However there is a kind of a hidden feature in the Windows 7 beta that will hopefully be transparent in the UI in the RTM version, but it is Microsoft so who knows? Anyway this feature is the ability to set your background to be the contents of an RSS feed, and what would be nice here would be to squirt in a Flickr RSS feed (for a specific set, tag, group, etc.) and have these high quality pictures be your desktop background.

So first of all you need to realise that theme files are simply a text file with a .theme extension, and as such can be edited with a simple text editor, so notepad it is then. First we need to create one, Open the Control Panel – Appearance and Personalization – Personalization, halfway down the page you will see the option to save the theme:-

First of all make the changes to the Colors, sounds, Screensaver that you want to have in your theme, then click on ‘Save theme’ as highlighted above. This will simply give you a file save dialog box, so give the Theme file a suitable name and location (I just use the Documents Library in this case) then click save.

You then need to open this file in Notepad, so this easiest way is to enter ‘Notepad’ in the search box in the start menu and press enter. Navigate to the theeme file file in the document library where you saved it then drag the file into notepad (this saves you the hassle to do with accidentally resetting file associations for this file type). So you end up with a file like this:-

Notice the ‘DisplayName’ is the same name as you named the saved file, all we need to do here is add a few lines to feed the flickr RSS into here:-

[Slideshow]
Interval=600000
Shuffle=1
RssFeed=http://yourflickrfeedurl

Replace the RSS value with the flickr feed you wish to use, like I Said this could be the RSS feed of one of your tags,sets,collection, main photostream within your flickr photos. You can make the changes the save the file. You do need to be aware of a few things though:-

• The photos need to have the high quality versions publically available in order to look good on the desktop, if not it will download the default size it shows which are not of a sufficient size for a desktop background and will look terrible.
• The photos will actually download in the background so it could take some time depending on the number of photos in the stream
• Obviously the higher the number of photos in the RSS feed, the more space it will take up.
• The Interval shown above is measured in milliseconds and is the refresh interval of each photo on the desktop

To import the them file simply double-click on it, the theme will apply and the ‘Personalization Control Panel’ will open and you will see that next to the ‘Save theme’ we used earlier it will show the current theme is your theme name. The photos in the RSS will now begin to download, you can save this theme again at anytime so you have a copy of this saved theme.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Power Management Issue
2. Windows 7 – Windows Media Center and the Xbox 360
3. Windows 7 – Dual booting with Vista

So first of all I start up WMC from the Windows 7 computer:-

You then the option of an express setup or Custom setup, I like to see what is going on whilst things are installing so I selected Custom:-

Setup then checks for an internet connection, after this is complete click next:-

I skipped through the Customer Experience Improvement Program Opt-in page, but you can select to join if you wish, then click Next. The next screen requests permission to connect to the internet to download information about your media and TV schedules, I selected to allow this:-

After clicking Next you will see that the ‘Required Components’ are setup, now for the optional components:-

I don’t have a tuner card and my computer is going to use the Xbox360 as an Extender, therefore I will just set up the display and media libraries,

When you setup the display, after making sure you are connected to the display that you are going to use you get to select the display type:-

You then choose the connection type:-

Then the width of the display:-

And to confirm the display resolution, then either fine tune display settings, or leave them as they are, for now I am going to leave them as they are and maybe come back to them later if video playback is not acceptable, but it is good to know you can configure your display in this way.

I then need to set up my media libraries, after selecting this from the menu I get to select the various media types:-

There is the option to setup watch folders that are on the Computer, or from network shares, or both.

An interesting feature is to be able to setup DVD movies, either DVD drives, DVD multi-changers, or folders with an extracted DVD in it (in the VIDEO_TS and Audio_TS folder structure), so I setup the locations and finished the setup.

In order to add the XBox 360 I had to clear the settings from the old Vista setup from the XBox, but as soon as I did this and launched setup, as with previous versions the media center detected the XBox360:-

After selecting ‘Set Up Now’, entering the setup key, and accepting the UAC prompt the system began setting things up:-

When it got to the searching for extender section as shown above a prompt from the XBox 360 was prompting to download the update required to connect to Windows 7. This took about a minute to download and the console restarted, it then applied the update which took a couple more minutes. I went back to the computer and it was showing a ‘Configuration error’; great stuff from Microsoft here, but hitting next on this error screen brought me back to the beginning of the extender setup and it was prompting for another setup key. So back on the XBox 360 and it now thinks it has a connection to a media center PC, so I hit connect and of course it fails but gives me the option of setting up a new connection, entered the new code on the PC and it proceeds, and the Xbox 360 comes up with the WMC connection screen, and back on the PC is begins to set up the extender and the media, this take a while as there is a lot of media, but a lot quicker than in Vista.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 – Dual booting with Vista
2. Installing Windows 7 on Samsung NC10 Netbook
3. Windows 7 – Display Brightness Problem

Ok, the first step would be to back-up the system obviously, the best way is to use Vista’s backup tools, All Programs-Accessories-System Tools-Backup Status and Configuration:-

From here select Complete PC Backup, and Select Create a backup now and accept the UAC prompt, the PC will look for backup device, you will need to select either a basic disk, or an optical drive, in my case I selected a USB drive with enough space for the image, on the next screen I selected to only backup the the C: drive and set the backup running, it might take some time depending on the size of your C: drive:-

After this completes we need to resize the partition that Vista is installed on to free up some space to create a partition for Windows 7. The easiest way of doing this is by using Vista’s own Disk Management, to access this simply click the Start Orb and enter ‘Computer Management’ in the Search box and click enter (whilst you are typing this you will see ‘Computer Management’ appear as an option in the program list, you can just click on this if you prefer).  In the computer management window expand Storage, and click on Disk Management:-

When it finishes getting the disk configuration right click on the primary partition (Usually C:) and select ‘Shrink Volume’. and the computer will check to see how much space it can shrink:-

You then get to choose how much you want to shrink the disk by, but as you can see it won’t necessarily be the full amount of free space as it warns in the the next window:-

When you have selected a suitable amount to shrink by, continue until it has completed, then reboot the computer with the Windows 7 DVD inserted, in my case I have gone with Windows 7 64-bit. After selecting Language/keyboard options and accepting the EULA, you get two installation options, Upgrade and Custom, select Custom, then select the unallocated space you created on the system disk and click next, Windows 7 will now install and will probably restart a couple of times, it might take some time, mine took about 20 minutes. On the initial Set Up Windows phase, I named my computer, created a user/password and chose not to input a Product Key at this stage as I wanted to check how well the hardware was supported etc.

The driver for the wireless card/AP built into the motherboard which is a Realtek RTL8187, I got the motherboard CD and successfully installed the 64-bit Vista version of the driver, however I found this would not connect. The onboard wired NICs had working drivers on install, so I connected to my router via ethernet cable and connected to Windows Update. There were a number of important updates, and under the optional updates there were drivers for the graphics card, and for the Wireless NIC. I selected all of these and set it going, after the final reboot everything looks good, however the Rating has dropped to a 4.9 for Windows 7, however it rates some of the components higher, the disk and Processor hold it back again.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 – Windows Media Center and the Xbox 360
2. Windows 7 Power Management Issue
3. Installing Windows 7 on Samsung NC10 Netbook

I was having a problem with controlling the display brightness in Windows 7, according to the document that can be downloaded from Microsoft at – http://itwit.in/75663/ there should be Brightness slider in both the Windows Mobility Center (Shortcut – Windows Key+X, or my right clicking the power icon in the system tray) and the Power Options (reached from either by the Controls panel – Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options, or by right clicking on the power icon in the system tray). However it was not present on my system, in fact not of the controls were listed.

I have the Vista version of Samsung’s ‘Easy Display Manager’ installed and this is supposed to enable keyboard hotkeys etc. Well the display brightness keys were only working sporadically, and generally when plugged into the AC power supply.

A quick search around the web revealed little but did see mentions of there possibly being controls in the BIOS to control brightness, So after rebooting my machine, I hit F2 to enter the BIOS and switched to the Boot options and saw the following:-

So I toggled the Brightness Mode Control to User Control, by hitting F6 to give the following screen:-

I saved the BIOS settings and booted back up to Windows 7, and the shortcut keys on my keyboard to control brightness worked like a dream, however I still could not find the controls in the Windows Mobility Center, or in the Power Options.  I will continue to pursue this though and hopefully write a new post with the updates.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Power Management Issue
2. Windows 7 – Windows Media Center and the Xbox 360
3. Windows 7 – Dual booting with Vista

After a bit of looking around for options I installed windows live essentials for her and setting her up with a Live account as she didn’t have an email address outside of work. So she now has an email address and the means to access it on the local machine, the interface for the Windows Live Mail client is very clean and simple, perfect for her really at this stage.

I installed Skype and set her up with an account and sorted out the webcam for her on there.  For when she has issues I made the laptop a LogMeIn client on my account so I could remotely connect. Security-wise I had already installed Avasy free antivirus and Spybot search and Destroy anti-spyware free edition. I alsoinstalled Firefox and made it the default web browser, which she accepted without question.

I showed her how to use the few simple things she need to use initially, and she picked things up pretty quickly and was genuinely excited by it all, especially the simple things like the wireless internet connection that I just take for granted.

She was interested in looking at Facebook as a lot of her family are on there, so the wife set all that up for her and showed her out to use it and added a few friends for her.

I was initially going to have her use the Windows Live Photo Gallery to public to an online gallery, but after taking a look at Flickr she wanted to use that instead, so now I just have that to set up for her, and install the uploader for her.

I am pretty confident she will pick things up pretty quickly, and I was surprised how easy it was to explain the basics in a way she understood and could follow, it has been a while since I worked in support so I thought it might be a lot harder to get her to understand.  Maybe there could be some work in this area in Moscow. Anybody need a hand?

I am pretty sure that the wife is going to be a lot happier knowing her Mum has a few new options to keep in touch with us whilst we are away.

Related posts:

1. First Moscow Visit – Part 1: On the Flight
2. Enter the Snarks!
3. Packing!