you want compression! Of course, I didn’t do tests of the same drive type and free space on XP vs. Vista machines, but my rough guesstimate is that Vista drive image backups of drives containing the operating system are 8 times larger than similar XP versions.

• No differential backups
  Again, Vista backups take up a lot of space, so you really want to be able to save space via differential backups.

• No backup scheduling
  Scheduled backups are only available for data backups, not drive backups.

• Cannot mount drive images
  The commercial products available allow you to mount a drive image backups like a drive, browse it and restore individual files. Ghost has had this feature for many years. This allows you to use drive image backups as data backups, as well.

• You can only store one backup image per drive
  Vista backup stores drive image backups in a folder named WindowsImageBackup on the drive being backed up to, which limits backups to one per drive. I have not found any way to browse for folders, create subfolders, etc. to allow storing multiple backup sets on the same disk. You can get around this by renaming the folder/files, but that makes automation hard and increases another maintenance step.

• Cannot validate backup images
  The other products like this I have used allow you to validate a drive image backup to check it for errors and verify it will restore properly. I could not find this feature in the Vista backup program. 

Backup products I’ve tried

• Norton Ghost 14.0 
  This was the first product I tried, simply because pre-Vista, I used Ghost successfully for many years. I still use Ghost 9 for my Windows XP PCs and we used Ghost exclusively for our in-house test PCs for many years. It just always worked. I didn’t have such luck with Ghost 14.0, it didn’t work for either of my 2 Vista PCs:
  - Vista Home Premium x64, HP, AMD Phenom 9550 quad core
  - Vista Business Ultimate x32, Dell, Intel Core Duo E8200A Symantec support technician remotely controlled one of the Vista PCs remotely for 2 full work days and couldn’t come up with any reason for the failure. At this point, I figured I had wasted enough time with this product and went on to try something else.

  Symantec, $49

• Drive Snapshot 1.3
  Drive SnapShot was recommended by our network administrator. It’s extremely simple to install and use (you can actually just use a single .exe file without any installation). I was also happy with the support Tom Ehlert, the software’s author provided in figuring out how to allow me to boot from a boot disk and see the hard drives on the HP Vista x64 PC (set the SATA BIOS setting from the default RAID to IDE/legacy mode).

  I’ve done numerous backups using the 30 day eval version of Drive SnapShot, verified them and restored from them. It just works!

  DriveSnapshot.de, $39

• Acronis TrueImage 2009 Home
  I mostly tried TrueImage because anyplace I checked about what other people use and recommend, such as Server Fault, everyone spoke very highly of it, and boy were they right. This product just worked flawlessly from day one. The restore disk just figured out how to access the hard drive on the Vista x64 box without any messing around, the interface is really well done and easy to use. TrueImage allowed me to set up a scheduled incremental backup with compression very quickly and easily.

  It also comes with a truckload of extra features.I’ve done numerous backups using the 15 day eval version of TrueImage, verified them and restored from them. It also just works!

  Acronis, $49

There are lots of other products out there for this purpose, both commercial and free. I did not try all of them, nor do I intend to. My goal was to spend as little time as possible to find a reliable and reasonably priced backup solution. 

Bottom line

The commercial drive image products I tested are worth every penny of the $39-$49 retail price that single non-server PC versions of these products typically cost. I chose Acronis TrueImage 2009 Home for my Vista backups. Being able to simply connect an external drive (or even a second internal drive) and use true ”set it and forget it” mode backup with scheduled incremental backups is just wonderful and I know I won’t forget to backup anything.

This post isn’t original in many ways, but this issue continues to tick me off. The sheer fact that this has been going on unabated for years confirms that more of us need to speak up about it.

So the other day, I installed the latest Adobe Reader 8 patch, then pretty much forgot about it. Today I rebooted my PC, and there is an Adobe Reader 8 icon on my desktop. I immediately noticed this, because, with the exception of the Recycle Bin, I have no icons on my desktop. This reminded me to check my Windows Registry. Sure enough, in my Registry, I found this:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"Adobe Reader Speed Launcher"="\"C:\\Program Files\\Adobe
    \\Reader 8.0\\Reader\\Reader_sl.exe\""

So what the Adobe Reader 8 patch installation did to my computer is:

• Wrote a Speed Launcher entry into the Run key of my Registry, which makes this program launch on start-up
• Placed an icon to Adobe Reader 8 on my desktop

It did all of this without asking me!

The Speed Launcher Registry entry is the kind of thing that gives Windows a bad name. While there are plenty of legitimate issues with Windows, one of the most often heard, and even used in Mac commercials, is that Windows slows down over time, both the boot-up time and performance while running programs. A lot of this is due to this type of behavior by companies like Adobe. Adobe Reader places a program into the Run key of the Registry so that part of the reader application gets loaded into memory when Windows boots up. The reasoning behind this is that less of the application has to be loaded up when a user actually opens a PDF document.

This practice is entirely self-serving of Adobe. Even if I just read one PDF document a month, part of Adobe Reader slows down my computer’s boot time and hogs my computer’s RAM 100% of the time I am running Windows. In other words, Adobe thinks that the Adobe Reader software is so important, so crucial to my everyday computing needs that part of it has to be running at all times, consuming some of the finite resources on my computer, no matter how detrimental this may be to the performance for anything else.

The desktop icon is mostly annoying, just another symptom of the audacity of Adobe to do whatever the heck it pleases to my computer. Also, why do I even need a desktop icon, or the Programs menu icon, for Adobe Reader? It’s not like I ever open Adobe Reader directly; it opens when I open a PDF document, most likely on some web site. This is clearly just another way for Adobe to put its logo in my face.

It would be one thing of the installation program to ask me if it was ok to do these things and allow me to make the decision, but to just do this behind my back is simply wrong! It’s also pretty underhanded to do this again during each patch installation, not just during the original program installation. This way, it forces me to clean up my Registry even more often.

I happened to pick on Adobe because it’s the most blatant and frequent offender, which uses these tactics with many of its products, but there are plenty of others:

• Microsoft Office ‘Microsoft Utility Startup’
• Apple QuickTime (qttask.exe)

Sadly, the list goes on and on. Together, if left unchecked, all of these programs would take up more and more time and resources on my computer until there aren’t enough left for the things I actually want to do.

Thanks Adobe!

Update (July 1, 2009)

It has been only two and a half weeks since I wrote this post. Today, Adobe Reader asked to install yet another patch and guess what was back in my Registry again? Looks like it’s time to seriously start looking for another PDF reader.

Update (February 6, 2010)

I have been using FoxIt Reader for a few months now and really like it. Thanks Kalpesh!

Of course, the stated problem remains, Adobe Reader is just one of many offenders.

I did just that until about a year ago. In that past year, I’ve had 3 hard drive failures:

• HP Pavilion, vintage 2004: this was my main work PC. It literally blew sparks one day. After that, the power supply was toast and the hard drive inaccessible. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because we could not justify the cost of replacing a hard drive and a power supply on a 4 year old PC.
• Dell workstation 360, vintage 2003: this was my wife’s PC. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because again, we could not justify the cost of replacing just a hard drive on a 6 year old PC.
• Dell Inspiron, just under a year old: this is my main test PC that I run virtual machines on. I had to repartition and reformat the drive, then reinstall the operating system. It appeared ok for a short while, then started failing again. It turns out that there were memory problems. Dell eventually replaced the RAM (another long story there, but not today) and now it seems ok.

I thought I was pretty good about back ups before all of these problems happened. Yet after so many failures in a relative short amount of time, you really find out whether your backup strategy is working or not. Mine clearly was not. Some drive images were several months old, some data wasn’t being backed up frequently enough and some not at all. I lost a lot of time due to:

• Having to reinstall Windows and/or numerous applications from scratch
• Getting data back from various places (source control, external drives, network)
• Simply not realizing what I did and did not have backed up.

At some time when we were discussing this mess, my boss Stephen said something to the effect of “If you don’t have a full drive backup, you don’t have a backup.” I now realize how right he was — don’t tell him! . 

Now I use scheduled backups on my daily working PCs and created a schedule in my Outlook calendar to remind me to back up the other PCs every two weeks. I bought a couple of big external drives (750 GB and 1.5 TB) and now have enough room for multiple drive image backups for each PC, so I can “roll back” to any of several drive revisions.

There are so many benefits to doing full drive image backups:

• You know you have everything backed up. No more “did I backup X before this crash”?
• It’s inexpensive: hard drives, including ready-to-use external drives, are cheaper than ever before.
• It’s easy: most drive image backup software today has true “set it and forget it” modes, with backup scheduling.
• Most drive imaging software today allows you to mount a drive image as a drive so you can view and retrieve individual folders and files from them, so drive image backups can also serve as data backup (within limits).

Remember to actually test restoring of your backup images, so the first time you try it isn’t after a drive failure. That’s a bad time to find out that it doesn’t work!