The Windows 7 Whopper (Wikimedia commons)

As with many great discoveries, I some interesting Windows 7 window behaviors by accident. I was trying to move the cursor by word (control + right arrow), when I accidentally hit the Windows key instead of the control key, and the active window went flush with the right side of the screen, and expanded to fill the right half of the screen.  This is much like the behavior when dragging a window to the right side of the screen, except that it works even when you have two monitors.  Here’s a recap of the key combos I found:

Windows key + right arrow key: Right side of window becomes flush with right side screen, expands to the top and bottom of screen, left side of window is in the horizontal center of the screen.

Windows key + left arrow key: Left side of window becomes flush with left side of screen, expands to the top and bottom of screen, right side of window is the horizontal center of the screen.

Windows key + up arrow key: Window fully maximizes to the screen.

Windows key + down arrow key: Window minimizes.

Artist's rendering of my black desktop

At first, I thought it was an issue with Windows activation, since that can cause the desktop to go black if Windows hadn’t been properly activated during install.  That was not the case, since there was no activation warning in the lower right of the screen, plus I have system updates turned on, which requires the Windows genuine advantage tool (or the Windows 7 version of it, anyway). I also noticed that fonts didn’t look quite right.  The smoothness of the fonts in the Windows Explorer were gone, and most other fonts looked jagged as well.

After I started poking around, I found there was a dialog that had been minimized telling me that my trial version of Norton AntiVirus had expired. Surely, they wouldn’t black out my desktop and screw with my fonts over that, would they?

Short answer: yes. I had planned on testing out Microsoft Security Essentials, so I uninstalled Norton, and lo, the desktop reappeared! After restarting the desktop came back, the fonts were smooth as a baby’s bumper cushions, and all was right with the world.

The chances of me extending my Norton trial? Very close to zero.  There are ways of communicating with your users other than messing with fonts and desktop backgrounds.  Not cool.

I love VMWare.  I’ve been a user of their server products for a few years, and with the recent purchase of a beefy i7-based PC, I started looking into VMWare Workstation and Player.  One of the features of these desktop versions of VMWare is that you can share folders from the host operating system on the guests. In my specific case, the host operating system is Windows 7, and the guest OS is Fedora 11. In order to backup my Fedora installation, I use the shared folders feature to copy from Fedora onto the Windows 7 host, where it’s backed up onto an external USB drive using Acronis Home.

This system worked for a few days, but suddenly stopped working one day.  It occurred after doing a software update on the Fedora guest. I checked the usual suspects for when things go wrong on Linux: firewall settings on both the host and guest, selinux, disk space issues, but no problem was found.  I deleted the shared folder settings and restored them, and I still couldn’t access the shared folders. I even went so far as to reboot both the guest and the host, and the shared folders still wouldn’t work.

It was as that point I realized the significance of shared folders disappearing after doing a Fedora system update.  Among the updates was a security update to the Linux kernel. It was then I realized what had gone wrong.

Shared folders will work with a guest OS only if VMWare Tools are installed on the guest.  On a Fedora guest, that involves recompiling the kernel, and when the kernel was overwritten by the system update, the VMWare changes to the kernel were lost, and thus no more shared folders.

To resolve the issue, I just reinstalled VMWare tools.  Since they were previously installed, all I needed to do was to go to where I had expanded the VMWare Tools tar file and run the vmware-install.pl script again.  I used all the default selections for the prompts during the re-install, and when it finished, shared folders reappeared as quickly as they had disappeared.