So I’ve always been a fan of Media Centre and although I’ve never really used it to its full potential (never had Live TV through it) I have used it sporadically on both my old Vista machine and via my 360 acting as an extender. What's stopped me from really moving to it full time, from a media playback perspective, was it’s lack of support of other 3rd party codecs (DivX, XVid etc).

However, whilst playing with Windows 7 over the last few days, I noticed something that didn’t really hit me until now.

Windows 7 out of the box now seems to support DivX and XVid formats (amongst others). All content I have on my WHS was fully playable in Windows 7 without installing ANY codecs. These formats are now able to also be able to played back in Media Centre (as opposed to Media Player).

Tonight, I’ve finally got a little time to connect my 360 to Windows 7 as a Media Extender and amazingly, all codecs can now also be played back via the Extender. I don’t believe this was ever possible prior to connecting to a Win 7 Media Centre and in addition the UI of the extender now reflects the Windows 7 UI (so I suspect the recent NXE update to the 360 also enabled it to also receive updates to the Media Centre Extender client).

All good news and another step towards me having a fully integrated Media solution at home. All I need now is for the next version of Windows Home Server (which will be based on the Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 architecture) to also include Media Centre so I don’t need to keep two machines on constantly to serve media.

As I’m sure no one in the IT industry will have missed, Microsoft released their Release Candidate of Windows 7 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers a few days ago.

Well, I couldn’t resist. Having played with the beta on my old Dell Dimension a few months back and being very surprised at just how stable and complete it was, the appearance of the RC really meant it was time now to give it a proper appraisal.

So over the last few days, I decided to say goodbye to my incredibly stable and astoundingly quick Vista x64 build on my Vostro. Having ensured all aspects of the system was backed up onto my Windows Home Server, I popped the DVD in and rebooted.

Now, I’m an advocate for clean installs of O/S’s as I know a lot of people are. Upgrading O/S’s, although convenient, forces you to bring along with you all the crap you’ve installed and hoarded since the last time you installed an O/S. “No” I said to myself. Even though I’d kept my x64 install of vista relatively clean (and I was sorely tempted just before of the work involved in reinstalling and restoring all your data), it was still time for a clean out, no upgrade for me…so I formatted the 500Gb hard drive and clicked install.

Ten minutes later I was staring at my new Windows 7 desktop. Yes you read that right. TEN minutes. That’s all it took from the second I clicked ‘format’ to seeing Windows 7 boot up. I tweeted just after I’d clicked the ‘Format’ option, and then again once I was staring at a Win 7 Desktop.

NO matter what anyone says, Microsoft have to be commended for having an OS that installs so darn fast.

There are a number of sites that detail the changes of Win 7 far better than I ever could, so I’m not going to attempt to. Paul Thurrott’s WinSuperSite has a huge amount of content on Win 7. Instead I’m going to concentrate on my impressions to the changes as well as my overall experience.

Installation

Absolutely flawless. My experience is getting Vista x64 to initially recognise my Vostro’s hardware was a real struggle back in March of last year. With Windows 7, not one unknown device and everything works as you’d expect. Wireless keyboards, mice, onboard sound, networks all worked right from the go.

On my older Dell Dimension 4500 (P4, 2.4Ghz and 1Gb RAM), again installation was very quick (~15 mins), and everything worked (except sound) from the go. As soon as I logged in, Windows Update immediately started to download drivers for my sound card and sound became available (with no restart I may add).

Application Compatibility

There was one issue though when I booted up. The 32 bit version of IE 8 kept crashing the instant I opened it (64 bit IE8 was fine strangely enough). As I only needed to get to Google to download Chrome (still my preferred browser), this sufficed. However for completeness, I wanted to make sure the 32 bit version of IE8 worked. Turning on and off the InPrivate filter seemed to fix it which was rather strange. However I had also installed Office 2007 inbetween attempts to run it so I’m not sure which of these steps actually fixed it.

Chrome also had issues with the default install. However this is a known issue with a 64 bit O/S and 32 bit Chrome (although I never got it with Vista x64 it has to be said). A lot of people reported that Win 7 RC didn’t have this issue, but mine did. To fix, you simply need to change the Shortcut parameters to have the parameter “-in-process-plugins” like so: -

C:\…\chrome.exe -in-process-plugins

This resolves any startup issues with Chrome. Apart from the two issues, I’ve found no issues whatsoever so far in the applications that I run day to day.

Performance

Now this is a hard one to compare on this machine. My experience with Vista x64 has been nothing but exemplary on this system and I sometimes think if only Vista worked like this for everyone I know it wouldn’t have such a stigma attached to it. Blindingly quick and never a crash, my 64 bit install far exceeds my vista 32 bit experiences (sometimes painfully slow, error prone and to be truthful, sometimes an absolute bloody mystery as to why the hell the hard drive was spinning at a gazillion rpm’s when the machine was doing ‘nothing’). Vista really hasn’t help itself in this regard it has to be said.

My WEI has actually increased by quite an amount as well between Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 (4.8 to 5.3). The bottleneck in Vista seemed to be my memory (4Gb of 667Mhz). In Windows 7, my memory performance is a far healthier 5.4. This clearly seems to indicate memory management in Windows 7 has had a major overhaul.

My bottleneck is now my ATI HD2600 XT 256Mb video card for gaming. As gaming is mainly done on an Xbox 360, this doesn’t concern me too much.

Unable to really compare on my Vostro, it’s a lot easier with my older Dimension 4500. Performance has increased from Vista significantly. Everything runs a lot lot quicker, even with the system’s modest specs.

The TaskBar

A lot has been said of the taskbar and I was a little cynical at first. It’s a total overhaul to the traditional task bar that has served all Windows O/S’s since Windows 95 and this is a real sea-change. Now that I’ve grown accustomed to it, it’s a serious improvement.

Now saying that, it does takes some getting used to, especially in the default settings it gets installed with (which I do prefer if I’m truthful). Once the way it works is known, it truly is a evolutionary step compared to what was there before it. How this will be changed and tweaked in future versions of Windows will be interesting.

The best way to describe it is a combination of the quick launch bar and standard windows task bar.

Below is my current taskbar (in the default behaviour at installation) and you’ll see both the applications that are ‘pinned’ to it as well as the applications that I have running.

Another mode of the task bar allows it to perform more like the current Windows Task Bar and only combine the icons when the task bar is full (as well as displaying labels): -

However I just don’t like the hybrid mode and much prefer the fully combined icon only view. I could probably write posts and posts about the Taskbar and its new behaviours. But the real great improvements are: -

• Jump Lists
• Much Improved Preview
• Aero Peek

Summary

Windows 7 is a serious improvement on Vista in almost every way. I use Vista day to day within my corporate environment and have grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies and pitfalls. However I can see Vista getting very old very quickly now I’ve seen the improvements to the usability that has come about with the redesign in Windows 7.

Well a few weeks back, my Xbox 360 died (again for the 5th time). I blogged last year that Microsoft had finally created a licence migration tool to allow you to transfer all of your purchased content to another console. this was particularly important as once purchased and downloaded, it’s locked to that console ID.

If you want to play it on another XBox (including a fixed one prior to the release of this tool) you needed to sign into XBox Live to prove it’s you. Unfortunately the newly created migration process only allows you to run it once every 12 months. And as I accurately predicted back in May of last year, I knew my now dead fourth XBox wasn’t going to be my last.

So a few weeks back, the same courier picked up my console for repair and whisked it off to Germany for repair. 2.5 weeks later and it’s back all repaired.

However everything wasn’t rosy. They had indicated that to drive customer satisfaction, they had given me a brand new XBox instead of a repairing my old one (more on this later). Now, on the Migration tools FAQ it clearly states that if your XBox is sent back for repair, any licences are automatically transferred if required to the new console. And in fact, if you try and do it again (inside the 12 month period), you’re taken straight to the ‘congrats’ page indicating success: -

My licenses were not automatically transferred this time and was easily proved by signing in using my son’s Live account and only seeing trial versions of the all of the arcade games I’d bought. Re-Downloading the content didn’t work either as the underlying license was still firmly attached to my old console, now presumably sitting somewhere in a warehouse in Germany.

So I contacted support to raise this as an issue. All was relatively painless thankfully. It was immediately flagged as an issue and escalated to the relevant teams with a promise they’d ring me back in < 24 hours. And they did, 15 hours later, on the following day, the escalation team rang me to resolve the issue. A few details were confirmed (XBox ID, my gamer tag etc) and I was told, “all’s done. The licences will be migrated automatically to your new console and we apologise this wasn’t done at replacement time. The licences should be transferred automatically within 30 days”.

Wait, 30 days?! Apparently instructions have to be sent to the billing and accounts department who then transfer the licences. This is likely due to financial reasons and revenue recognition, and I suppose if I think about it in this light, I can see why they don’t offer an open ended ability to transfer your licenses to other consoles. So until then, my children will have to have the inconvenience of signing in as me prior to themselves for starting the games. Luckily though, this is now a transparent process so I won’t need to download any content again (which is cool as I have a LOT of downloaded content).

So some interesting things with respect to this experience: -

• My console didn’t RROD, the DVD Drive simply started to fail to recognise a disk was in the drive. In my eyes, this is likely a DVD Drive failure as opposed to something more nasty. However, it looks like it’s now simply easier (and cheaper) to simply send out a new XBox as opposed to breaking it down, repairing the console and re-packaging it back up again. The rework costs here are likely quite expensive compared to simply shipping a new one out.
• I’ve now got over 3 months of free XBox Live Gold membership due to failing XBox’s. You’re automatically given a one month coupon whenever your console is repaired.
• Absolute cudos and credit to Microsoft’s Larry Hryb (Major Nelson). I had tweeted a question to him with respect to this issue and what I should do and he responded within 10 minutes that I contact support right away and they’d sort it. Given, I’m sure, how busy his twitter feed is, I’m incredibly impressed at the response time of Microsoft’s main voice for Xbox online.

Haven’t blogged for a while. Have quite a few in draft that haven’t as yet been finished so I thought I’d approach this entry like Marie Boran did a few months back after she found herself in the same predicament.

This one’s from the heart.

Christmas time is upon us again. serious food, presents, incredible expense (especially with three children), and overall a great craic (again especially with three young children as the ‘magic’ is still there).

With the likelihood of Santa bringing Guitar Hero:World Tour, a Pool Table, Surf boards and bikes, this Christmas holiday promises to be a fun one (if not a ‘wet cold one’ as I’m bound to find myself dragged to the beach to surf on either Christmas or St Stephen’s (Boxing) day.

However, this year will also be the first year in which I won’t be sending my Nan nor my Aunt Pam cards/presents.

Dorothea Whelband died on the 19th April 2008 after a short battle with a chest infection that quickly became Pneumonia. Fortunately, there was enough time for me to fly over and spend the last few days with her until she passed away. Those last few days, even though she was rarely lucid when we visited, I will cherish as she had had a fundamental part in my upbringing until I left home at 21. I still remember going around every Friday night, toasting marshmallows on the open fire and watching Startsky and Hutch. No, seriously…

Pamela McFadden, daughter of Dorothea and my father’s sister died a little over six weeks later after a long battle against Cancer. Here’s a life that has been cruelly taken away from us all far too prematurely and we’re all still a little shocked at how, in the end, it quickly came about. Again, I remember the majority of my childhood and holidays were spent either round her house or on camping trips with Pam, my uncle Charlie and my Cousins. Our families were close, given the proximity in age of my father and Pam and my childhood is filled with memories of us all enjoying life together.

Both women were fabulous examples of their generations and I truly believe the world is a little worse off without them right now.

When I started this post I really did not know what direction it was going to take. Should I create a Eulogy for two amazing women or simply pour out my feelings instead? I suppose in the end it’s none of these and serves to simply say that this year’s not been the easiest for anyone in our family. Everyone who knew Nana and Pam will know and remember just how amazing they were and trying to put these memories and praises into words would not do them justice.

However, time inevitably goes on and I will get up on Christmas morning to the sound of 3 children’s excited gasps and cheers as we walk into the living room to see what Santa’s left for us all. However in all of the happiness and joy that this time of year brings, it also brings reflection and I’ll also be taking a moment or two to consider the year that was and the loss that we’ve experienced.

My best wishes to you all this Christmas time and I wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Now, I should know better. Being an Architect of Enterprise Scale applications (millions of transactions, hundreds of thousands of messages a day and database tables the size you’ve never seen), I should know and preach the power of more memory.

However, I, for some crazy reason, have ignored my own instincts for a long time with respect to my own Home Server.

“It’s only storing my Audio and Video and running backups. Microsoft clearly calls out 512Mb as the recommended memory for a ‘typical’ WHS” I kept thinking. So why bother upgrading?

Well two things changed my mind: -

1. I demonstrated remote access to a colleague the other day and viewing WebGuide was really really slow
2. My WHS over the last few weeks has started to become a little more of a work horse, with some new planned blogs and sites running on it while in their design stage (resulting in both mySQL and SQL Server being required…)

So Friday just gone, I ordered 2Gb of memory online to add to the already paltry 512Mb. It arrived this morning so having just put it in, I booted the server up.

One area where performance has increased exponentially is with the Remote Console (a very cleverly disguised Remote Desktop Session). Prior to this, performance was only adequate (even before I added RDBMS’s to it). However the UI now absolutely flies with switching between the difference ‘tabs’ being almost instantaneous.

With more and more add-ins coming out for WHS, I suspect a great many people with experience the same degrading performance as they add more and more functionality to the server without being aware that simply adding more RAM will speed it up.

However, one challenge here is the fixed Sku’s of certain WHS’s (unless you build your own like I did). The HP Media Smart range of servers for instance, has no official way as yet to upgrade memory so doing so invariably invalidates your warranty. I believe they are aware of this concern though and are currently preparing an upgrade path for customers.

As a final thought, I should have done this six months ago. Knowing Windows as well as I do, I also know Windows ‘loves’ as much memory as you throw at it so if you think, or even suspect, your server/desktop is swapping to disk often, upgrade the RAM, the difference will be like night and day.

On that note, I sourced my memory from Orca in the UK. The memory was shipped within 45 minutes of me ordering it online on Friday and arrived here in Ireland on the Monday. Can’t ask for more than that.

So, I've been using WHS now since the beginning of the year and as with my previous posts on WHS, everything just 'works'.

I haven't experienced any issues and overall my network, numerous PC's and overall data storage are in a far better state than they ever were.

With the release of Power Pack 1 (and the fix for the data corruption bug), my entire photo gallery is now held natively on the server with Windows Photo Gallery accessing this directly (management of Tags, ratings etc). Prior to PP1, this was something that was risky if you had multiple drives and because of this,the photo's, until recently were stored locally on my main Vista desktop.

One aspect of my new regime that hadn't as yet been truly investigated was online backup (no real reason, just simply not enough time). However, after looking at the storage the other day, I had to be honest with myself and admit that some of that data is truly critical and irreplaceable (the 19Gb of photo's is high on that list believe me).

Yes, I duplicate everything at the moment over at least 2 disks (as I have the space) but there's still that risk of catastrophic failure. There's over 6 years of photo's there and losing them would be heartbreaking.

So I've finally taken the plunge and opted to add into my backup strategy an online portion.

One aspect that was important is obviously integration with WHS as this will always be my primary backup and storage source for all of the data held in the house.

My approach is pretty straight forward: -

• Use WHS Backup's as my primary backup strategy (and why not? As it just works *so* well)
• Use the WHS shares (with all important data duplicated over two drives) as my main storage for public and common files used by everyone in the household (Music, Photo's, Video's, Shared docs etc)
• Compliment this with off-site storage for all absolutely critical content and files on the WHS that I cannot be without in the event of having to 'start again'

This approach will give a pretty consistent approach in the unlucky event of a failure/catastrophe:-

• In the event of a Media failure (a hard disk in the WHS), remove the failed disk and replace. Absolutely no 'downtime' and all files are always available
• In the event of a desktop/laptop failure (HDD, O/S corruption etc), restore from a WHS restoration image
• In the event of a serious catastrophe, all files I can't easily obtain again will be stored offsite and can easily be restored once the WHS is back up and running again

After looking around at a number of options, I've decided to use Amazon's S3 service and Jungle Disk's WHS add-on to manage this aspect.

One of the advantages (or disadvantages depending on how the S3 service is used) is that it's not fixed price (but then it doesn't have any data limits either), and you only pay for the storage you use.

Given my strategy (restoration from offsite storage is absolutely last resort and only for critical content I can't easily re-obtain/recreate) this approach will actually me cost pretty much next to nothing on a month by month basis and will grow and scale as I need in the future.

Had I chosen to use Jungle Disk on my desktop's as my main primary backup strategy, my usage and thus cost, would I'm sure be more significant (as you do also pay for 'requests' for the data as well as putting data in and out). However, with the strategy above, I estimate storing all of my essential content will only cost me between €2-€3.50/month

So I suppose a lot of you would be asking, well this is never going to happen to me, so why do I need to backup my data so securely? Unsurprisingly as we all know, PC's are being used more and more. But then surprisingly, the absolutely lack of awareness to the importance of backups really still passes most people by.

However it DOES happen; A family member for instance, recently had GCSE grades lower than expected due to losing all of their coursework on the family computer. My good friend (Paul Hammond) came back from holiday to find his hard disks had failed. It happens. Period.

Now saying the above, I've luckily never, in all the time I've been in IT, experienced a Hard Drive failure or serious data loss. However, I've seen it happen to too many people I know and I for one, am now glad that I've finally put in place the final element to ensure I'm protected.

I blogged a few months back about a soon-to-be ability to transfer your Xbox 360 licenses to a new console. Somehow it appears the license migration tool slipped into being without a huge amount of fanfare and it went live back at the end of June.

As I've been waiting for this, I'm a little frustrated it wasn't given more exposure. There are a large number of people (including myself) who I'm sure have previously repaired 360's, that may still not know this tool exists.

Currently, there are a large number of Arcade games than my children can't easily play on their Children's XBox Live Silver accounts as at the moment, the licenses are still spread across my now dead and defunct, returned consoles.

The tool is a two step process and can be initiated by visiting http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemuse/xbox360/licensemigration.

Once you've signed in, you transfer all of your licenses to the current console and then simply have to 'redownload' all DRM'd items to the new console. The site clearly explains the steps and as soon as I'm home later in the week I will be doing this.

Interestingly enough, the initial screen shows you the total licenses you own as well as to what console they are currently locked to. My licenses are currently distributed across 4 consoles: -

I'm curious to know what the 327 licenses are that I downloaded to my third (now dead) console. I didn't download THAT many arcade games!

Some interesting points to note with the tool:-

• For all new 'recent' repairs, they is no need to do this, as the process is now performed automatically as part of the repair process.
• You can only run this tool once every 12 MONTHS. The reason for this I don't quite get given the functionality of the tool. This essentially restricts you from upgrading your console, if you're so inclined, to once a year only.

The time limit is particularly restricting for me. Given all of my repairs were prior to this process being available I NEED to use this to migrate all of my previous licenses to my current console. If I choose to upgrade to an Elite (or a HDMI enabled Premium console), I'm effectively back to where I am now until August 2009.

However, that's a bridge I will cross once it occurs. For now, the tool is a much needed fix for a large issue Microsoft has had with their 360 DRM policy and I for one welcome this version.

Microsoft is renowned for using code names for its product development and sometimes the code names are far more interesting than the final product names they become.

Well Microsoft's latest new product is a new version of their Cloud Computing technology (the current of which is Live Mesh which is in public beta). The code name for this new version? According to Information Week, it's Red Dog.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209400797

This gave me a chuckle but my good friend Paul hinted at something interesting (who ironically also works for Microsoft). I may find some some new visitors to this site whilst they look for information on "Red Dog".

So if you are someone looking for information of codename "Red Dog", I'm afraid you've lucked out but whilst you're here, by all means stay a while, take a read and welcome