I like to use the monthly Mozilla Foxkeh desktop wallpaper.  Right now, I have the January 2011 wallpaper — this nice, large, lossless PNG.  (By the way, the word that he is in the progress of writing is “火狐”, which literally means “fire fox.”  How cool!)

Anyway, I noticed that there is crappy compression on the image shown on my desktop, particularly around the numbers that make of the calendar.  This has been occurring in the wallpapers for past months as well.  If I open up the PNG (that I told Windows to use!!) and zoom way in, the image is crystal clear.  But on the desktop, it is junk.  Take a look, I zoomed in on the “2011″ at the top-left of the calendar.  On the left is the data from the PNG as viewed in any decent graphics application, and on the right is what appears on my desktop.

Yuck!

Now, with perhaps more typical wallpapers like photographs, maybe this wouldn’t be so noticeable.  But this is still dumb.  If I provide a lossless image, why can’t Windows use it directly, or at least convert it for use in a lossless manner?

I happen to know that in the registry, the path to your current wallpaper is located at HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper.  Taking a look at the value stored there…

That’s right, it is pointing at TranscodedWallpaper.jpg, located in the depths of my user profile.  So, Windows took my PNG and converted it to JPEG to be used as my wallpaper.  Ugh.  Ugh ugh ugh.

Anyway, there’s a couple of ways around the problem.  First, you can open the PNG image in Internet Explorer or Firefox or Windows Live Photo Gallery (or perhaps any number of other applications), right-click on it, and select the option to use it as your desktop background.  It will be properly set, without the crappy compression occurring.  (I normally set it through the control panel you get by right-clicking your desktop and clicking “Personalize.”  I confirmed that going back there to set it restores the crappy JPEG compression.)

The other option would be to convert the image to BMP and set the path to it manually in the registry, at the value shown above.  Then, log out and log back in to have Windows notice that the wallpaper has changed.

Hopefully this will be addressed in the next major Windows release!  (Not addressed in the forthcoming Windows 7 Service Pack 1, sorry.)

Well, the cheesiest way to fix this problem is to set the Print Spooler service to automatically after failure.  Visit the Print Spooler service properties in the Services module in the MMC and click on the “Recovery” tab.  I found the default settings to be “Restart the Service” for first and second failures, but not for subsequent failures.  Set all three of the options to “Restart the Service.”

Alright… problem solved.

Except the Print Spooler service is still crashing, as I can see in the reliability monitor:

What’s this?  Some of these crashes are 10 minutes apart or less?  Even though the Print Spooler restart every time it crashes, I’d like to get rid of the crashes altogether.

Looking at the system event logs, I found error messages that correspond to the service crash times that look like this:

Faulting application name: spoolsv.exe, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bd3d1
Faulting module name: wsdapi.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be0a1
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000000769a
Faulting process id: 0×1340
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb3e447c97686a
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\System32\spoolsv.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\wsdapi.dll
Report Id: d1e7f7eb-aa38-11df-b6ff-caee131491bf

Ah ha!  wsdapi.dll is blamed for crashing the Print Spooler service.  Some research indicates that this DLL is used to talk to printers configured to print via WSD, or Web Services for Devices.

Turns out that we have a couple of printers at the office where I work that support WSD, and Windows 7 had automatically chosen WSD when I set them up using the printer setup wizard.  By the way, you can check to see if you have any printers set up to use WSD by opening Print Management (find it using the Start Menu search), and then clicking on Print Servers -> (your computer) -> Ports.  Any WSD ports will have a name starting with “WSD.”

Now, I don’t know if this crash is because of Microsoft’s WSD support, or flaky printer drivers, or a flaky WSD implementation on the printer itself, or what.  All of the print drivers I am using are either the ones bundled with Windows 7 or ones provided automatically by Windows Update, though.  Anyway, I decided to delete the WSD printers and set them up again using plain old TCP/IP printing without WSD, to see if that cured the problem.  Sure enough, it did.  Here’s how it goes.

In the printer setup wizard, after telling it you want to search for a network printer, make sure you choose the option that says your printer was not listed (even if it was).

Then say you want to add a printer by its IP address.

Then set the device type to “TCP/IP Device” instead of “Autodetect” or “WSD”…

And then, type in the IP address.

Then complete the printer setup as normal and repeat for any other WSD printers that you have.  If you got them all, no more crashes due to WSD!

Update: September 17, 2010

Barnkeeper below in the comments suggests that this is related to security issue MS10-061 (corrected by update KB2347290).  I have tested this and confirmed that the update does not fix the problem.  The Print Spooler service continues to crash even with the update applied.

Update: February 3, 2011

This issue still occurs in Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

Anyway, this error popped up for me in Windows 7 the other day.  After the computer boots up, you click on your user icon, type in your password, and BAM!  “The User Profile Service service failed the logon.  User profile cannot be loaded.”  And then you are logged off, and stuck back at the user select screen.

If you’re having this problem, hopefully you have another account on the computer that you can sign in to.  To fix it…

• Sign into another Windows account.
• Run the registry editor.
• Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.
• Look at the sub-keys here in the form of S-1-5-21-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXX.
• One of them is probably duplicated with the extension “.bak.”  Remove (or backup) the one without the .bak, and then rename the remaining one, removing the .bak extension.
• Log out and try to log in as your troublesome user.  Should be fixed now!

Now, why did this happen in the first place?  I think it has something to do with Windows Backup creating a backup copy of the profile during the backup procedure, and then being interrupted or something and not restoring things to how they used to be.  Maybe there are other scenarios that can cause this problem as well.  In any case, I hope this helps someone!

By the way, while this happened to me on Windows 7, I understand that the error can occur on Windows Vista as well.

Update: April 26, 2010

Some commenters have noted that if you only have one account on your computer, you may still be able to use this trick to fix your problem.  Try booting in safe mode (press F8 at boot).  If you can log in using safe mode, fix the registry as described above, and then reboot into normal mode and you should be all set.

Update: September 1, 2010

If you do not know how to use the registry editor, or you do not know how to start your computer in safe mode, Google up a tutorial for either of these and once you figure them out, you should be able to use this information to solve your problem.  Or, get a more experienced techy friend to look at your computer and point him or her to this article.  Explaining these is beyond the scope of this article and I won’t be posting any more detailed step-by-step in response to comments.

Update: December 1, 2010

Jon Hege reports in the comments that this problem may also be caused by a missing C:\Users\Default folder.  In this case, you may be able to copy the folder over from another machine to correct the issue.

But if you are dealing with stuff on a different machine, perhaps by Windows file sharing, there’s no way to elevate yourself.  So, if you are trying to access a shared folder that only “Administrators” are allowed to access, even if you are a member of the “Administrators” group, you will not be able to access it.

The fix for this is to disable remote UAC processing.  With this disabled, users in the “Administrators” group will be able to do what they have permission to do without elevating, if they are accessing the machine over the network.  To do this, create the following DWORD registry value (if it does not exist already):

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set the value data to 0 to disable remote UAC processing and to 1 to enable it.

The reason I wanted to disable remote UAC processing is so that I can access the contents of local backups created by Windows Backup on Windows 7 remotely.  Windows automatically restricts access to the backup folder it creates to the “Administrators” group.  Even if you change the permissions, they will be reset next time the backup runs.  But I imagine that there are a number of situations where this would be helpful.

For more information, see this MSDN article.

However, there’s an easy way to turn such a “locked” disc into a disc that will install any edition again, just like with Windows Vista.

First, make an ISO image of your Windows 7 DVD if you do not already have one.  (I use UltraISO, but there are any number of utilities for doing this.)

Then, open the ISO image in your favorite ISO editor (again, I use UltraISO).  Navigate to the “sources” directory and delete the “ei.cfg” file.

Save the image and burn it to disc.  Now, when you use it to start a Windows 7 install, you will get the option to choose which edition you want to install.

Make sure that you choose the one that matches which version you actually have a license for!  Otherwise, you will not be able to enter your product key at the end of the installation process.

Note that Windows 7 Enterprise is not included in the list in the screen shot.  Like Windows Vista Enterprise, you’ll need a separate disc for it still.  However, if you are using a 32-bit Windows 7 install DVD, you will also have “Windows 7 Starter” on the disc.

Windows, of course, lets you specify some amount of time to wait before turning off your screen.  But, here’s a utility you can use to turn off your screen right away.

Head over to Jim Chevalier’s downloads page and grab Monoff4.  If you just run it, it will give you a one-time configuration to allow you to select the power-off mode.  Then, running it makes the screen just power off.  It wakes up when you move the mouse or bang on the keyboard.

Oh, the reason I finally got around to looking for a solution to this is that since I installed Windows 7, my screen has not been shutting off after the 1 hour I told it to wait — it just goes black, with the backlight still on.  This utility properly shuts off the screen.

If you’d like to also have your Windows session lock when you turn off the screen, grab LockWS from the same page, and set up a batch file like this:

@echo off
start Monoff4.exe
LockWS

(It seems that if I try to launch Monoff4 without the “.exe“, it brings up the configuration screen again.)

You can create a shortcut to this batch file and pin it to your Start menu, or wherever you like, for when you would just like the screen off.

That’s all for today!

However, I find that libavcodec is not fast enough to decode high-bitrate h.264 content in real-time on my machine (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo) — say, for example, the h.264 content that you would find on a Blu-ray disc.  So, I set out looking for alternatives.

The most obvious choice is CoreAVC (although that will cost you $15!).  They boast having the fastest software h.264 decoder available — and they’re probably right.  I downloaded the trial version and found that it allowed my computer, for the first time, to play back a Blu-ray encoding without stuttering or hiccuping or dropping frames.  Unfortunately, my particular Blu-ray movie (Stargate: Continuum) apparently was encoded by some encoder that did not follow the AVC spec completely, and thus, CoreAVC has some decoding errors (although the video is decoded fine by libavcodec, if a bit too slowly).  I’ve been promised that a workaround for this issue will be present in CoreAVC 2.0, which may come along at around the same time as Windows 7′s general availability.

There’s also hardware-assisted decoding.  Maybe if you have a good GPU, this is an option.  On my machine, the GPU supports h.264 decoding, but it is even slower than libavcodec.

Another option is just to use Windows 7′s built-in h.264 support, that I had read about at some point, but completely slipped my mind until after I checked out CoreAVC.  So, here’s how to configure Media Player Classic to prefer Windows 7′s native support over that provided by FFDShow.

First, go to View -> Options.  Select “External Filters” on the left, and then click “Add Filter” in the top right.  Find “Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder” and click “OK.”

Now, select this filter in the list of filters, and choose the “Prefer” option on the right.

This filter will take over the playback of some other types of media as well.  If you don’t want that, remove everything except the h.264 subtype and the subtypes in {braces} from the list at the bottom of this window.

Press “OK,” and then close and restart Media Player Classic.  And then, enjoy your h.264.

(By the way, this is the h.264 encoding found on the Blu-ray disc, and it has not been re-encoded or re-compressed or anything.  I had to rip it because that’s the only way I could get it to play at all… but that’s another story.)

If you ever decide you want to undo this, just go back to the “External Filters” config and remove the Microsoft DTV-DVD filter from the list, and then restart Media Player Classic again.

I’ve found Windows 7′s native support to be faster than libavcodec, but slower than CoreAVC.  It also doesn’t have any of the decoding errors that I saw in CoreAVC.  It is almost fast enough to play the movie on my system, but I still notice some slight stuttering.  I’ll live with it until CoreAVC 2.0 is available, and then we’ll see how that stacks up.

Windows 7 seems to me to be, more or less, Windows Vista done right.  They could have easily called this something like “Windows Vista Second Edition” (if not for the negative association a lot of people seem to have with “Vista”).  Most of the improvements are behind the scenes, with more optimal use of memory, less stuff running in the background, and performance optimizations across the board making your computer seem much snappier.  If you are familiar with Windows Vista, moving to Windows 7 will not be a problem for you at all.  From the surface, it looks mostly the same.

There is a new boot screen that is actually pretty cool.  (I always thought that Vista’s boot screen was particularly boring.)  There is a “pulsing” Windows flag animation, and it’s the same rather you’re booting from scratch or resuming from hibernation.  There’s also a place for a status message that can change… it is used to show you some minimally informative messages during Windows setup.

Some of the bundled applications have been updated.  For instance, Paint now has a ribbon interface much like the Microsoft Office 2007 applications.

WordPad has a similar interface, making it look like a mini Microsoft Word.

There is finally the option to rotate your desktop wallpaper.  You can specify which images you would like and how often you would like the wallpaper to change.

There’s a new “Library” system for keeping track of your files, separately from the regular file system.  This has been tried a few times before, rather unsuccessfully I think.  I haven’t messed with this latest attempt much yet so I cannot comment on its usefulness.

There is new “Homegroup” functionality, which is supposed to make it super easy to share stuff between the Windows 7 machines in your home.  I’ll try this out when I have more Windows 7 machines up and running, and make another post on it if it is particularly interesting.

And then, there is the new taskbar — the first major change to a staple of Windows since it was introduced in Windows 95.  Gone is the long-standing “one button per window” approach, there is now just one icon on the taskbar for each application that is running.  If the application has multiple windows open, you can see them when you hover over or click on the icon on the taskbar.  Also, you can “pin” applications to the taskbar, so that they are there even when they are not running, and you can start them with a single click.  This works kind of like the Mac OS X dock.

I actually kind of like it.  As applications are updated to take advantage of this functionality, you’ll see applications reporting their progress on downloads, burning CDs, or whatever they’re doing by filling in a little progress bar behind their icon on the taskbar.  Also, application-specific commands can be added to the menu that you get when you right-click on a taskbar button.  You can already see this when using Windows Explorer, and other applications included with Windows 7.

I can see the new taskbar turning into something of a mess, once application developers decide that you would definitely prefer to have their application pinned to the taskbar at install time.

The Bad

One thing that I really appreciated about Windows Vista was having several editions on one disc.  Depending on the product key you entered at the beginning of Windows setup, you would install Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, etc.  You wouldn’t have to chase down a separate disc for each edition like you did with Windows XP.  Unfortunately, they seem to have gone back to the old way of doing things, with each different edition of Windows 7 being available on a separate DVD.  This will require a lot of space for me to keep a copy of all of the images for when I need them… compounded by the fact that most editions are availble in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Many of the applications that were included with Windows Vista have vanished.  Windows Calendar, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Mail, and maybe others are no longer part of Windows 7.  Most of these have replacements available in the Windows Live suite of applications, which you can download for free.  There doesn’t seem to be any notice or link that points you toward downloading the Windows Live stuff, though, which may lead to a small amount of confusion for new users, say, looking for their mail client.  (Though most people use webmail these days, and I actually suspect that most of these applications will not be missed much.)  The Windows Live apps are offered to you as “Windows Live Essentials” if you enable Microsoft Update.

On a side note, I’m also disappointed that when I installed the Windows Live suite of applications, it included a beta version of Windows Live Movie Maker that had already expired, and made me manually download and install an update right away.  Since the Windows Live installer actually downloaded the applications as it ran, surely this could be fixed easily.

Finally, the name “Windows 7″ itself doesn’t really make much sense to me.  A while back, Microsoft released some reasoning on the Windows Team Blog that explained how to hold your head sideways and count 6 versions of Windows leading up to this one, but it seemed a little iffy to me.  Here’s a very rough sketch of the history of Windows releases (for a time, there were separate “home” and “business” versions):

Doesn’t quite add up to 7, no matter how you count it.  Furthermore, Windows 7 is identified as Windows 6.1 internally.

This means that we will probably have a Windows 7.0 in the future, that is actually called something else! 

But, whatever.  Windows 7 is what we have and that’s the name everyone will know.  And, all-in-all, it is an improvement over the previous version, so I suppose I should be happy. 

I’ll post some impressions later.