Windows Seven and Sidebar Gadgets

2009-10-18T14:27:03.153

I've been using Windows 7 for a while now and my test experience is nearly great, with some exceptions like for occasional NVidia driver crashing the kernel and a few restarts because of it. The other day, I found something new : my sidebar gadget was missing completely! After searching for it and googling, it turns out disable UAC altogether (setting to "Never Notify") will make sidebar completely disappear and as soon as you bring it up only one notch (setting it to "Do not dim my desktop") will automagically bring it back after a restart.

Luckily for me, guys on My Digital Life forum have a hack to get this going :

1- Close all gadgets.

2- Take the ownership of the Gadget folder and grant permission to Administrators (folder is located on Windows Drive:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar)

3- There are a couple of file here, create a backup copy.

4- Download the patched files here.

5- Overwrite the existing files with the ones in the zip file.

6- Re-add all your gadgets to your desktop.

Note that this is a patch. It worked on my machine but use it at your own risk.

Using Windows Seven Beta

2009-10-19T13:55:24.867

It's been a few weeks since I've installed Windows 7 on my work development box. During the installation everything went fine and all the applications I had on my Windows Vista installed and worked fine under new windows 7, except for Skype for which I had to download and install their version 4.0 Beta. As a Vista user, I found myself immediately familiar with the environment but there are a lot of goodies here and there which made me say "Nice" loud and clear. Performance gain is totally noticeable compared to Vista and memory usage is as low as it can be. Fresh installation of Windows 7 occupies just 700 MB of memory which is obviously way lower than Vista.

I had very few problems using it. The disastrous one was two occasional system crashes when I was designing WPF apps in Visual Studio 2008. The design screen of my WPF UI was frozen and with just a mouse click system had a hard crash. The other issue is using Virtual PC. When windows overlap the VPC window, it goes black and I have to move the window a little bit to see the content (I'm using VPC in Windowed mode, not fullscreen). This too is very annoying because Windows are overlapping each other all the time and its giving me a hard time.

I know this is beta stuff and things may be broken and not working, but I see that guys at Windows 7 team have done a great job.

Update : If you have a Nvidia graphic card, upgrading the driver via Windows Update will solve the VPC going black.

Win7 - SeeSharp

Windows Seven and Sidebar Gadgets

Using Windows Seven Beta