Leeoniya

i'm not sure if i remember this correctly but i know in XP at least you need to make sure AHCI was enabled prior to installing windows cause it might be used during SID generation and HAL stuff. i know they changed the HAL a lot in Vista and 7, so i don't know if this is still the case...i would try running a repair install with AHCI enabled if you're getting BSODs. this MAY work (though probably not, and will most likely screw your entire install): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897418.aspx regarding NCQ, make sure you install the latest working driver from Seagate, and you should be able to enable it in the device manager/device properties on the controller, assuming it is also enabled in the BIOS. i will say this much: if you defrag regularly (and you should unless you have an SSD) in a non-server environment NCQ will yield no benefit. NCQ was designed for truly random access, eg where simultaneous random requests from 100 websites may need to be served from every platter and every sector of the drive in minimal time. a single user environment will never experience anything close to this on any but the most horribly fragmented volumes. if you're looking for speed, SSDs are where it is, or a WD Velociraptor / RAID setup. my $0.02, Leon

i asked whether it can be changed, not why the defaults are the way they are - i understand the reasoning perfectly well. however, there are a lot of things done for security which can be entirely disabled - IE protected mode, firewall, defender, guest accounts, allowing blank account passwords...etc, etc, etc and....*drum roll*...UAC - altogether. so if you can turn UAC completely off, it's not unfathomable to ponder if a default "no" focus can be tweaked to be a "yes" focus.

cause Alt+Y is pretty awkward to press, so i'd like to tweak it if possible. isn't that what tweaks are for?...so you don't have to live with defaults. i'd like a quick way for opening up an elevated privileges command prompt via keyboard. i made a shortcut in the start menu that dues run as admin for cmd that i called "acmd" so the sequence is as follows: Win key. "acmd". Enter. then the UAC prompt defaults to No. i would rather just hit double Enter.

the default focused button on a UAC elevation prompt is always "No", is there any way to tweak it to "Yes"? i'm NOT interested in disabling UAC, btw. thanks, Leon

^bump Win7 / Vista too?

You're still not comparing apples to apples. Win7 has more bloat in general, as does Vista - this is true. It may be the fact that it loads more drivers that's making it slower for you. Perhaps not all of those drivers need to be loaded. Whenever i installed Vista, i always vLited it and it ran as fast if not faster than tweaked XP installs. I'm tech-savvy and i would never compare bloated end-user oriented installs as good benchmark of an OS (for myself anyways, though it may be for 90% of their target user base). Pound for pound though, a stripped down Win7 will outperform a stripped down XP - and still have many more features left to show for it.

actually you are wrong, they have parallelized driver loading in win7, making it load much faster. it does load a bit more stuff and certainly more services afterward, but footprint has nothing to do with how fast an OS loads. if you strip down win7 to have only functionality present in XP (which is now a much less daunting task since they have rearchitectured the entire dependency model to be more like Linux, lol go MinWin *cough*MinLinux!), it will blow XP away in boot times, trust me.

i run off an SSD, boot times are fantastic in both, 7 an XP. My friends say they are booting faster off regular drives in Win7 too. I've noticed a significant battery life increase with Win7 as well. they actually made Explorer WAY better than in XP, but removed some very useful things i used to use. If you follow e7 blog, you'd know what to look for. A few things i noticed: - no need to use a reg tweak to "find target" on shortcuts anymore - the breadcrumb feature is actually very useful - the new side by side window docking (not just explorer) is great - column widths in list view are no longer global, so lists are more compact - this always annoyed me - full line select in details view - this was always a big peeve for me. - i know it was done in vista already - autosorting when new files are placed into an open folder...this is a mixed bag - i think there is room for both implementations, but i cant think of a way to easily have both at the same time. pressing F5 was not terribly difficult, but now locating all your files in a view with lots of others after they are resorted is not fun. i do think they need to bring the old advanced search style back, i'm disliking this new one a lot. also the only thing i actually like about the new superbar is the search as you type in the start menu for quickly launching programs. Peek is cool but useless, Win+D is much better and effective, plus usually you look at the desktop when you intend to use it. Shake is useless for mouse users, though i see some benefit on tablets/multitouch displays and such. Win7 is easily the best OS (perhaps ever)...but as always they have fubared the UI and disabled advanced features and have not made customization more easy, but much less and locked down - bad move MS, there are a lot of professionals who want to use their windows as THEY want. I was hoping they would start pulling all the registry tweaks out of the registry and make them finally accessible but of course, they made it worse. i hate all this new ribbon garbage, make a ribbon for common features at least, or a customizable user-ribbon to expose only common features people actually use daily. sheesh.

I'm a long-time XP user who opted to skip Vista and now finally migrating to Win7. Keep that in mind before saying that something i mention is the same in Vista. Yes, it's true, the first thing i did with my Win7 RC1 installation is make a file called annoyances.txt on my desktop it reads as follows so far: still no shortcut key to quickly cycle display views "small" detail pane is actually not small at all and wastes a ton of space, often for nothing. detail pane does not display file size sums of current directory and not very customizable no titlebar text, and no way to place close/minimize buttons in a way that doesnt always waste a bar's-worth of window space. no network activity light - wtf? "junctions" always labeled as file folders? no way to disable the hover "preview" feature on taskbar when in aero...this is very annoying and makes things HARDER when grouping is turned off when grouping is turned off, without a consistent position of quicklaunch icons, launching programs becomes a pain since the icon position changes constantly. no battery percentage display when in list view, any file you click that resides in a column that is partly scrolled out of view (even if the filename itself is fully in view) it annoyingly scrolls into view automatically and out from under your cursor, preventing, right click menu, doubleclicking, slow doubleclick renaming...etc...surely this is a bug. no way to disable "search as you type"? btw, i do know of Aerobar - is there a better solution to this - ideally i'd shorten the breadcrumb nav width and move the search field to the left, and put minimize/maximize/close buttons on the same level, that would solve a lot. other nits are mostly poor defaults for appearance - which i have found ways to tweak to my content. if anyone knows solutions to any of these, i'd be interested to hear them. i'll keep this list updated as i find more nits. thanks, Leon

I'm running the leaked 7100 build which is currently still not activated because i'm a bad person. ...also, forget slow double-click to rename one of these items : (

I'd like to report a Win7 explorer bug but don't have an MSDN subscription. From what i gather, there's no official way to leave feedback without an MSDN account. If this is the case, which would be pretty retarded, can someone verify and file this one, or check if it's been filed: When you right click on an item in Explorer (in list view at least), if the full column width of the file is not within view, it will automatically scroll into center view but pop up the right click menu in its original location - ultra annoying. thanks, Leon

like the topic says, any way to disable display of empty card reader drives if the reader is connected via USB header? I know that my Lenovo T400 laptop doesnt show the built-in card reader drive if it's empty...but that's probably cause it's sitting on an internal S/ATA interface rather than USB. appreciate any help, Leon

I've been trying to determine if it's possible to prevent XP from scanning the contents of removable USB drives and CDs to determine the "type" of content - but still keep typical autorun functionality like parsing and utilizing autorun.inf to set drive icon/add context menu items or autorun a specific program (also through autorun.inf) I can't seem to disable one and still keep the other, is there some secret or am i just stuck? thanks, Leon

I'm setting up a new XP install for a fairly computer illiterate person. The specs on the PC are garbagey at best, 256MB ram, nuff said. Instead of putting on a full-blown antivirus, to save on system resources, i'd like to give him day-to-day access to a restricted account only. But it's his PC nevertheless, so i'll give him the admin password of course, but is there any way for XP to auto-prompt for privilege elevation with a password dialog or something rather than erroring out nastily with insufficient privileges and forcing him to go through Run As manually every time? thanks, Leon

u're right, it does work in XP. but not in xplorer2, it just gives me the folder contents unless i click the desktop in the folder tree. time for a bug report. i should point out, however, that even real folders can have CLIDs (see provided link in OP). ex: Start>Run> ::{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103} thx.