Kernel Confusion

Designing a Windows 7 Client can be quite complicated, especially when you face a customer that wants to set everything there is to match his vision. In this particular case the customer wanted build-in Windows 7 Gadgets which connect to the internet not to appear in the Gadget list.

A little searching didn’t help me, I even found a TechNet thread where a Microsoft colleague stated that there is no way to turn single gadgets on and off, you can just disable the whole feature.

As a techie I wasn’t satisfied with that answer and pulled Sysinternals Process Monitor out of my sleeve… well, a USB stick. If a user right-clicks a gadget in the list, he is presented with a uninstall option. Using this one will add the filename of the gadget to the settings.ini in “%userprofile%\Windows Sidebar”.

So my solution is to use a Group Policy (Extention) to edit the .ini-file as I need it. Look at the [Root] section and the “PickerDefaultPackageSkipList” property. There you can add all the Gadgets you don’t want to see in the list.

Example:

PickerDefaultPackageSkipList=”Weather.Gadget,Currency.Gadget,”

This will remove the Weather- and Currency-Gadget from the list. Of course, the user can still re-add this one, but you could also delete the files as well. From here you can customize the solution to your needs.

Go Go Gadgetto Blogpost!

A customer of mine uses Microsoft BitLocker encryption to protect all it’s computers, both mobile and workstations, as they contain critical financial information of several other companies. When upgrading their client environment to Vista, we already introduced BitLocker for all hard drives and it worked like a charm. As they now move on to Windows 7, an interesting problem occurred for one the workstations when trying to encrypt a secondary drive.

Bitlocker encrypted OS drive

Whenever the administrator deployed the encryption task sequence via ConfigMgr, the hard drive disappeared from the system. There was no sign left at all, no drive letter in explorer, no entry in the management console and no trace in the device explorer. Gone! Looking at the activity LEDs, there was nothing going on. Restarting the system brought the drive back, but it did not continue to encrypt. Restarting the encryption led to the same behaviour. Looking at the drive’s BitLocker status revealed it began it’s work as it showed a 1% encryption. Decrypting it, again, let the drive vanish.

After some resultless research the final solution was to update the SATA Controller’s driver with the most recent one, in this case from the chip manufacturer, not the workstation vendor. After updating it, the encryption worked flawlessly.