I am currently using the beta of Windows 7 and I must say I like it a lot. Here's a short list of things I "discovered". I must add that I use it in a VMware environment, I don't like the idea of a beta OS installed as main OS on my workstation.
Progress bars are now visualized within the (minimized) taskbar icons
Screen resolution can be accessed directly from the context menu on your desktop
A Snipping Tool is part of default installation (at least in the Ultimate edition)
New 'Libraries' in Explorer-view allowing you to use 'Favorites' in your folder-structures
Much friendlier BitLocker support (Some UI improvements, including the option to right-click on a drive to enable BitLocker protection, support for automatic creation of the hidden boot partition required for enabling BitLocker on an already-installed system (!!!) and support for encrypting multiple machines with the same key)
Immediate media-discovery within Windows Media Player 12 (WMP12) instead of waiting to be indexed your files get added to WMP right after you add them to your libraries, like My Music, My Videos etc.
Multi-download from Internet Explorer 8 - Wait no longer for your first 2 downloads to complete before you can start the next 2: you can download at least 4 files at the same time, I did not manage to test it's limits yet. I do think it's rather strange by the way that this is possible, because Microsoft's official reaction in the past about the 2-concurrent-downloads-limit was regarding standards that they wanted to be compliant to: RFC 2616, which covers HTTP1.1.
Ofcourse there's much more to mention, but this is what I quickly wanted to add to my blog at this moment. This probably is one of those "ongoing blog posts" where more stuff will get added to along the way.
I experienced some problems using Windows Update on my Windows Server 2008 Standard machine. Now this is an old machine... really old I must say and I barely runs with this OS, but at least it works so I'll have to see about upgrading the hardware some day. The problem I had with the Update service in-the-end was not caused by these performance issues... Here's what happened:
When using Windows Update, several updates seemed to be available, both important and optional. When I tried installing these updates, I received error message 8024402C. The eventlog showed me it had something to do with WSUS, and I figured it had to do something with some kind of a SQL Server database as I noticed a database with that same name. After digging into the help files I found that was not the case: it had to do something with connectivity. One of the possible options the Help mentioned was switching my Internet Connection Settings, in particular to turn on the checkbox for automatic detection of the settings. Doing so unfortunately did not solve my problems. When I wanted to search online for more answers, it seemed that I could not view any website at all!
Looking at my network settings it seemed my only DNS server was set to 127.0.0.1 which was not that strange as I have the DNS Service running on that machine. Also, the websites which I host on this server opened up fine from another location, and the network icon showed I was connected to both local and internet so I assumed my internet connection was fine... yes it was indeed... for the outside world it was! I figured I needed to add another DNS server: I chose to add the IP address of my local router, as that does DNS resolving just fine, but I could probably have used my ISP's DNS as well. Doing so solved the issue: my internet connection worked fine from my server again, and the 8024402C message never appeared again!
Hope this helps other people as well who are struggling with this error. I must say I don't know why I had set my DNS-address to localhost only. I am sure to have viewed websites from my server before, so I think there are two options:
- I changed the DNS setting myself, but I do not remember doing so.
- I installed some fix/update/tool which altered my DNS setting
Whatever caused it, it now is solved! :)