Jakub Anderwald

I’m planning to switch from Windows 7 RC to the retail version on my desktop PC. I started wondering which version would I choose.

Theoretically there are 3 choices: Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. However, the price difference between Professional and Ultimate is only 12 euros, so I can choose between Home Premium (183 EUR) and Ultimate (294 EUR).

The biggest advantage of Ultimate over Home Premium is the Virtual PC and XP Mode. I use it to access my old scanner via USB (there are no 64-bit drivers) and play around with Active Directory and servers in my Windows 2003 test lab. Even though those come for free, in reality I have to pay 110 euro for the Virtual PC.

Yesterday I asked myself “do I really need it?” and I ran some tests.

It turned out VMWare has just released a new RC version of their free VMWare Player software. This new version can also be used to create virtual machines, so it’s a full-fledged type 2 hypervisor. It also can connect unregnized USB devices to the VM and provides desktop integration (a bit differently than Virtual PC, but it works). Additionally it has some extra little features, like more advanced network configuration (without the annoying DHCP server), automated unattended installer for Windows OSes and the ability to run different guest OSes than just Windows.

And there’s a free converter tool that lets you convert machines from VirtualPC to VMWare.

I have old unused Windows XP license, so the choice was simple – I’m staying on Home Premium edition.

I was setting up a test Windows 2003 domain network to play around with it. One of servers is a gateway server – hosting ISA 2004.

However, I found an issue there – the “Internal Network” card did not get IP address from DHCP server (installed on domain controller in the local network), but instead an address from APIPA pool.

The weird thing was, it said “Assigned by DHCP”, and the DHCP server itself had an IP address from APIPA range.
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I tried pinging this DHCP, sniff it etc. but with no results. Then I found some hint about a built-in DHCP server into Virtual PC. This DHCP server replies faster than my DHCP server on virtual domain controller, so it always won.

To remove this problem, you have to modify the System Policy Rule called “Allow DHCP replies from DHCP servers to ISA Server” to not allow the built-it DHCP server. To do this, go to ISA Server Management -> Firewall Policy and click “Edit System Policy” in Tasks pane. Go to DHCP rule (first one) and add a new exception.

Create a new computer with IP address 169.254.0.1 and add it to excetions. This way the built-in DHCP server will not be allowed to assign IP address to your virtual NIC and it will get the IP from other DHCP servers in your network. Which is exactly what we wanted.

I just switched to Windows 7 64 bit RC on my main computer. Since Crimson Editor was constantly throwing UAC popups, I decided to try something else as a text editor.

I started by looking at Wikipedia “Source Editor” page. I quickly scanned the list of free text-editors for Windows and decided to go with Notepad++, since it had most of the features I need.

I downloaded the installation package (with some plugins included by default) and it installed just fine. However, there’s a glitch. It doesn’t allow you to type in regional characters easily – they appear as if they were entered with ISO into a CP-1250 text editor. 10 years ago that would not be a big surprise, but hey, we have unicode all around us, such things should not happen, right?

I tweak the settings around a bit, but nothing helped. But, since I’m a geek, I have to resolve it.

I googled a bit, found notes about removing HexEditor plugin (which I don’t have installed) and then something about transparency problems on Windows 7.

Then I tried switching Notepad++ to run in backwards compatibility mode and I found out it’s enough to “downgrade” to Windows Vista SP2 and it starts working properly.

So – if you have the same problem with Notepad++, just set the executable file to run in Vista compatibility mode.

I’m a heavy usenet (newsgroups) user. I find it way faster than any other communication / collaboration method.

There’s one downside to using “fat clients” – every message is fetched from the server when you read it. It might have been a good solution when dialups ruled, but nowadays it would be much easier to just download everything and read afterwards – you wouldn’t have to wait a second or two for every message to be transferred. Unfortunately, you have to use tricks with “offline mode” to force such behaviour on regular usenet readers (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird).

At some point in time I said “enough” to loosing those seconds and started looking for solution. I found one – I’ve set up a local proxy news (nntp) server. Yes, it sounds complicated and serious, but it’s not.

Messages download instantly and I can save a lot of time this way.

Just download hamster news server, copy folder to c:\program files (or wherever you keep your software) and run the main EXE. That’s it.

Apart from super-fast message reading, you also get resiliency to server failures – if one server fails, hamster will download messages from another server and you won’t have to change anything, won’t loose your read / ignored threads information etc.

Go to configuration -> News configuration, Newsserver tab and add at least one news server.

Then to News-Pulls and add your news groups, so hamster will fetch them.

Go to configuration -> Local users & passwords, add a local user to connect from the news client and a password.

Basically that’s it – play aroung with options a bit. Once you’re familiar with the menus and configs, it’s time to start using the server.

Click Online -> All servers. Hamster will fetch your newsgroups and all messages – it might take a while.

Then start your favorite news reader and add a new server, with localhost as address. You should be able to subscribe to the groups you’ve selected on hamster.

Now, let’s make hamster automatically download messages when it stays idle. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any setting for that – but hamster has a scripting interface itself – let’s use it!

Go to script -> Manage Scriptcs and Modules, add a new script. Let’s call it Fetch.

Edit it and put the following code inside:

#!load hamster.hsm
### begin script ###

#!hs2

 HamWaitIdle
 HamNewsJobsClear
 HamNewsJobsPostDef
 HamNewsJobsPullDef
 HamNewsJobsStart

 HamWaitIdle

### end script ###
quit

Now, go to Configuration -> Automation, Actions tab and for Startup and EveryHour events set to run Fetch.hsc script.

That’s it. You have your own local news server operation in less than hour.

I would suggest to make it auto-run on Windows startup. It, sort of, makes sense ;)

Recently I found a valuable, complete batch file course.

It is written for Windows 95/98/me, but you can still learn some useful techniques there.

http://www.allenware.com/icsw/icswidx.htm