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Windows 7

Windows 7 Beta Report Part 1: Bugs

Windows 7I had Windows 7 installed on my trusted Vaio SR140D laptop a couple of weekends ago and have been running it on a near constant basis since. Now after 3 weeks or so I have compiled a list of bugs and bonuses that should be helpful to the development team as well as users who are curious about this new operating system.

Overall I have to say Windows 7 has been a revelation (of the good kind that is). People say that Microsoft get things right every second release of something major, and since Windows 7 can be said to be a second coming of Vista the saying rings true. Windows 7 sees vast improvements in everything from usability to functionality to performance and puts a final nail in the coffin of most of the negatives the naysayers and Mac fanatics have been riding so hard on for the last two years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Because I know you came for the trash talk I’m going to start with the bugs, ‘cus there are some nasty ones. My Windows 7 Bonuses article with the many reasons why Windows 7 is the best OS I have ever worked with will be up some time next week.

System Fatal Program Crashes

Yes, you read that right; system fatal program crashes. In the first week alone my computer crashed upwards of 40 times from this error. Bizarrely that number has gone down to almost zero in this last week but still, there is something horribly wrong going on here.

Although I can’t reproduce the problem at will, it is obviously related to files being written to drives, both internal and external: When saving one or multiple files from different applications, one or more of the applications will freeze, display “Not Responding” in the window header and a fade effect is applied. There is no way of turning the program off when this happens; even opening Task Manager, selecting the process and hitting Delete does not kill the application and you are left with a dead program locking up your computer. This problem is cascading so once it has occurred and you attempt to save another file from a different program, that one will also stall and so on.

But the problem doesn’t end there: Because Windows 7 is unable to terminate the application even from Task Manager, it is impossible to shut down or restart the operating system by normal means. When you try to shut it down, the Open Applications window will appear listing the stalled applications with and you are asked if you want to shut them down. But no matter what you try, the applications just won’t shut down and the computer is left in an infinite loop. At the end the only way of resolving the issue is to do a manual restart by holding down the power button for 8 seconds.

And now for the really bizarre part: As I said, this problem appears when you try to save a file. The application stalls almost immediately after the saving process has started so one would think the file was never saved, right? Wrong! For some inexplicable reason, once the computer has been restarted you will find the file that caused all the problems to begin with in the location where you saved it. And it works the way it is supposed to.

At first I thought that the problem was caused by some sort of drive writing conflict but that theory was shelved when I discovered that the files were actually written properly. My new hypotheses is that the problem is a broken communication between Windows 7 and the applications as to the writing process itself; a checksum error or something along those lines. That still wouldn’t explain why the applications stall so completely nor why Windows 7 is incapable of shutting them down, but it is a start.

The system fatal program crash has been triggered by both Windows 7 native and 3rd party applications including these ones: Windows 7 native zip extractor, IE 8, FireFox, Expression Web 2, PhotoShop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Notepad, Notepad ++, Opera and FileZilla. In the case of the zip extractor the crash occurred multiple times when I tried to drag-and-drop files out of an archive and onto my desktop. As for the browsers the crash occurred when I tried to save files from the web.

Caveats

Note that the system fatal program crash only happens during write-to-disk operations. I have managed to crash several programs for other reasons but in all the other cases the program has either shut down properly on its own or been possible to shut down through the Task Manager. Also note that I have been unable to find any similar references to this specific problem anywhere else on the web. However I highly doubt the problem is caused by my computer itself – I installed Windows 7 on an empty hard drive and the computer is only or 5 months old and running perfectly – and there is no possible way I’m the only one experiencing it. And even if I was, there is a good chance someone else will run into it further down the line and since none of the conventional shut down techniques work once it rears its ugly head I foresee true panic unfolding among the Windows 7 using masses.

First Start Program Incompatibilities

The second major problem I’ve run into is a transient one: Upon first installation a lot of programs do not run properly. I’ve installed a huge pile of applications under Windows 7 and for the most part (often surprisingly) they work without a hitch. But in some cases things go badly wrong until I reboot the computer. The most recent example is when I installed Camtasia from TechSmith yesterday. Upon installation the application seems to run fine, but when I stopped my screen recording and tried to start it again, the actual recorder portion of the program stalled. A warning windows opened asking if the application terminated properly and when I said no, the recorder shut down wihtout shutting down Camtasia in the process. I am guessing this is because Camtasia actually runs several different sub-programs and the crash only occurred in the recorder sub-program. Anyway, the recorder shut down and I had to restart it. After experiencing the exact same problem 5 times in a row I restarted the computer and after that everything worked perfectly.

This problem also happened when I installed PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2, FileZilla and some other applications. The problem seems to be rooted in registry rewrites or some other element that runs in the “bottom” of the operating system and needs to be restarted to be reset. Because it is transient and is easily resolved by restarting the computer it is not a major problem like the one listed above but it is still hugely annoying.

A solution?

If I’m right (and I think I am) the problem is caused by a registry rewrite or something similar that unlike Vista, Windows 7 requires a restart to apply. If that’s the case it shouldn’t be too hard to create some form of conditional operation within Windows 7 that tracks such changes and suggests that the user restarts the computer for the newly installed program to run properly.

Compatibility Mode Annoyances

As I mentioned before I am running PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2 on this computer (dont’ ask why – long story). If you’ve played with these programs under Vista you probably know that there are some crazy and annoying compatibility issues (though they are nothing like the ones in Premiere Pro CS2 which pretty much becomes nonfunctional under Vista). Fortunately the wise minds at Microsoft foresaw this problem and created something called Compatibility Mode where you can set applications to run as if they were running under older operating systems like Windows XP SP1, SP2 or even older ones like Windows 98 or 95. And this worked great. In Vista.

Annoying User Account ControlIn Windows 7 on the other hand things get a bit annoying. Because of the Vista problems with CS2, I set PhotoShop and Illustrator to run in Compatibility Mode for XP. But when I did, Windows 7 started treating the applications as unwanted bastard step children. First off, the otherwise wonderful icons displayed in the Start menu and the new and vastely improved task par are branded with an ugly User Account Control sheild warning you that something is very wrong. Seccondly, when you open the application, a User Account Control warning appears saying that an application from an unknown publisher is trying to run on your computer and asks if you still want it to run. This is totally rediculous because if you run the same program under either Vista Compatibility Mode or without Compatibility Mode, that warning doesn’t appear. Finally, in XP Compatibility Mode the splash screen at startup is totally mangled and ends up looking like some poorly hacked knock off. This of course is purely aesthetic but it still bugs me.

Yes, I know you can turn User Account Control off etc etc but the majority of user won’t do that. And even if you did, it still wouldn’t explain why the application while running under Compatibility Mode all of a sudden becomes a potentially malicious piece of software from an unknown publisher. That’s just plain rubbish and it should be fixed.

Crazy Window Dither Effect

Window Dither EffectThis last bug is one that occurred twice, but I have not been able to reproduce it since then. It is hard to describe but the screen grab above pretty much says it all: The top and bottom bars of the windows are dithered and screwed up by horizontal lines that spill out to the sides. The effect is distracting and makes it hard to work with the windows but had no actual effects on the window functionality. Click here or on the image to see the full screen grab with multiple busted windows.

This dither effect appeared during the installation of Adobe Reader and also appeared after the reboot I did to get rid of it (which is when I took the screengrab). For a while I thought this was some sort of permanent screen driver glitch but after another reboot everything was back to normal. Very weird.

That really is all there is to it. Apart from the bugs listed above, all of which should must be fixed before the final release of the new operating system, Windows 7 is running flawlessly on my laptop and I am so content with it I am considering wiping the Vista partition on the machine to free up more space for fun stuff work.

By Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and lynda.com specializing in WordPress and web design and development and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He is a popular speaker and educator on all things design, web standards and open source. As the owner and Web Head at Pink & Yellow Media, a boutique style digital media company in Burnaby, BC, Canada, he has created WordPress-based web solutions for multi-national companies, political parties, banks, and small businesses and bloggers alike. He also contributes to the local WordPress community by organizing Meetups and WordCamps.

5 replies on “Windows 7 Beta Report Part 1: Bugs”

For the first problem it is likely related to AV software or some other utility you are running. As you can imagine, “fatal errors” across multiple applications would be something that probably isn’t an out of box experience for the beta 🙂

I hear what you’re saying though I find it hard to understand seeing as this happened when I had just installed the OS and wasn’t running any AV software or drivers. But on the positive side it only happened during the first two weeks of use. Since then the fatal errors have disappeared completely. which makes absolutely no sense…

On another note, the screen dither effect reappeared yesterday after a month of seclusion. It was triggered when I opened Live Maps in Firefox and I had to reboot my computer to get rid of it. I’m going to test again today to see if the situation can be reproduced.

Nice to see Microsoft is actively engaging in conversations with users by the way. Mad props and all that.

The Fatal Crashes are indeed, as you postulate, caused by the disk write…

The problem is that it is NOT the application at fault, it is the new disk security.

As you recall, in Vista they took the great… no scratch that, annoying leap of logic to make the disk ‘owned’ by the Trusted Installer service. 7 takes that one step further… your desktop is secured and owned not by your user account, but again by a system account. Even logged on as administrator *(local and domain) I found that any app saving to desktop failed/crashed and the only way to get beyond the crash was to use task manager to kill NOT the application (as it would stay running no matter how many times you told it to end) but the Windows Explorer executable… Windows Explorer would then restart (and in the process drop the application that was frozen for you).

The only way I could get around this initially was to create all my document and desktop stuff in a folder on D:, and create a link shortcut on the desktop to this folder and never save on the desktop. To remove this annoyance alltogether I ended up last week simply taking ownership of the entire c: with my domain admin account. I then removed and replaced all security for my user profile directory and voila! I can now create files and folders directly on the desktop without word/PS/some other app freezing when saving files.

The last issue is likely a problem with display drivers. We’ll probably get new drivers from all the major vendors before Windows 7 ships.

I am having the same issue. my explorer as well as the application hangs while saving files. Bad part is the problem still persists on my PC.
I am totally frustrated

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