Category Archives: windows 7

.net, adobe, apple, facebook, google, internet, microsoft, mobile, windows, windows 7

Which mobile platforms will fail?

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Gartner’s Nick Jones addressed this question in a blog post yesterday. He refers to the “rule of three” which conjectures that no more than three large vendors can succeed in a mature market. If this applies in mobile, then we will see no more than three survivors, after failures and consolidation, from the following group plus any I’ve missed. I have shown platforms that have common ownership and are already slated to be replaced in strikeout format.

  • Apple iOS
  • Google Android
  • Samsung Bada
  • Maemo MeeGo
  • RIM BlackBerry OS BlackBerry Tablet OS (QNX)
  • HP/Palm WebOS
  • Symbian
  • Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 and successors

Jones says that success requires differentiation, critical mass, and a large handset manufacturer. I am not sure that the last two are really distinct. It is easy to fall into the tautology trap: to be successful a platform needs to be successful. Quite so; but what we are after is the magic ingredient(s) that make it so.

Drawing up a list like this is hard, since some operating systems are more distinct than others. Android, Bada, MeeGo and WebOS are all Linux-based; iOS is also a Unix-like OS. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 are both based on Windows CE.

While it seems obvious that not all the above will prosper, I am not sure that the rule of three applies. I agree that it is unlikely that mobile app vendors will want to support and build 8 or more versions of each app in order to cover the whole market; but this problem does not apply to web apps, and cross-platform frameworks and runtimes can solve the problem to some extent – things like Adobe AIR for mobile, PhoneGap and Appcelerator. Further, there will probably always be mobile devices on which few if any apps are installed, where the user will not care about the OS or application store.

Still, pick your winners. Gartner is betting on iOS and Android, predicting decline for RIM and Symbian, and projecting a small 3.9% share for Microsoft by 2014.

I am sure there will be surprises. The question of mobile OS market share should not be seen in isolation, but as part of a bigger picture in which cloud+device dominates computing. Microsoft has an opportunity here, because in theory it can offer smooth migration to existing Microsoft-platform businesses, taking advantage of their investment – or lock-in – to Active Directory, Exchange, Office and .NET. In the cloud that makes Microsoft BPOS and Azure attractive, while a mobile device with great support for Exchange and SharePoint, for example, is attractive to businesses that already use these platforms.

The cloud will be a big influence at the consumer end too. There is talk of a Facebook phone which could disrupt the market; but I wonder if we will see the existing Facebook and Microsoft partnership strengthen once people realise that Windows Phone 7 has, from what I have seen, the best Facebook integration out there.

So there are two reasons why Gartner may have under-rated Microsoft’s prospects. Equally, you can argue that Microsoft is too late into this market, with Android perfectly positioned to occupy the same position with respect to Apple that worked so well for Microsoft on the desktop.

It is all too early to call. The best advice is to build in the cloud and plan for change when it comes to devices.

apple, iphone, microsoft, mobile, professional, windows, windows 7, xbox

Windows Phone 7 gets decent launch, Stephen Fry’s blessing

I was not able to attend the press conference for Windows Phone 7 in person but watched the live webcast from New York. I was unconvinced by the phrase “Always delightful, wonderfully mine” which formed the basis of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s lead-in, but it got better.

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Corporate VP Joe Belfiore did a live demo, explained how the team had aimed to simplify the phone and make it where possible seem one step ahead of the user, predicting the information you would want or the next step you wish to take. He also spent some time on enterprise features, especially Office and Exchange integration, which interested me as there is some ambiguity in how Microsoft is positioning the launch devices; consumer is the focus yet business-oriented features keep cropping up.

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One of the 5 HTC phones announced today is the HTC 7 Pro which has a keyboard and seems mainly aimed at business users.

Ralph de la Vega from AT&T said that his company will offer Windows Phone 7 from November 8th in USA, initially from LG, but with  with 3 devices – LG, HTC, Samsung – available a few weeks later.

Belfiore’s demo looked good, despite a couple of failures from which he made a good recovery. He announced that the much-discussed Copy and Paste feature, which will be absent from the first release, will come as an automatic update early in 2011.

He also spent some time on the Xbox Live integration, which is one feature that is distinctive to Windows Phone 7 and strikes me as a smart move. A couple of XNA games were demoed and look good, one called Ilo and Milo that uses the accelerometer:

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and a familiar one from EA, The Sims:

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The best part of Microsoft’s launch though was not in the USA but in the UK. Celebrity Stephen Fry, known for his love of all things Apple, got up and and praised the phone.

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The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones caught some of this on video, and I am going to quote extensively because it touches on something I’ve been tracking for years: Microsoft’s belated recognition of the importance of design:

I made no secret of my dislike of Microsoft over many years. I did think that analogy of a building site, of a Sixties grey office, is essentially what the environments they were making then were. Whatever I may think of this device (and I’m going to come to that in a moment) I think we can all admire the humility which which Microsoft have admitted to the fact that they now, I think, get it. They get the fact that all human beings whether they work in enterprise or in small businesses or are self employed, are human beings first.

You don’t judge the machines you use or the houses you live in or the offices where you work, simply by listing their functions. The first thing you do as a human being, whether you work for a large office or a small one, is say how you feel about it.

…

What I was always excited by when Apple produced things and then when HTC and other OEMs started making fascinating and enjoyable Androids, and even when RIM came out with the Torch, I felt pleasure using them. These are things, we carry them around at all times and our lives flow through and out of them. And the first feeling we should have is one of delight, so when I heard Mr Ballmer use the word “delight” I thought, oh what joy there is in heaven when a sinner repents. Because let’s be frank, Microsoft were grey, they were featureless, they did concentrate so much on enterprise and tickboxes for function, that they forgot that even the greyest number-cruncher in the corporation is a human being first, a father, a husband, a mother, a daughter, whatever, and that their experiences are based on feeling and emotion.

So when they did send me one of these about a week or so ago – I’ve got a few of them, and I’m not being paid – my first feeling was that it was just fun to play with. And I know that’s childish, but isn’t that how you think of cars and many other things we spend our lives doing? That it’s fun to drive. Yes you want it to be economical, yes you want it to get from A to B, yes you want various things.

…

People buy things because they feel that emotional engagement, they feel the pleasure of using it. I have felt enormous pleasure using this phone. Yes, because I’m not a paid spokesman, because I’m not any kind of spokesman for Microsoft, I can say that it has deficiencies; but then that was the thing about the iPhone that everybody felt, people who had Windows Mobile 5, as it then was, they laughed to scorn the iPhone when it arrived because it didn’t have all these functions. But if you remember the tedious horror of drilling down through the menus just to get a wireless connection, on an old WinMob phone, you will understand that it wasn’t about that, people embraced the iPhone because it was simple, it was closed, it was clear.

Now the closed environment is something you’re all going to be speaking about, the ecosystem, you’re all going to be speaking about how it positions itself against RIM and it positions itself, crucially, against the iPhone and the Android, and that’s a decision that only the market and the next year can make.

He added on Twitter:

Some will call me traitor, but I was pleased to stand on stage ad welcome Windows Mobile 7 into the world. Used it for a week. Like it.

This was a great PR coup for Microsoft, but more important, it shows the impact of something I wrote about in 2008: Bill Buxton’s arrival at Microsoft and his work to introduce design-consciousness to Microsoft and its OEMs:

Everybody in that food chain gets it now. Everybody’s motivated to fix it. Thinking about the holistic experience is much easier now than it was two years ago. What you’re going to see with Mobile 7 is going to give evidence of progress.

I thought the launch was good enough to make people want to try this phone; and considering Microsoft’s current position in the market that is a good result for the company.

apple, google, microsoft, windows, windows 7

Steve Ballmer ducks questions at the London School of Economics

This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the London School of Economics on the subject of Seizing the opportunity of the Cloud: the next wave of business growth. Well, that was supposed to be the topic; but as it happened the focus was vague – maybe that is fitting given the subject. Ballmer acknowledged that nobody was sure how to define the cloud and did not want to waste time attempting to do so, “cloud blah blah blah”, he said.

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It was a session of two halves. Part one was a talk with some generalisations about the value of the cloud, the benefits of shared resources, and that the cloud needs rather than replaces intelligent client devices. “That the cloud needs smart devices was controversial but is now 100% obvious,” he said. He then took the opportunity to show a video about Xbox Kinect, the controller-free innovation for Microsoft’s games console, despite its rather loose connection with the subject of the talk.

Ballmer also experienced a Windows moment as he clicked and clicked on the Windows Media Player button to start the video; fortunately for all of us it started on the third or so attempt.

Just when we were expecting some weighty concluding remarks, Ballmer abruptly finished and asked for questions. These were conducted in an unusual manner, with several questions from the audience being taken together, supposedly to save time. I do not recommend this format unless the goal is to leave many of the questions unanswered, which is what happened.

Some of the questions were excellent. How will Microsoft compete against Apple iOS and Google Android? Since it loses money in cloud computing, how will it retain its revenues as Windows declines? What are the implications of Stuxnet, a Windows worm that appears to be in use as a weapon?

Ballmer does such a poor job with such questions, when he does engage with them, that I honestly do not think he is the right person to answer them in front of the public and the press. He is inclined to retreat into saying, well, we could have done better but we are working hard to compete. He actually undersells the Microsoft story. On Stuxnet, he gave a convoluted answer that left me wondering whether he was up-to-date on what it actually is. The revenue question he did not answer at all.

There were a few matters to which he gave more considered responses. One was about patents. “We’re better off with today’s patent system than with no patent system”, he said, before acknowledging that patent law as it stands is ill-equipped to cope with the IT or pharmaceutical industries, which hardly existed when the laws were formed.

Another was about software piracy in China. Piracy is rampant there, said Ballmer, twenty times worse than it is the UK. “Enforcement of the law in China needs to be stepped up,” he said, though without giving any indication of how this goal might be achieved.

He spoke in passing about Windows Phone 7, telling us that it is a great device, and added that we will see slates with Windows on the market before Christmas. He said that he is happy with Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering in relation to the Enterprise, especially the way it includes both private and public cloud offerings, but admits that its consumer cloud is weaker.

Considering the widespread perception that Microsoft is in decline – its stock was recently downgraded to neutral by Goldman Sachs – this event struck me as a missed opportunity to present cogent reasons why Microsoft’s prospects are stronger than they appear, or to clarify the company’s strategy from cloud to device, in front of some of the UK’s most influential technical press.

I must add though that a couple of students I spoke to afterwards were more impressed, and saw his ducking of questions as diplomatic. Perhaps those of us who have followed the company’s activities for many years are harder to please.

Update: Charles Arthur has some more extensive quotes from the session in his report here.

windows, windows 7

Setup error raises obscure Outlook error message

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I was intrigued by the following Outlook 2010 error message which I had not seen before:

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Instant Search is not available when Outlook is running with administrator permissions. However, it was not. A Microsoft support note suggested another possible reason: Windows Search not running. However, it was running. It was clear though that Outlook searches were not being indexed, making them unusable on my low-powered netbook.

Eventually I figured it out. I’d just run an update for the excellent Battery Bar, which installs an batter monitor in the Windows 7 taskbar. In order to shut down the running instance, the Battery Bar setup restarted Explorer. Since the installer was running with elevated rights, Explorer had presumably restarted with elevated rights, and this somehow triggered the error in Outlook.

I recall that it it is tricky (but possible) for an elevated process to start a non-elevated process, so I guess Osiris needs to tweak its setup application.

The solution from my point of view was to restart Windows.

.net, adobe, development, flash, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Silverlight versus HTML, Flash – Microsoft defends its role

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Microsoft’s Brad Becker, Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms, has defended the role of Silverlight in the HTML 5 era. Arguing that it is natural for HTML to acquire some of the features previously provided by plug-ins – “because some of these features are so pervasive on the web that they are seen by users as fundamentally expected capabilities” – he goes on to identify three areas where Silverlight remains necessary. These are “premium” multimedia which merges video with application elements such as conferencing, picture in picture, DRM, analytics; consumers apps and games; and finally business/enterprise apps.

It is the last of these which interests me most. Becker’s statements come soon after the preview of Visual Studio LightSwitch, which is solely designed for data-driven business applications. Taking the two together, and bearing in mind that apps may run on the desktop as well as in browser, Silverlight is now encroaching on the territory which used to belong to Windows applications. With LightSwitch in particular, Microsoft is encouraging developers who might previously have built an app in Access or Visual Basic to consider Silverlight instead.

Why? Isn’t Microsoft better off if developers stick to Windows-only applications?

In one sense it is, as it gets the Windows lock-in – and yes, this is effective. I’m aware of businesses who are tied to Windows because of apps that they use, who might otherwise consider Macs for all or some of their business desktops. On the other hand, even Microsoft can see the direction in which we are travelling – cloud, mobile, diverse clients – and that Silverlight fits better with this model than Windows-only desktop clients.

Another consideration is that setup and deployment issues remain a pain-point for Windows apps. One issue is when it goes wrong, and Windows requires skilled surgery to get some app installed and working. Another issue is the constant energy drain of getting new computers and having to provision them with the apps you need. Microsoft has improved this no end for larger organisations, with standard system images and centralised application deployment, but Silverlight is still a welcome simplification; provided that the runtime is installed, it is pretty much the web model – just navigate to the URL and the app is there, right-click if you want to run on the desktop.

If Microsoft can also establish Windows Phone 7, which uses Silverlight as the runtime for custom apps, the platform then extends to mobile as well as desktop and browser.

The downside is that Silverlight apps have fewer capabilities than native Windows apps. Printing is tricky, for example, though Becker refers to “Virtualized printing” and I am not sure what exactly he means. He also highlights COM automation and group policy management, features that only work on Windows and which undermine Silverlight’s cross-platform promise. That said, via COM automation Silverlight has full access to the local machine giving developers a way of overcoming any limitations if they are willing to abandon cross-platform and browser-hosted deployment.

A winning strategy? Well, at least it is one that makes sense in the cloud era. On the other hand, Microsoft faces substantial difficulties in establishing Silverlight as a mainstream development platform. One is that Adobe was there first with Flash, which has a more widely deployed runtime, works on Android and soon other mobile devices, and is supported by the advanced design tools in Creative Suite. Another is the Apple factor, the popular iPhone and iPad devices which are a spear through the heart of cross-platform runtimes like Silverlight and Flash.

Finally, even within the Microsoft development community Silverlight is a hard sell for many developers. Some us recall how hard the company had to work to persuade Visual Basic 6 developers to move to .NET. The reason was not just stubborn individuals who dislike change – though there was certainly some of that – but also existing investment in code that could not easily be migrated. Both factors also apply to Silverlight. Further, it is a constrained platform, which means developers have to live with certain limitations. It is also managed code only, whereas some of the best developers for both desktop and mobile apps work in C/C++.

I suspect there is division even within Microsoft with regard to Silverlight. Clearly it has wide support and is considered a strategic area of development. At the same time, it is not helpful to the Windows team who will want to see apps that take advantage of new features in Windows 7 and beyond.

Yesterday Windows Phone 7 was released to manufacturing, which means the software is done. Another piece of the Silverlight platform is in place; and I guess over the next year or two we will see the extent to which Microsoft can make it a success.

microsoft, professional, windows, windows 7

What users want in Windows 8

A number of blogs are running a coordinated poll on what users would most like to see in the next version of Windows. The results so far are unsurprising but still worth repeating, since there is a good chance that they differ from Microsoft’s priorities.

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Note that users are less concerned about new features, more concerned about an OS that works better and faster.

Less bloat, currently number five in the list, will be hard to achieve while PC vendors still insist in bundling poor quality add-ons with their systems.

If you want to vote you can do so at any of various blogs including 4sysops – which has some notes expanding on what each category might mean – markwilson.it and Within Windows.

windows, windows 7

Changing the motherboard under Windows 7

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Today I needed to swap motherboards between a machine running Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and another running 32-bit Windows 7. No need to go into the reason in detail; it’s to do with some testing I’m doing of Hyper-V backup and restore. The boards were similar, both Intel, though one had a Pentium D processor installed and the other a Core Duo. Anyway, I did the deed and was intrigued to see whether Windows would start in its new hardware.

Hyper-V Server – which is really 64-bit Server Core 2008 R2 – started fine, installed some new drivers, requested a restart, and all was well.

Windows 7 on the other hand did not start. It rebooted itself and offered startup repair, which I accepted. It suggested I try a system restore, which I refused, on the grounds that the problem was not some new corruption, but that I had just changed the motherboard. Next, startup repair went into a lengthy checking procedure, at the end of which it reported failure with an unknown problem possibly related to a configuration change.

That was annoying. Then I remembered the problems Windows has with changing to and from AHCI, a BIOS configuration for Serial ATA. I posted on the subject in the context of Vista. I checked the BIOS, which was set to AHCI, changed it to IDE mode, and Windows started fine. Then I made the registry change for AHCI, shutdown, changed back to AHCI in the BIOS. Again, Windows started fine.

What puzzles me is why the long-running Windows 7 startup repair sequence does not check for this problem. If the alternative is a complete reinstall of Windows, it could save a lot of time and aggravation.

It is also worth noting that Windows 7 declared itself non-genuine after this operation, though actually it re-activated OK. I guess if you had two machines with OEM versions of Windows 7, for example, and swapped the motherboards, then strictly you would need two new licenses.

apple, microsoft, professional, windows, windows 7

Windows 8: detailed plans leaked, show Microsoft cycle of invent, fail, copy

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No doubt crisis meetings in Redmond as plans for Windows 8, shared apparently with OEM partners, leak to the web. Of course it may all be an elaborate hoax, and even if not, the slides all state:

Disclaimer – Windows 8 discussion, this is not a plan of record

Still, it looks plausible. So what’s new?

In some ways, Windows 7 was low-hanging fruit. Simply fix what was broken in Windows Vista, make Windows faster, more reliable and more pleasant to use. Windows 8 needs to take a step forward, and according to these slides this is what is planned:

1. Elevation of the Slate as a key form factor. The slides refer to three basic form factors: Slate for web and media consumption, laptop for productivity and all-in-one touch control desktop for both.

2. 3D content display along with “HTML 5 video” and DRM, focus on DLNA.

3. Instant On, always connected. Hang on, wasn’t this promised for 7? And Vista? The docs do refer to a “New Off state” called Logoff + Hibernate, with optimised hibernate plus a “Boot/Shutdown look and feel”. The idea is that this becomes the norm for a switch off.

4. Log on with face recognition. One of the few pieces of real innovation on offer here.

5. Proximity based sleep and wake.

6. Another go at the Windows App Store. This time Microsoft is serious. Approval process. Dashboard for developers with telemetry. Auto update. Software license roams with the user, as do settings – a great idea. Partner co-branding, ho hum.

7. Reinstall or “reset” Windows while keeping apps, docs and settings. A bit like the old repair install, though the difference here seems to be that this is a genuine wipe and reinstall, with apps reinstalled from the App Store. 

8. Windows accounts “could be connected to the cloud”. I would think they must be, if the app store stuff with roaming software licenses is to work. Hooking your Windows login to a Passport ID is not new though; I’m guessing it will just be more prominent and important.

Needless to say, this is not the whole Windows 8 story, even if genuine. What do we learn though? Mainly that Microsoft is taking its lead from Apple and accepts that the App Store concept is central to our future computing experience; the Slate also seems influenced by iPad.

We are also seeing the return of Passport. Most of what was in the controversial .NET My Services from 2001 is now accepted as normal, after Google and Facebook have softened us up for the concepts.

There’s a pattern here. Microsoft gets bright idea – Tablet, Windows Marketplace, Passport. Does half-baked implementation which flops. Apple or Google works out how to do it right. Microsoft copies them.

When do we get Windows 8? You can try and puzzle out the slide on “Windows 8 product cycle” if you like; but I’d bet that it will be around three years from the release of Windows 7: mid to late 2012.

.net, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, visual studio, windows, windows 7

Why we love to hate Microsoft

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Mary Branscombe has an excellent ZDNet post on Why do we (love to) hate Microsoft, and asks:

What would Microsoft need to do and say to you for you to be happy to call yourself a fan?

In part she’s reacting to Frank Shaw’s Microsoft by the Numbers in which he highlights the success of Windows 7, and makes the point that Windows netbooks will likely outsell Apple iPads by 7 or 8 times in 2010, that Linux has not ousted Windows either on the desktop or the server, and that Nokia smartphones will likely outsell iPhones by 2.5 times in 2010.

That last one is interesting. Why is Shaw puffing Nokia, when he is VP corporate communications for Microsoft? Well, the enemy of my enemy applies; it’s a jibe at Apple.

Unfortunately for Shaw, Nokia itself admits that Apple iPhone and Google Android are hurting its market share, or at least that is how I interpret this remark:

Nokia now expects its mobile device value market share to be slightly lower in 2010, compared to 2009. This update is primarily due to the competitive situation at the high-end of the market and shifts in product mix.

Nokia is being driven down-market. The same thing has happened to Microsoft in the laptop market, with the high-end going to Apple. This is a worry for both companies, since if a company becomes known as “the best” in a particular sector, it may well extend its market share simply by lowering prices or introducing cheaper product variants. This happened to some extent in the portable music player market – only to some extent, because Apple is still more expensive than most of its competitors, but its market share is now huge.

I digress. Here are a few observations on the ZDNet post. First, has Microsoft really changed as stated?

Microsoft is still paying for the bad old days of arrogance and dubious business practices. I think they’re the bad old days – I spend a lot of time talking to Microsoft insiders, partners and competitors and the attitudes I see have changed, inside and out.

The trouble is, Microsoft is so large and complex that it is hard to generalise. I think of it more as a set of united (or disunited) states than as a single corporate entity. This has always been the case – at least, as long as I can remember, and I don’t go back to the very early days.

I can believe that regulation has mitigated the worst practices of the past. But why on earth is Microsoft suing Salesforce.com (and getting itself counter-sued)? It’s terrible PR; it looks as if Microsoft wants to compete in the courts and not on product quality. If it wins and hurts Salesforce.com, what is the benefit to the industry? I realise Microsoft is not a charity, but we are talking business ethics here.

More broadly, there are two separate topics that need to be addressed. One is about the quality and prospects for Microsoft’s products and services, and the other is about how it is perceived and why.

I’ll take these in reverse order. Microsoft has history, as Mary Branscombe says, and more history than just Clippy. It’s the perceptions of the web community that are most visible to many of us, and the piece of history that counts for most is over the web browser. Microsoft beat off the competition, then froze development, an evil act that is particularly hard to forgive because of its cost in terms of devising workarounds for web pages. Yes, that’s changed now, and we have had IE7, IE8, and the promising IE9; but has Microsoft convinced the community that it would not do the same again if it had the opportunity?

There are other things I can think of. The whole Office Open XML (OOXML) saga, and hints that Microsoft is not following through on its promises. The BlueJ incident.

There is also the question of pricing, especially for business users. When I reviewed a Toshiba Netbook recently I figured that installing Windows Pro (to join a domain) and Office would cost more than the hardware. I suppose you cannot blame a company for charging what the market will bear; but when the commodity software costs more than the commodity hardware, you have to wonder whether monopolistic pricing is still present.

OK, what about product quality? I tend to agree that Microsoft often does better than it is given credit for. Windows 7 is good; Visual Studio 2010 is great; Silverlight 4 was a bit rushed but still impressive, to mention three offerings about which I know a good deal.

Nevertheless, Microsoft still had deep-rooted problems that I’ve not yet seen addressed. I’ll mention a couple.

First Microsoft still has an OEM problem. Going back to that Toshiba Netbook: it was nearly wrecked by poor OEM software additions and the user experience of a new Windows machine often remains poor. Many users do minimal customisation and as a result get a worse experience of Windows than they should. Apple will carry on winning if this is not addressed.

Second, Microsoft is conflicted, caught between the need to preserve its profits from Windows and Office, and the need to keep up with the new Cloud + Device model of computing. It is drifting towards the cloud; and developments like Office Web Apps and other one about which I am not allowed to tell you yet are encouraging (wait until next month). This issue will not go away though.

Third, mainly as a result of the above, Microsoft still does not convince when it comes to cross-platform. Silverlight is cross-platform, sure; except on the Mac you don’t have the COM integration or any equivalent, sorry, and on Linux, well there’s Moonlight or maybe we’ll work something out with Intel. It is the Windows company. Having said that, I put the Live Messenger app on the iPhone 4 I’ve been trying and it’s great; so yes, it sometimes gets it.

What can Microsoft do in order to be better liked? The key to it is this: ensure that our interactions with the company and its products are more often pleasurable than painful. Windows Phone 7 will be an interesting launch to watch, a product where Microsoft has made its best effort to break with past and deliver something users will love. We’ll see.

windows, windows 7

Virtual wi-fi adapter breaks wireless in Windows 7

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Today I was asked to look at a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop that would not connect to a wireless network. At least, it connected but there was no internet connectivity. I did the usual ipconfig /all and noticed that everything looked OK on the wireless adapter – IP address, default gateway, DNS servers. Nevertheless it could not resolve a ping.

I tried various things – reset the TCP/IP stack, updated the Realtek wireless lan driver, even tried with a different wireless access point, but still it did not work.

Curiously, a wired connection to the same router worked fine. Investigating further, I found that it was possible to ping remote sites by IP number, but not by name. It was a DNS resolution problem. But what? Even specifying the addresses of known good DNS servers in IPv4 properties did not fix it.

I Googled and found this discussion. Ignore the official Microsoft reply. The issue is with this thing:

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This is the Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter. If it is enabled on this machine, then DNS resolution over wireless fails, even though it says “Not connected.” If it is disabled, everything works. So you right-click it, select Disable, and all is well.

Problem fixed; but what is this virtual adapter? Long Zheng has an overview. Essentially, it lets you have more than one wifi connection even with only one physical wireless adapter, which means you can make any Windows 7 into a wireless access point.

This is odd though, because there is no obvious way to connect it. Here’s the reason:

Currently this feature is a development platform that exists only for application developers.

and with a link to this article, which explains how to create a wireless hosted network using the netsh command line utility.

That’s all very well, but it is annoying to find that a user cannot connect at all, thanks to some unknown interaction with an experimental virtual device that is of little practical use.

What I still do not know is how to fix the issue properly, instead of just disabling the virtual device. The problem is not universal; in fact, the netbook on which I am typing this post also has a virtual wi-fi adapter and it does not cause any problems. I doubt the user will suffer any adverse effects from its absence though.

Update: Kelvyn Taylor points out that the handy Connectify utility uses this feature of Windows 7.