There is an unimplemented feature in Windows 7 that virtualizes your wireless adapter and with a little third party software, you can turn that virtual adapter into a hotspot.
I actually wrote about this feature back in May, but completely forgot about it. The virtual WiFI adapter is indeed alive and well in Windows 7, but it only lives in the code. There is no place you can turn it on, change any settings, or disable it. That is where military network developer Nomadio comes in. They used their networking expertise to develop an application that leverages this feature and creates a your own wireless hotspot using the virtual WiFi adapter.
What does this mean for you? Anywhere you are connected to a network of some type, you can share access through the virtual adapter. Whether you are in a coffee shop with paid access, plugged into a wall where there is no other WiFi, or in a hotel room, you can easily share your network connection over WiFi with just your Windows 7 PC and Connectify, the name of Nomadio’s software.
Right now Connectify is a free beta program, but Nomadio expects they will have a more fully featured, paid version of the software in about six weeks. They may also offer a free, ad-supported version.
As one would expect with the official launch of Windows 7, Lenovo’s bloggers have been sharing more details around the Enhanced Experience Lenovo is offering.
The chart above is found on Matt Kohut’s latest post at Inside the Box, where he announces the forum event and also includes some more videos talking about the Windows 7 Enhanced Experience. Hopefully the chart answers people’s questions around EE support on Lenovo PCs, particularly the ones that don’t come with the preload.
The bottom line is that if you didn’t buy it with the preload, you won’t get the full experience. If you have a system that is currently offered with the EE preload and you could somehow get ahold of the Win7 recovery discs, then I don’t see a reason it wouldn’t work (your chances would be better if your specific MTM was offered with EE). But Lenovo won’t officially sell you the Win7 recovery discs unless the system you purchased has that license, so getting the recovery discs is your problem.
Hit the link below to visit Matt’s blog post that also has some videos discussing Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience, as well as discussion on the Windows 7 Launch event on Lenovo’s forums.
To engage in a hopefully more valuable way for their customers, Lenovo has opened a special section of their forum around the Windows 7 launch that has unique information for customers and will be staffed by engineers and other experts within Lenovo to answer questions.
The Windows 7 Launch board is pre-populated with a lot of frequently asked questions around the new OS, to hopefully cover many of the basics that people have been wondering about Lenovo products and Win7. You can of course also post your questions and the board will be staffed by Lenovo engineers for the next two weeks.
At the end of two weeks, this board will be made read-only and your interactions with Lenovo’s superstars preserved forever. Day to day Windows 7 discussion will occur in the regular Windows 7 board, but this is a unique opportunity to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. This will also help educate the regular and “super” users of the Lenovo community, who will be all the more equipped to help the community later on.
Visit the Windows 7 Launch Event board today, and take a look around the rest of their forum while you’re there.
Wall Street Journal tech pundit Walt Mossberg recently shared his views on Windows 7 with the world.
In recent years, I, like many other reviewers, have argued that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows. That’s no longer true.
Amidst reveling in how Windows 7 practically levels the OS playing field with Apple’s Snow Leopard, Walt also comments that among the Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Sony notebooks he tested Windows 7, the Snow Leopard Mac he used still restarted faster than most of the Win7 PCs. Except for one of the Lenovos.
Maybe there is something to the Lenovo Enhanced Experience after all.
A couple days ago Lenovo announced the details of their “Enhanced Experience” program, an initiative undertaken to improve efficiency and overheard on Lenovo PCs running Windows 7. The results can be seen in significant reductions in boot, shutdown, standby, and resume times on Idea and Think PCs running Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience Windows 7 preload.
One of the main engineers behind this effort, Howard Locker, was recently caught on camera and interviewed about the process they went through to produce the Enhanced Experience. Check it out below
P.S. Head over to Matt Kohut’s blog post with this video and leave any further questions you have on the Enhanced Experience for them to address in a future video!
Lenovo has announced that certain models of their Think and Idea PCs will get a special treatment for Windows 7, known as the Lenovo Enhanced Experience.
This announcement centers around specific improvements made to the Windows 7 preloads that will be available on select Lenovo PCs. Let’s dispense with the facts, courtesy ComputerWorld:
Fixed the drivers of on-board hardware components that were cumulatively causing massive delays. For instance, Lenovo discovered a driver for a “popular wireless device” had been written to pass worst-condition certification specs and thus would grab 4 MB of continuous memory from the system in 4 KB chunks, said Locker. That added five seconds to the time it took for a PC to go to sleep. After getting the third-party vendor to fix the driver, Lenovo cut the driver’s overhead to just 200 milliseconds, Locker said.
Tweaked the BIOS phase of startup to temporarily hide some devices from Windows 7, so that the OS only loads the drivers after the boot is finished.
Tweaked Windows 7 to delay the loading of non-essential services and applications until after startup. Those include automatic-updating apps for Adobe and Microsoft, or even Windows features. While users can try to fiddle with Windows themselves, Locker warns that do-it-yourselfers likely won’t achieve the same improvements.
Rewrote its power manager to be easier to use. It also includes an extra chip in its notebooks to more precisely measure the remaining battery life than Windows 7′s, and help you “stretch” it out as long as possible.
What does all this supposedly get you? Think PCs will boot up to 56% faster, while Idea PCs get a 33% boost. This is the result of three years of work by Lenovo’s “Velocity” team in collaboration with Microsoft, where they timed the load performance of every driver and application to identify the bottlenecks.
Matt Kohut over at Inside the Box (Welcome back Matt! We’ve missed you in the blogoshere) shares some relative benchmarks on system boot times with the various operating systems. He also shares some tips on decreasing boot times with BIOS tweaks, which I suggest you take a gander at.
This is indeed a healthy decrease in boot time, but I have to agree with some of the commenters about Matt suggesting that reboots can be faster than hibernating: a reboot means I have to load all my apps up again to be productive. With Hibernate or Standby, I’m ready to go once everything loads back up and everything is as I have left it.
This sounds great and is indeed a great marketing point for Lenovo, but not necessarily entirely unique, nor entirely due to Lenovo’s work. As much as I love Lenovo engineering, they aren’t the only ones to do stuff like this and you can count on HP and Dell to have analyzed their preloads for any major bottlenecks. Also, they cite that Lenovo Enhanced Experience PCs will boot X% faster than Windows XP or Vista on the same machine. Of course it will boot 33% or 56% faster than XP or Vista (count on that number being based on Vista), as Windows 7 is a faster and much better optimized operating system. Let’s also not forget that Lenovo has always included a separate power management hardware chip, it’s just not something that is heavily publicized. (It helps that I’ve written plenty of those marketing messages and can sniff them out pretty easily)
While I pick on Lenovo’s overly optimistic marketing message, the effort behind the work is highly laudable. PC manufacturers need to differentiate more than ever, not to mention that one of the industry’s biggest challenges (outside of the down economy) is Windows itself. I look forward to sampling the Enhanced Experience once everything is final!
With Lenovo sending review units of the ThinkPad T400s and X200 Tablet multitouch around the web like candy, there’s been lots of good coverage amongst our friends on the intarweb.
The folks over at jkOnTheRun have shared an interesting tidbit about making Windows 7 more touch-friendly. While it was optimized from the get-go, more-so than any other Windows OS anyway, I agree it is lacking in the size of scroll bars and title bars to interact with all those Windows you’ve sprouted up.
Through the use of a free add-on originally designed for Vista, called Origami Experience, you can adjust the size of various elements of the Windows interface to be larger and more touch friendly – just look at the screenshot above. Hit the link below for all the details on how to get your Windows 7 touch optimized.
It’s been all over the intarwebs lately, Microsoft is offering Windows 7 to students for $29.99. It is quite a deal and as long as you have a valid .EDU e-mail address and are enrolled in a U.S. education institution, you’re good to go!
Browsing the terms & conditions, it does say you can choose from Home Premium or Professional, but it’s not immediately apparent how you choose Professional on the Windows 7 for students order page. I figured out the “trick” to it is to click the link where it says: “Need to join your school’s network domain?”
The Home versions of Windows have traditionally lacked certain networking features, among other capabilities, and thus Microsoft deemed it fit to put the Professional version behind the “school’s network domain” query. There really is no reason for anyone to choose Home Premium over Professional for the same cost, so make sure you click that link.
You will be able to download your copy of Windows 7 on October 22nd and the offer is good until January 3rd, 2010. If you like, for $13 more you can have a DVD mailed to you as well.
Who saw this one coming? A multitouch display, much less on a non-convertible notebook? Crazier things have been done, like wrapping a laptop in leather. To make use of the multitouch features, Lenovo loaded a mostly-final version of Windows 7 on the T400s multitouch (MT) along with a new ThinkVantage utility: SimpleTap. TrackPoint enthusiasts will appreciate the homage paid within this application. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Microsoft and Intel recently demonstrated how Windows 7 stands to offer better battery life under certain usage scenarios than Vista, and they used a Lenovo ThinkPad T400s too.
Playing a DVD on two identical T400s’, the Windows 7 machine was drawing 15.6 watts while Vista bumped up to 20.5 watts. The benefit here will only be seen when you are actively using the machine, as Windows 7 have a “power coalescing” feature that lets one CPU core sleep as long as possible when it’s not needed.
Gizmodo also mentions that the next mobile chip from Intel will be able to execute two threads per core, improving the multi-tasking performance of both cores and possibly allowing for more situations when the 2nd core can be powered down.
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