But even more unusually, after several seconds of being locked up, suddenly a shrill tone came out of my Dell Dimension 8400 computer tower. It sounded like a prolonged BIOS beep. I turned off the computer right away. And then decided to turn it back on to see if it would boot successfully.

It booted up just fine, thankfully. I did some online research and I found an article that said the following:

Executives at Creative Technology Ltd. said they believe they’ve isolated the so-called “squeal of death” associated with the company’s Audigy sound cards, and that it’s not tied to the sound card itself.

The “squeal,” which consists of a shrill tone caused by an audio loopback after a PC locks up, has been tied to a specific PCI bridge chip used in at least one motherboard from Soyo Computer Inc. The same squeal has also been tied to a PCI glitch in PCs manufactured by Dell Computer Corp., according to Steve Erickson, vice-president of audio development at Creative Labs, Fremont, Calif.

[...]

Creative has worked to track down the source of the squeal. In one of the cases, Creative found the glitch was tied to the AT123S PCI arbitration chip from Attansic Technology Corp., often used to avoid system conflicts in motherboards with a large number of PCI devices. Under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal, Erickson said. The chip has been found on the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, which uses the Via KT266A chipset.

Hmm, that “under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal” sounds about right, considering I was “only” exporting an audio file, editing another, and opening Outlook 2003 at the same time, with a bunch of other programs open. Tsk tsk.

One thing though: it sounded like the tone was coming from inside the computer. The article didn’t say whether this squeal came through the speakers or whether it was internal, so unfortunately I don’t know for sure whether this is the problem.

But next time, I’ll think twice before I bog down my computer to that extent!

1. Take a screenshot

It couldn’t be easier: just press the Print Screen key on your keyboard (sometimes abbreviated to Prnt Scrn) and the contents of the screen are copied to the clipboard. You can then paste the screenshot into Paint, Microsoft Word, or another program.

If you just want to copy the contents of the currently selected window, hold down the Alt key while you press the Print Screen key.

2. Grayscale anything (Windows XP only)

Here’s a sneaky trick: You can easily turn any part of the screen into a grayscale version. First, make sure the part you want to capture is not in the center of the screen. The click the Start button and click Log Off.

As you probably know, after the Log Off dialog appears the screen will slowly fade from color to grayscale. But if you use the screenshot tip mentioned above, you are able to use that XP “eye candy” to take a screenshot of the now-grayscale screen.

3. Overcome screen-capture prevention

If you use tip #1, you may come across programs that prevent you from taking screenshots. If you’re sure that it’s legal to take the screenshot you want to take, you might be able to overcome this by first holding down the Ctrl key and tapping Esc twice. Then press Print Screen. Note that it will not work to tap the Windows key twice.

I haven’t been able to find any information on the Microsoft website that prohibits the use of these icons, so I guess that means it’s okay, right?

For Windows XP, maybe. But according to a screenshot of the “About Windows” dialog in Windows Vista Business posted on the SuperSite for Windows:

The Windows Vista™ Business operating system and its user interface are protected by trademark and other pending or existing intellectual property rights in the United States and other countries.

Of course, the OS name at the beginning of the sentance will vary if you’re using a different edition of Windows Vista.

But compare this to the legal info found in the “About Windows” dialog in Windows XP:

Copyright © 1981-2001 Microsoft Corporation

Yep, just a copyright notice.

Obviously, the legal information in the About Windows dialog has changed significantly from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

Does this mean that programmers and web developers will be unable to use elements of the Vista interface, including icons? If so, does this interface protection cover just Vista itself? Or does it also encompass programs included with Vista, such as Windows Media Player 11 and Windows Internet Explorer 7? If IE7 is protected with a “trademarked interface,” does that mean that usage of the IE7 feed icon is illegal? What other implications might this possibly have?

I have previously considered the use of Windows XP icons on websites to be okay. Many popular sites use them, and Microsoft hasn’t complained about it as far as I know. In addition, the usage of Windows icons presents a consistent user experience for new PC and Internet users.

But it looks like this might be changing. For me as a programmer and web developer, I would find it very helpful if Microsoft would make it clear what exactly they want to prohibit and what they want to allow.

What do you think?

From the Windows Vista Developer Center RSS homepage:

Windows Vista will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it’s released.

And from the RSS Support in Longhorn article:

RSS, as we use it in this document, refers not to a single format (such as RSS 2.0), but to the general concept of feeds of syndicated content. It should be considered to cover all feed formats that meet the basic criteria of updateable [sic] collections of items.

I do see why Microsoft has chosen to define RSS this way, and at the same time I don’t.

There really isn’t a term that exclusively encapsulates both “RSS” and “Atom.” You could say the word “feed,” though that can include other formats such as OPML.

But don’t you think “feed” is more technically accurate and user-friendly than “RSS” when describing both RSS and Atom?

Paul Thurrott (author of SuperSite for Windows articles) gave an interesting an opinion on why Apple would do this:

One might wonder why Apple would create such a thing. After all, with barely 2 percent of the market for computer operating systems, should Apple be trying to win market share for Mac OS X and not offer a way for Mac users to run Windows? Not exactly. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn’t actually make a lot of money directly from sales of its OS. Instead, Apple makes most of its money–even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy–by selling computer hardware. So one might think of Boot Camp as a win-win. Apple wins because a much wider audience of users can now consider its Mac systems, secure in the knowledge that they can run Windows if they want to. Microsoft wins because these users will still be using–and paying for–Windows. And best of all, we as users win, too, because now we can have the best of both worlds: the elegance of Apple hardware coupled with Windows, the operating system that runs all those applications we want to run.

Some Mac users don’t see it that way. They’d like you to believe that Mac OS X is all anyone would ever need, and they’re actually quite a bit distressed that anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac. Get a life: This software will open up the world of Apple to a much wider audience and if OS X is as great as they think it is, surely some of those people will start spending time with OS X instead of Windows. I can’t really see the issue there.

The review also said that:

A future version of Boot Camp will be included with Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” due in late 2007. That version, presumably, will support Windows Vista as well.

I do daresay that I’m actually getting somewhat excited about this. I’ve never wanted to switch from Windows because it is, as I consider it, the ultimate progamming platform. With a dual-boot setup like this, I could still do programming etcetera on Windows and then doodle with Mac OS X if I ever wanted to. Hmm…

• Free Up Disk Space
• Defragment
• Run the Windows Disk Checker
• Get an Anti-Spyware Program

Pretty basic steps, but it looks like a very good step-by-step guide for someone who’s new to computers.

The article says that a WinFS Community Technical Preview is due on February 15, 2006 — coming right up.

Probably few of you know that Windows 95 came with an entertaining 3D hovercar “capture-the-flag” game. It was called, appropriately, “Hover!” In the game you drive your hovercraft around (named, not surprisingly, the “Hover 950″) and try to capture the AI’s flags while guarding your own flags from the AI.

Hover was not installed with Windows 95 by default, but rather was buried on the Windows 95 CD-ROM. Much like Microsoft’s Backup program is buried in the Windows XP Home Edition CD-ROM.

Thankfully, at the time when our family had our Windows 95 computer, I had enough computer knowledge to take the program off of the CD-ROM and save it. I don’t even remember how, when, or why; so long ago it was (5+ years ago). I’m just glad I did, considering our Windows 95 CD has long since been lost.

Hover has been passed down our lineage of computers and I still have a playable copy today (Figure). It appears I’m really lucky to have a copy; I did a Google search and it looks like there are a lot of people that want one. (No, I’m not going to give a copy to anyone that wants one. The game was included with Windows 95, so I don’t think that it would be legal for me to distribute a game that was included with a commercial operating system. If you own a Windows 95 CD, do a search for “hover.exe” to find it. If you don’t, you can buy a CD on eBay for under $10; make sure it’s not an upgrade CD.)

I find it very amazing that this game works on both Windows 95 and XP, and probably all operating systems in between. So that means I can still play it!

Anyway, enough with the fond memories. Let’s play the game!

When I first start the game, it gives me a nice warning — complete with a Windows XP exclamation icon — that my 16-million-color display just won’t cut it. I need 256 colors (Figure). Yawn. Couldn’t those Microsoft people just have used the >= operator instead of == when they were programming?

The splash screen, shown at the top of the post, looks pretty cool, although the image quality isn’t the best (Figure).

After the splash screen is finished splashing — that is, after it goes away — the Quick Help dialog appears (Figure). After that, I’m ready to start (Figure).

Naturally, I start out at level 1, with mountains rising above a maze that looks as if it were set in the Medieval period (Figure). Although the mountains look quite pretty, to tell you the truth I didn’t even notice the mountains until I started taking screenshots for this post.

Level 1 is complete with stairs (Figure) and platforms (Figure). There are special squares that you can run over (Figure), some of them good and some of them bad. There are also floating bubbles (don’t know what else to call them) (Figure), that when run into, can do one of several different things: temporarily speed up or slow down your hovercraft, temporarily remove any effects that special squares have on you, or give you a special tool: a wall (a temporarily-existing wall that can be used to block enemies), a spring (used for bouncing, of course), or a cloak (makes your hovercraft temporarily invisible).

Soon I spot one of my automatically-positioned red flags (Figure), but an enemy hovercraft (Figure) hones in and swoops it away. Darn.

I moved on to level 2. Though I didn’t take the time to finish level 1. I used Hover’s “Start At” dialog box (Figure) to jump ahead.

Level 2 is set in a busy-city setting (Figure). After that comes level 3, set in an enclosed aquatic-themed environment (Figure).

When you get to level 4, it’s the same medieval-themed maze from level 1 (Figure). And the levels keep cycling through the environments, unless you set the “maze type” setting to “random” instead of “sequential” in the “Customize Game” dialog box (Figure).

I checked the default high scores list (Figure) to see if there were any special names in the list. Nope, no “Bill Gates” entry in sight.

However, I found something else that was very interesting and rather amusing. The “About Hover!” dialog, accessed by clicking “About Hover!” on the Help menu, says that Hover is part of Windows XP! (Figure) Hover obviously utilizes the same “About” dialogs that other Windows utilities did (in 95) and still do (in XP).

Still on the topic of “About Hover,” I also took a screenshot of the “Version” tab in the Properties dialog for the hover.exe file (Figure) .

The Help menu (Figure) gives a slew of options. However, the Help Topics dialog doesn’t have a lot of documentation, though it has a fair amount (Figure). And the “How to Use Help” (read: “Help on Using Help”), which I would assume would help me to use the help system, opens help documentation in the help system! (Figure) Not very helpful. No sir.

Hover is a cool game, with graphics that were certainly exceptional for its time, but I’ve been thinking: Why did Microsoft hide Hover on the Windows 95 disk? And why did Microsoft not include Hover in any future Windows versions?

Hmm… the unsolved mysteries in the Legend of Microsoft Hover.