Order of the Bath

Do you like to keep a few shortcuts on your desk top? Those things that you need often or might need quickly, or those in obscure places that are hard to remember. I do. I don’t like a cluttered desktop but there are some things that are easier there. I have links to stuff on networked drives (that maybe require a mount or VPN before they are visible), links to utility programs like KeePass and PuTTY and some scripts that do routine things.

Microsoft in its wisdom (Windows 7) has decided to clean these up for us on a regular basis and if they are broken or not recently used then “tidy them up” for us—i.e. delete them. It wouldn’t be so bad but there are bugs in it, so it often deletes stuff that is frequently used and are not broken by any definition. This is not directly configurable, you have to turn off the whole of the maintenance daemon but it is not a great loss. Open the Control Panel and go to Troubleshooting (or System and Security—Find and Fix Problems on some systems). Now select the Change Settings in the left margin and switch it off. Done.

You can run it manually occasionally for the other benefits—same panel at the bottom is Run Maintenance Tasks. On the panel that pops up first click Advanced at the bottom and un-select Apply Repairs Automatically. The other things it does is check logs that may be wasting disk space, that the system time is set correctly and looks for disk errors. The last is the only really useful one.

Addendum: I notice that it also affects entries in Programs\Startup as well!

I have been reading about the new features of Windows 7 and one that looks attractive is the concept of Homegroups. This is an extension of the home networking facility which consolidates the files of all participating machines and users into common libraries. So, for instance, if you have multiple PCs on your network, each with multiple users then all their music folders are consolidated into one music library while the files themselves remain on the owner’s account. This is an extension of the “My Music” and “Shared Music” across multiple machines and accounts in a more transparent way. This has been available for a long time in Windows Media Player but the mechanism has been moved back into the O/S and extended to other libraries such as videos and pictures. There are not a lot of details, but I presume that this is for read only and write always goes local. The libraries involved are Music, Pictures, Videos and Documents and the sharing also includes printers. What it fails to mention, of course, is that it only works when the relevant machines are switched on!

An article I was reading on Windows Secrets, which is a lot more informative, suggests that Documents are handled differently from others. It says that “Homegroup setup makes sharing the Documents Library optional” but I can’t see why that should be given special treatment. Surely your Gangsta Rap collection and the pictures from your naughty weekend in Brighton could be just as sensitive?

In the forthcoming Windows 7 the hated Windows Genuine Advantage changes it’s name to Windows Activation Technologies and it is supposed to be slightly less annoying.

But seriously, Windows 7 is getting a lot more critical support than Vista ever has. One of the best features is a built in virtual platform for running old XP applications, though this rather depends on your processor supporting it. It is intended for the huge number of business users who can’t or won’t switch and are costing MS a lot of sales. It is reported that many typical retail consumer PC’s won’t have the right processor chip.