Energy efficiency is one of the most active topics in modern computing today. As evidence, consider that processor and chipset vendors are marketing products on “performance per watt”, instead of just processor clock frequency and benchmark performance. Perhaps you have seen a press release for one of the many industry consortiums focused on “Green Computing”--reducing the power consumption and environmental impact of computing. Finally, battery life continues to be a major purchasing and usability factor for mobile PCs. These related energy efficiency efforts in the PC industry result in an ever-increasing interest in how Windows manages power.
In engineering Windows 7, our goal is to deliver the capabilities and features users want from a Windows PC while reducing power consumption over previous releases. Windows already provides a rich set of energy saving features, including the ability to turn off the display and automatically put the system to sleep when the user is not interacting with the computer. For Windows 7, we are building upon the investments in these areas by extending the existing capabilities and focusing on reducing power consumption when the system is idle. Although Windows is responsible for managing the power state of many devices, including the processor, hard drive and display, the remaining devices and software running on the computer have just as much (if not more) impact on power consumption and battery life. This is a challenge for everyone contributing to the PC experience.
When we talk about energy efficiency and power consumption, we like to break down the problem area into 3 main components:
* Base Hardware Platform: The processor, chipset and memory and in the case of mobile platforms this also includes the battery capacity. The base hardware platform can have a significant impact on the power consumption of the platform—maximum processor speed, the number of cores, if the processor is designed for mobile devices, and the amount of RAM are all factors.
* Windows: The PC operating system is responsible for managing many of the devices in the system, making smart tradeoffs between performance and power consumption based on usage and allowing the end-user to dictate power management policy through power plans and settings. The challenges in this area are to properly manage device power and to ensure new Windows features are as efficient as possible in the amount of system resources (CPU, memory and disk) they use.
* Extensions: Extensions is a general category which includes other devices, drivers, services and applications. Devices, drivers and other software can have a significant impact on power consumption and a single application can impact battery life by 20% or more.
Realizing great energy efficiency from a Windows PC requires efforts in each of these areas. A problem with any single component in any area can have a significant impact on power consumption. Thus approaching energy efficiency from a platform approach and paying special attention to each component on the platform is required.
Base Hardware Platform
The base hardware platform is really dictated by the system manufacturer. The customer gets the ultimate choice when they buy a system—the customer can buy a system with ultra-efficient hardware components or can buy a system with components that favor performance over power consumption. There are desktop and mobile PCs in all kinds of form factors, with varying capabilities and power consumption levels. Some mobile PCs have a normal 3 or 6-cell battery, while others have an extended 9-cell battery or another external battery that can be added to the computer. The challenge for Windows is to be energy efficient across the wide range of hardware in the Windows ecosystem. Looking at a modern laptop, here is where the power goes:
Laptop power consumption.Desktops will have a similar power distribution although higher in watts. The display is a large amount of the energy consumed in using your desktop PC as well.
Operating System
The Windows operating system can have just as big an influence as any other component in the platform. In engineering Windows 7 our goal is to make sure Windows provides a great foundation and energy saving opportunities within the operating system starting with configuration of power policy settings.
The first place most users encounter Windows power management is through Power Options in control panel, or the battery meter on a mobile PC. For as long as Windows has had power management, Windows has had power schemes or power plans. The power plans allow you to easily change from one set of power settings to another, depending on your preferences.
Power Options control panel.
Within a power plan, you can change a variety of Windows power-saving features, including inactivity timers for turning off the display, automatically putting the system to sleep or even creating a new custom power plan for the exact settings you want. The display and sleep idle features are very important for power savings and battery life. As above, the display can consume approximately 40% of the power budget on the typical mobile PC and anywhere from 30-100+ Watts on a desktop PC.
PC OEMs, especially makers of laptops, will often develop a custom set of power schemes that work to take advantage of differentiated hardware and unique software available on a specific model. So often you will see power schemes that carry the name of your PC OEM in the title. These have been developed by the OEM who is just as committed to energy efficiency.
Quick tips: The easiest way to save power on a desktop PC is reduce the display idle timeout to something very aggressive, such as 2 or 5 minutes. If you have a screen saver enabled, disable it to allow the display to turn off. On a mobile PC, the easiest way to extend battery life is to reduce the brightness of the display in addition. Also note that many of the new all-in-one machines use laptop components and thus from a power management perspective look like laptops.
Windows manages the processor performance and changes it dynamically based on the current usage to provide performance boost when required and conserve power based on the current workload. For example, when the system is mostly idle, such as when I’m typing this blog post, there is no need to be running the processor in the maximum performance mode, instead the processor voltage and frequency can be reduced to a lower value to save power. Similarly, the hard disk drive and a variety of other devices can be placed in low-power modes or turned off completely to save power when not in use.
For Windows 7, we’re refining the user experiences for power management, focusing on reducing idle power consumption and supporting new device power modes.
There are two reasons to optimize idle power consumption on the system. First there are various times throughout the day when the PC is idle and the more the system gets to idle and stays idle, the less power it uses. Second, idle power consumption is the ‘base’ power consumption for all other workloads. A system which consumes 15W at Idle will consume additional power over the idle power consumption while is use for other workloads. By reducing the idle power consumption on the platform we will improve most other scenarios as well.
The first step in reducing idle power is optimizing the amount of processor, memory and disk utilization. Reducing processor utilization is the most important, because the processor has a wide range of power consumption. When truly idle, the processor power consumption can be as low as 100-300mW. But, when fully busy, the processor can consume up to 35W. This large range means that even small amounts of processor activity can have a significant impact on overall power consumption and battery life. There are several areas of investment in Windows 7 that help reduce processor utilization and thereby enabling longer periods of time where the processor can enter into low power modes. One of these investments is in the area of services that are running on the platform and having those services only start when they are required referred to as “Trigger-Start”. While these services are efficient and have minimal impact by themselves, the additive effect of several services can add up. We are looking at smart ways to manage these services both within Windows but making our investments in this area extensible for others who are writing services to take advantage of this infrastructure. (Also note these are the same features that contribute to improvements in boot time as well).
To further help reduce idle power, we are focusing on core processor power management improvements. Windows scales processor performance based on the current amount of utilization, and making sure Windows only increases processor performance when absolutely required can have a big impact on power consumption.
We have made several investments in the area of device power management including enhancements to USB device classes to enable selective suspend across a broad range of devices including audio, biometrics, scanners, and smart cards. These investments available in Windows 7 enable more energy efficient PC designs. We have also invested in improvements to power management for networking devices, both wired and wireless.
While many of our investments in the core infrastructure improves energy efficiency across several scenarios, in Windows 7 we also focused on several key customer scenarios to identify resource utilization improvements to extend battery life on mobile platforms. One of these scenarios that we identified was media playback. The optimizations for DVD playback include reducing processor and graphics utilization, audio improvements, and optical disk drive enhancements. These improvements are already paying off and showing significant increase in battery life across a broad range of mobile platforms which we demonstrated at the WinHEC conference.
Extensions
Graphics devices, USB devices, device drivers, background services and installed applications are all extensions to Windows. Large improvements in power consumption and energy efficiency can be realized by improving the efficiency of platform extensions.
For example, consider a single USB device that does not support Selective Suspend. That USB device itself may have very low power consumption (e.g., a fingerprint reader), but until that device enters the suspend state, the processor and chipset must poll the device at a very high frequency to see if there is new data. That polling prevents the processor from entering low power idle states, and on a typical business-class notebook reduces battery life by 20-25%.
Devices are not the only area that require efforts for great energy efficiency. Application and service software can also have a big impact on power consumption. Take for example an application that increases the platform timer resolution using the timeBeginPeriod API. The platform timer tick resolution will be increased and the processor will not be able to efficiently use low power idle modes. We have observed a single application that keeps the timer resolution increased to 1ms can have up to a 10% impact on battery life on a typical notebook PC.
We’re committed to helping improve the energy efficiency of Windows platform extensions by working closely with our partners. The strategy we’re employing is to provide rich tools to identify energy efficiency problems in hardware and software. For Windows 7, we’ve added a new inbox utility that provides an HTML report of energy efficiency issues—a “Top 10” checklist of power problems. If you want to try it out on Windows 7, run powercfg /energy at an elevated command prompt. Be sure to close any open applications and documents before running powercfg—this utility is designed to find energy efficiency problems when the system is idle. powercfg with the /energy parameter can detect USB devices that are not suspending and applications that have increased the platform timer resolution.
For more advanced analysis, we have provided the Windows Performance Toolkit. The Performance Toolkit http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx makes it very easy for software developers to observe the resource utilization of their applications, resolve performance bottlenecks and identify issues impacting energy efficiency.
What about turning my PC off?
So far, we have been talking about how to save power while the PC is ON. But, there are power savings to gain by entering low power modes when the PC is not in use. Many users simply Shut Down their computer when it is not in use, yet others use Sleep and sometimes Hibernate on mobile PCs. Windows features each of these power-saving modes so you can choose the right mode for how you use the system:
* Sleep : All of the open programs, documents and files are preserved in system RAM and the rest of the system is powered off. Because only memory is powered, Sleep consumes a very small amount of power—typically less than 1W on a mobile PC and typically less than 3W on a desktop PC. The primary benefit of Sleep is that resume is very fast—most systems resume from sleep in less than 2 seconds.
* Hibernate: All of the open programs, documents and files are copied from system RAM to the hard drive. The resulting file is called the Hiberfile. After RAM is copied into the Hiberfile, all of the PC is powered off. Hibernate is most often used on mobile PCs because it consumes nearly 0W on most laptops, and even if the battery does eventually drain, all of the open programs and documents are saved in the Hiberfile. As RAM continues to grow, and as some PCs have limited storage, Hibernate might not be the best option for folks. (As a quick tip, the disk cleanup wizard, or powercfg –hibernate off, can remove the disk space pre-allocated to hibernate).
* Shut Down - This is a normal Windows shutdown, nothing is saved to memory or disk, and the system boots again the next time the system is powered on.
Using an example desktop PC, we measured power consumption for Sleep, Hibernate, Shut Down and the basic ON state, with just the desktop shown and no open programs. We also measured resume latency—the amount of time to get the system back to the ON state.
Comparing Sleep, Hibernate, and Boot Power v. Time to On
The chart makes it pretty clear why we focus on Sleep reliability and performance, and encourage most people to use it when they are not using their computer. Sleep consumes nearly the same amount of power as Shut Down, but resumes the system in less than 2 seconds, instead of going through the boot process. You can see that boot takes a significant amount of power so when considering whether to turn off your machine to save power or to put it into a low power state, think about how long your machine will be out of use. Nevertheless, as we’ve talked about in previous blogs boot (and shutdown) are obviously very important performance scenarios as we engineer Windows 7.
Next Steps
We are committed to continuously improving the energy efficiency of Windows PCs, and have made significant improvements to core platform power management for Windows 7, as well as tools to identify where power is consumed. We still have more work to do, and look forward to our upcoming Beta release and monitoring incoming CEIP telemetry for energy efficiency and power management results. Of course we continue to work very closely with the other members of the ecosystem as we all have much to contribute to energy efficiency—from the manufacturing, usage, and end of life of a PC, software, and peripherals.
--Dean
Posted by e7blog | 47 Comments
Filed under: Perf
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 12:00 AM
At Home with HomeGroup in Windows 7
Like many places we’ve spent the past few weeks under quite a bit of snow, which is pretty unusual for Seattle! Most of us on the team took advantage of the snow time to install test builds of Windows 7 on our home machines as we finalize the beta for early 2009—I know I felt like I installed it on 7000 different machines. We’re definitely looking forward to seeing folks kick the tires on the beta when it is available. For more information on the beta, please stay tuned to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7 which is where we will post information about participation.
This post is about a Windows 7 feature that covers a lot of territory—it is about networking, user interface, sharing, media, printing, storage, search, and more. HomeGroup is a way of bringing all these features together in a way that makes it possible for a new level of coolness in a home with multiple PCs running Windows 7. A lot of us are the sysadmins for our own homes and for many others (friends and family). We set up network topologies, configure machines, and set things up so they work—HomeGroup is designed to make that easier so it can be done without a volunteer sysadmin. It makes for some challenges in how to describe the feature since the lack of such a feature has each of us creating our own private best practices or our own techniques for creating and maintaining a home network. HomeGroup is about making this easier (or possible for everyone else) and at the same time giving you the tools to customize and manage—and no matter what, under the hood the file and printer sharing, media sharing, and networking you are already familiar with is there should you wish to stick with the familiar ways. HomeGroup is a deep feature that builds on a lot of new infrastructure/plumbing new to Windows 7, though in this post we’ll talk about it from the experience of setting up a network.
This is a feature that is one you should just use and see it working, rather than trying to read about it as it covers so much territory in writing.
This post is by Jerry Koh a lead program manager in the Core User Experience team, with help from a number of folks across the dev team. --Steven
PS: From all of us on the Windows team, we wish you a very Happy New Year!
You probably have seen or heard about HomeGroup by now. We demonstrated it at PDC this year during Steven’s keynote, it was mentioned a few times at WinHec, and some of you may have even tried it on your PCs with the PDC pre-beta build of Windows 7. HomeGroup represents a new end-to-end approach to sharing in the home, an area in which Windows has provided many features before --- the intuitive end to end is what’s new. HomeGroup recognizes and groups your Windows 7 PCs in a “simple to set up” secure group that enables open access to media and digital memories in your home. With HomeGroup, you can share files in the home, stream music to your XBOX 360 or other devices, and print to the home printer without worrying about technical setup or even understanding how it all works.
This blog post is designed to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we designed HomeGroup.
Designed with you in mind
The HomeGroup design goal, like other Windows 7 features, is informed by customer data and input. Whether from the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), the Windows Feedback Panel, focus groups or usability sessions, the data we collect enables us to focus on key areas where people feel the most pain. To begin figuring out how to solve file and printer sharing problems in the home, we started by looking at how people interact within a home environment. We wanted to learn not only how people used computers in the home, but also what social and behavioral norms were acceptable to see if there were parallels that we could bring into our design. We found the following:
* People don’t allow strangers into their homes and usually lock their exterior doors. People within the confines of the home are typically considered to be trusted.
* Within the home, doors to rooms are usually not locked, allowing members of the household to have free access. Books, photographs, magazines, CDs, and DVDs are often freely shared.
* Social norms prevent most people from snooping into areas where they shouldn’t and, if needed, adding locks to rooms or drawers is relatively easy.
The social model of the home also reflected how people want to share. When we discussed file and printer sharing in the home (or the concept of doing so), we found that people classify their content generally into four different buckets: private, public, parentally sensitive, and children’s stuff. Private content consists of business and financial data and is considered private mainly because people fear it will be accidentally deleted as the number of people who have access to it increases.
People are typically quick to point out that they don’t have entertainment content they consider private, and they’re very open to free access to this content within the family. Families with children are often concerned about parentally sensitive content (inappropriate music, videos, etc.). With digital cameras and camcorders dropping in price and being widely adopted, parents are primarily concerned about accidental deletion or loss of original copies of digital memories.
These observations were very interesting to us; a model that mirrored real-world expectations for sharing could be more natural to people than something that layered different questions around security, permissions or rights. So we approached the HomeGroup sharing model with the concept of open access in the home. But, how can we define what the “home” really is? What assumptions can we make about security?
Wireless, user passwords and when are you “at home”?
One of the key advances we’ve had in home networking technology has been wireless. Standards like 802.11 have taken the home network by storm. Wireless router sales to consumers are higher than ever, and are projected to continue growing. As a wider segment of people buy wireless routers, concerns about security start to build up. When configured incorrectly, wireless networks can leave your entire home network vulnerable to malicious people or nosy neighbors. While there have been efforts to help people become more aware of securing wireless networks -- such as the “Windows Rally program” and various “Windows Connect Now” technologies--the general public still lags behind in setting up security for their wireless networks. We know from our customer data that more than half of all wireless networks, whether by choice or oversight are set up as unsecured and we know many of you are the first line of defense in helping your friends and families set up a secure home network. While trends all point to more awareness and improvement in the future, it isn’t clear whether we would ever reach 100% security on these networks. So how can we make sure home networks are secured?
Another interesting factor is the usage of passwords on user accounts in the home. While people are more sensitive to security than ever before, we also observed that many don’t want to set up passwords for their Windows user accounts. They feel that it is a barrier to their use of the computer and yet another thing for them to remember or lose (as an aside, passwords are often viewed as a performance bottleneck in the home). From the data we obtained from the Windows Feedback Panel, a majority of users actually don’t use passwords in the home, opting for the simple model of opening the laptop lid and using Windows quickly. This parallels usage patterns on cell phones, where setting passwords on them would just be a deal-breaker for most people.
A majority of the computers in our panel only had one primary user. While we all know that laptop sales have overtaken desktop sales in the last couple of years, this data tells us that people are buying PCs more for specific people rather than for a shared location. With laptops, the mobility factor has contributed to the “one person/one computer” landscape, again mirroring cell phone ownership patterns in which users almost never share a personal cell phone. Clearly as notebook options include even less expensive options, this will only increase, though we recognize it is still rather a luxury in most of the world.
Percent of PCs with given number of accounts.
So we wanted to find a model that could secure home sharing for people who don’t use passwords and could also take into account the more personal nature of PC usage.
First we needed to figure out that people were “at home”. Luckily we didn’t need to look very far for some useful technology in this area. Windows Vista introduced a concept known as network location awareness (NLA). This enables the system to recognize when you’ve changed network locations, and it tags the location with a simple “Home”, “Work” or “Public” designation. While it was somewhat of a mystery in Vista in terms of what such a designation did (unless you read all the words), we will see the infrastructure has become increasingly important as we built out the HomeGroup scenario. In addition to ensuring the right firewall settings are configured for these locations, NLA also enabled us to be smarter about starting Windows services that are targeted at specific network locations. For example, the network discovery service does not start if you’re in a public location. However, Windows Vista didn’t have much distinction between the “work” and “home” network locations; they were essentially the same in terms of which firewall ports were opened and which Windows services were started.
In Windows 7, we extended the concept of NLA and made “work” and “home” more distinct. In Windows 7, when you select the “home” network profile, we know that you are “at home”, and will start the essential services required for successful file and printer sharing in the home. This provides an intuitive entry point into HomeGroup, and once you are “at home” we start looking for (via network discovery) other Win7 PCs in the home. If you already have a HomeGroup active, we offer you the ability to join it; if not, you can create one.
Set Up Windows Network Location dialog
Now that we know your PC is at home, we need to make sure that your data is secured from prying eyes. While wireless security is full of acronyms and technical solutions to security (WEP, WPA, TKIP, etc., to name a few), the fundamental model of wireless security is fairly simple for people to understand. The use of a physical key (copied several times) to enter one’s home is mirrored by the concept of typing in a shared key to gain access to the home wireless network. In the HomeGroup case, Windows will provide you with a pre-generated password out of the box, which you would hand over to any member of the home, and they could then join the group.
Homegroup password reminder.
While a password is provided by default, people can, at any time, visit HomeGroup in Control Panel to change their password to something they prefer. This flexible system performed very well in testing. When faced with the default password, people wrote it down, and shared it with others to set up the HomeGroup. You may ask, why don’t we enable people to set their own passwords by default? The answer is actually quite ironic, since that was our initial design. In testing, this concept raised quite a bit of alarm with people. It seems that most people generally have 1 or 2 passwords that they use for all their online or offline activities. When asked to input a user password for their HomeGroup, they gravitated towards using one of those, and then reacted with alarm when they realized that this password needs to be shared with other users in the home! People generally reacted better to the auto-generated password, since they knew to write it down and hand it around. The other interesting benefit we got from this was a reduction in the amount of time people would spend on the UI that introduced them to the HomeGroup concept. With a user-generated password, they had to grasp the HomeGroup concept, think about what password to set, and decide whether to accept the shared libraries default. Without having to provide a password, people had more time to understand HomeGroup, and their sharing decision – leading to a much more streamlined, private, and secure design.
A home of equals with open access to libraries
In addition to balancing security with ease of use, we also wanted to account for PCs becoming more personal. For this reason, we adopted the concept that each person in the HomeGroup is a peer of the others. Each person can thus join and leave the HomeGroup as they wish. Each person brings with them their choice of media/memories or files to share with the rest of the home. With a system based on equals and peers, the big benefit is a lack of management overhead; you don’t need one person to bear the management task of maintaining the group and dealing with membership tasks. This eliminates a primary source of complexity. All you need to gain entry is the shared password (just like the house key that each family member has).
With a home full of equals, what would they share? As mentioned above, our customers indicated a desire to share media, both music and photos, they want to quickly and easily access within the home. So that is exactly what we implemented. HomeGroup will enable sharing the pictures, music, and video libraries from your Windows 7 PC by default. Another blog post will go into more detail on how libraries work, but in a nutshell, they provide Windows with a way to aggregate multiple physical locations on a computer into one unified view. This is a very powerful addition to the way you organize your data in Windows. Your Pictures library can now contain your
In addition to media, some people might want to share their documents. We enable you to do this when you create or join a HomeGroup. This is great for people who want to collaborate with their family or in families where open access to documents is not a concern. The content is shared as “read-only” and can be selectively changed in Windows Explorer. We want the system to work the way you expect it to, with enough flexibility to do whatever you want later.
Setting up Homegroup options.
Easy to use
Now that we have made it easy to set up, the next step is to make it easy to use. There were two aspects here that we want to emphasize for this post:
1. Discovery of what is shared to me
2. Access and usage of content that is shared to me
In Windows Vista, this discovery was done through the network folder, which provides a complete, but highly technical, view of the resources available to you on the network. In addition, the network folder also contains other devices and additional media libraries that were shared on the network. This was confusing and difficult to understand for typical people. For example, if you shared your Pictures folder, it was actually found under the computer in \\
The concept of “libraries” introduced in Windows 7 gives us the design point to improve access their content across the network. While libraries aggregated the view on a local computer, if these locations were shared out to the network, they resulted in a more complicated view in the network folder for our users. Each location would be shared as a separate path, so taking the example above, sharing out the Pictures library means that you’ll see three shares under \\computername, Users\
First, people should have the same experience viewing a library whether on a local computer or across the network in a HomeGroup. We made sure that when you share the Pictures library in Windows 7, not only are all locations of the library shared, but the library resource is also shared and can be consumed by other computers in the HomeGroup. Effectively, members in a HomeGroup would see just one unified library with its aggregated views.
Second, we found that accessing these resources in the network folder was too many clicks away and sufficiently buried such that people would find it impossible to discover. So we created a new HomeGroup node on the navigation pane in Windows Explorer. When you join a HomeGroup, other HomeGroup Win7 PCs will appear under the HomeGroup node in the Windows Explorer navigation pane. They’re one click away and always at your fingertips. In our tests, this really opened up discovery and usage of content throughout the HomeGroup. People easily discovered music on another computer, played it back, or looked at photos. Consumption of media thus becomes something easy and habit-forming in the home, all by joining a HomeGroup.
Windows Explorer with Homegroup visible.
With the introduction of libraries, we also had an opportunity to remove some of the confusion between specialized media libraries that are created by Windows Media Player (WMP) or Windows Media Center (WMC). In previous versions of Windows, WMP would scan the entire hard drive on the computer to find media files and add them into a media library, but in Windows 7 this no longer has to happen. Since you already have Windows Explorer libraries, WMP and MCE just use those. If you add new locations to the libraries in Windows Explorer, WMP and MCE now automatically just pick them up since they are using the same common library for the content. We thus eliminated the need for people to manage multiple views of their data using different user experiences. In addition, WMP will also show the media libraries shared by the HomeGroup as nodes in the WMP navigation pane, mirroring the discovery and access model of Windows Explorer. So the same set of HomeGroup users you see in Explorer by default will also be shown to you in WMP as well.
Media Player with Homegroup
Similar to WMP, in WMC, there is a new “shared” section when browsing media like recorded TV, pictures, music and video. HomeGroup computers show up in this section and can be accessed easily. The content of those libraries that have been shared with the HomeGroup will show up and be accessible in WMC. This includes music, pictures and videos, but also recorded TV--which means that you can now browse and stream non-DRM TV (that was recorded on another computer in your home) from your laptop!
Media Center and Homegroup sharing.
Media Center and Homegroup sharing.
In addition to sharing out your media by default, we also wanted to make sharing additional content to the HomeGroup simple. In the past you had to worry about setting access control, as well as managing user passwords to make sharing work in the home. As we better understood how people interacted and worked at home, we realized that most were OK with enabling general access to all members of the household. So we built a few shortcuts into the sharing experience to enable this. Windows Explorer now features a new “share with” menu in the command bar:
Share with context menu in Windows Explorer
This enables you to select a library or folder and quickly share it with the home. It even enables you to make content writable by home members with one click, thus making it easy for people at home to easily collaborate on pictures or documents. This enables scenarios like importing digital photographs on one computer and editing them on another computer without making a copy. Once you share a folder with the home, it also shows up under the user in the HomeGroup node. This makes it incredibly easy to share anything on your computer to others in the home, and have them easily find and use them. We also recognize that some people need a way to easily bring some of this content off the network quickly and easily and make it private. The “share with” menu includes a shortcut to “share with nobody.” This option removes access to any content that has been previously shared and makes it private, thus enabling us to deliver on another requirement we observed people have in the home.
Printers and other devices work with HomeGroup as well
So what about devices? We’ve heard from you that sharing printers needs to be much simpler. While we have made it super easy to add printers to Windows, we needed to bring this simplicity to the home network. USB printers are still tied to a specific PC and can’t be shared out very easily. People typically email files to themselves to retrieve on another computer, or use USB keys to move their files to the computer with the printer. That had to change.
In a HomeGroup , if you have installed a USB printer that has a Windows logo, the other people on the HomeGroup would get this printer automatically installed on their computers. They won’t see a prompt, they won’t need to answer any questions – it would just show up, and “just work.” For non-Windows logoed printers, we need to ask the user for permission to install the printer. HomeGroup members will see a prompt that a printer has been found in the HomeGroup. Clicking on this prompt installs the driver. The reason we had to do this was to ensure that users consent to 3rd party code that hasn’t been through the rigors of the logo program. One of the big benefits of this system is that you no longer need to find, download, and install the driver manually on multiple computers. The driver (for the correct architecture) is just copied from the computer that has the physical printer attached. This saves time and network bandwidth. With a HomeGroup, there will no longer be a need to think about sharing a printer. If you attach one to a computer in the HomeGroup, everyone else will get it installed and ready to use.
Changing Homegroup settings to include printers.
In addition to printers, devices like photo frames, game consoles (such as the Xbox 360), and media receivers (like the Roku Soundbridge) can benefit from some of the easy setup, as well as all the shared media in the home. For setup, we have reduced all the UI within Windows that deals with these devices to one simple checkbox:
Enabling Homegroup sharing of devices such as photo frames, game consoles, and media receivers.
Once you are part of a HomeGroup, we turn on Windows Media Player streaming support, so not only will your computer detect other WMP libraries on the network and allow playback from them, devices would also be able to consume the shared media content. Another blog post will go into more detail on an exciting new feature called “play to” which would also be automatically enabled in a HomeGroup enabling you to send media from your PC to any supported picture frame or media receiver, and never have to deal with the minimal UI you have on these devices, which you can see in the demonstration of the Day 1 keynote at WinHEC. If you check a box in HomeGroup in Control Panel, all existing and future devices in the home will detect and consume the media on the HomeGroup computer. All these previously complicated settings are now simplified with HomeGroup.
Domain-joined computers can be part of a HomeGroup
The laptop buying trend doesn’t stop at home. Large corporations are also moving toward buying laptops for their employees. There is research out there that outlines productivity improvements with employees using laptops. This makes sense as most of these laptop-wielding employees bring their computers home and put in those extra email hours. However, most corporations require that their laptops be joined to a corporate domain. This enables system administrators to manage and maintain these computers. Domain-joined laptops are thus subject to more restrictions than regular home computers are. It’s hard to even locate another PC on the home network to access or share files, let along configure your domain-joined computer to print to a printer at home.
With HomeGroup, we wanted see if we could make things a little easier for these computers to come home. With more and more people working from home or having the option to these days, we wanted to see if they could enjoy some of the media content they have on the other PCs in the HomeGroup while they work. So in Windows 7, your domain-joined computer can join and participate in a HomeGroup. This enables the domain-joined computer to consume the media available on Windows 7 PCs in the home, watch TV through WMC, listen to music via WMP, or print to the printer on another HomeGroup PC all by entering the same key you provide to other computers in the HomeGroup.
The only difference is that sensitive content on the corporate laptop is never shared to the other HomeGroup computers. In essence, the domain-joined computer can see out (and consume) but no one can see in. We believe this meets the need for corporations to maintain security over documents while enabling our customers to enjoy a fun and interesting work environment at home, with access to all their media and home printers while they work. All you need is an existing HomeGroup, a domain-joined computer, and you can be rocking to your favorite tunes on your home network, while you catch up on all your important work.
Of course the ability to join a HomeGroup is a policy that can be managed by corporate domains as you would expect.
Create a HomeGroup with the Beta
Phew! I hope this post has given you some insight into some of our design decisions, as well as the capabilities of the feature. HomeGroup will highlight some of the cool capabilities Windows has had for a long time in a friendly and easy fashion and also build on some of the new plumbing and infrastructure in Windows 7, and we are very excited with its possibilities. It is important to note that none of this would be possible without the help of people around the world who have provided us with opportunities to listen to their feedback, observe their actions, and take note of their needs.
We know there will be lots of discussion around this feature once folks have had a chance to explore it. It represents a new model for something that has arguably been very difficult to set up and so for most people seeing all this work will be a first and for many of us reading this blog we’ll be “mapping” our existing model to this new experience. The best thing to do is just see if you can let Windows 7 run and do the work. After some use you can then dive into the customization and configuration available to you.
To set up a HomeGroup you will need to install Windows 7 Beta on more than one PC on the same network and be sure to select Home as the network location if you want to automatically create (or join) a HomeGroup.
Thanks,
Jerry
Posted by e7blog | 68 Comments
Filed under: Networking
Monday, December 15, 2008 12:00 AM
Continuing our discussion on performance
We've talked some about performance in this blog and recently many folks have been blogging and writing about the topic as well. We thought it would be a good time to offer some more behind the scenes views on how we have been working on and thinking about performance because it such an interesting topic for the folks reading this blog. Of course I've been using some pretty low-powered machines lately so performance is top of mind for me as well. But for fun I am writing this on my early holiday present--my new home machine is a 64-bit all-in-one desktop machine with a quad core CPU, discrete graphics, 8GB of memory, and hardware RAID all running a pretty new build of Windows 7 upgraded as soon as I finished the out of box experience. Michael Fortin and I authored this post. --Steven
Our beta isn’t even out the door yet and many are already dusting off their benchmarks and giving them a whirl. As a reminder, we are encouraging folks to hold on benchmarking our pre-production builds. Yet we’ve come to expect it will happen, and we realize it will lead many to conclude one thing or another, and at the same time we appreciate those of you who take the time to remind folks of the pre-ship status of the code. Nevertheless we’re happy that many are seeing good results thus far. We're not yet as happy as we believe we will be when we finish the product as we continue to work on all the fundamental capabilities of Windows 7 as well as all the new features folks are excited about.
Writing about performance in this blog is nearly as tricky as measuring it. As we've seen directional statements are taken further than we might intend and at the same time there are seemingly infinite ways to measure performance and just as many ways to perceive the same data. Ultimately, performance is something each individual feels is right--whether than means adequate or stellar might vary scenario to scenario, individual to individual. Some of the mail we've received has been clear about performance:
* Boot-very very fast in all applications ( open-load applications) especially so many simultaneously!!!!! Hence, massive multicore ( quad-octa core cpu) , gpgpu for all!!!!!!!!!!!!
* This is right time to do this properly, the users want speed, we'll give them speed.
* i want to be able to run windows 7 extremely fast and still look good graphically on a asus aspire one netbook with these specs-1.5 ghz intel atom processor (single core) 1gb of ram
* I hope that in addition to improvements in the gui and heart (I hope massive multicore + 64-bit + Directx 11 ..extreme performance, etc) for windows 7, modified the feature Flip 3d In Windows 7!!!!! Try to make a Flip 3D feature, really efficient and sensible in windows 7.
* With regard to the performance thing, could you look at ways to reduce the penalty of having a lot of fonts installed.
* From performance, boot up, explorer speed and UI experience , I hope the next version of windows delivers something new and innovating. I was playing with the new UI on the HP TouchPC and I have to say they did a great 1.0 job on the touch interface controls.
* I do keep my fingers crossed for Windows 7 to be dramatically better in its performance than Windows Vista.
* The biggest feature I see a lot of people wanting is performance.
You can also see through some of these quotes that performance means something different to different people. As user-interface folks know, perceived performance and actual performance can often be different things. I [Steven] remember when I was writing a portion of the Windows UI for Visual C++ and when I benchmarked against Borland C++ at the time, we were definitely faster (measured by seconds). However the reviews consistently mentioned Borland as being faster and providing feedback in the form of counts of lines compiled flying by. So I coded up a line count display that flashed a lot of numbers at you while compiling (literally flashy so it looked like it couldn't keep up). In clock times it actually consumed a non-zero amount of time so we got "slower" but the reviewers then started giving us credit for being faster. So in this case slower actually got faster.
There's another story from the past that is the flip side of this which is the scrolling speed in Microsoft Word for DOS (and also Excel for Windows--same dynamic). BillG always pushed hard on visible performance in the "early" days and scrolling speed was one of those things that never seemed to be fast enough. Well clever folks worked hard on the problem and subsequently made scrolling too fast--literally to the point that we had to slow it down so you didn't always end up going from page 1 to the end of the document just because you hold down the page down key. It is great to be fast, but sometimes there is "too much speed".
We have seen the feedback about what to turn off or adjust for better performance. In many ways what we're seeing are folks hoping to find the things that cause the performance to be less than they would like. I had an email conversation with someone recently trying to pinpoint the performance issues on a new laptop. Just by talking through it became clear the laptop was pretty "clean" (~40 processes, half the 1GB of RAM free, <5% CPU at idle, etc.) and after a few back and forths it became clear it was the internet connection (dial-up) that was actually the biggest bottleneck in the system. Many encourage us to turn off animations, graphics, or even color as there is a belief that these can be the root of performance. We've talked about the registry, disk space utilization, and even color depth as topics where folks see these as potential performance issues.
It is important to consider that performance is inherently a time/space tradeoff (computer science sense, not science fiction sense), and on laptops there is the added dimension of power consumption (or CPU utilization). Given infinite memory, of course many algorithms would be very different than the ones we use. In finite memory, performance is impacted greatly by the overall working set of a scenario. So in many cases when we talk about performance we are just as much talking about reducing the amount of memory consumed as we are talking about the clock time. Some parts of the OS are much more tunable in terms of the memory they use, which then improves the overall performance of the system (because there is less paging). Other parts of the system are much more about the number of instructions executed (because perhaps every operation goes through that code path). We work a great deal on both!
The reality of measuring and improving performance is one where we are focused at several "levels" in Windows 7: micro-benchmarks, specific scenarios, system tuning. Each of these plays a critical role in how we are engineering Windows 7 and while any single one can be measured it is not the case that one can easily conclude the performance of the system from a measurement.
Micro-benchmarks. Micro-benchmarks are the sort of tests that stress a specific subsystem at extreme levels. Often these are areas of the code that are hard to see the performance of during usage as they go by very fast or account for a small percentage of time during overall execution. So tests are designed to stress part of the system. Many parts of the system are subjected to micro-benchmarking such as the file system, networking, memory management, 2D and 3D graphics, etc. A good example here is the work we do to enable fast file copying. There is a lot of low level code that accounts for a (very significant) number of conditions when copying files around, and that code is most directly executed through XCOPY in a command window (or an API). Of course the majority of copy operations take place through the explorer and along with that comes a progress indicator, cancellable operation, counting up bytes to copy, etc. All of those have some cost with the benefit as well. The goal of micro-benchmarks is to enable us to best understand the best possible case and then compare it to the most usable case. Advanced folks always have access to the command line for more power, control, and flexibility. It is tempting to measure the performance of the system by looking at improvements in micro-benchmarks, but time and time again this proves to be inadequate as routine usage covers a much broader code path and time is spent in many places. For Internet Explorer 8 we did a blog post on performance that went into this type issue relative to script performance. At the other end of the spectrum we definitely understand the performance of micro-benchmarks on some subsystems will be, and should be, carefully measured --the performance of directx graphics is an area that gamers rely on for example. It is worth noting that many micro-benchmarks also depend heavily on a combination of Windows OS, hardware, and specific drivers.
Specific scenarios. Most people experience the performance of a PC through high level actions such as booting, standby/resume, launching common applications. These are topics we have covered in previous posts to some degree. In Engineering Windows 7, each team has focused on a set of specific scenarios that are ones we wanted to make better. This type of the work should be demonstrable without any elaborate setup or additional tools. This work often involves tuning the code path for the number of instructions executed, looking at the data allocated for the common case, or understanding all the OS APIs called (for example registry lookups). One example that comes to mind is the work that we have going on to reduce the time to reinsert a USB device. This is particularly noticeable for UFD (USB flash drives) or memory cards. Windows of course allows the whole subsystem to be plumbed by unique drivers for a specific card reader or UFD, even if most of the time they are the same we still have to account for the variety in the ecosystem. At the start of the project we looked at a full profile of the code executed when inserting a UFD and worked this scenario end-to-end. Then systematically each of the "hot spots" was worked through. Another example along these lines was playback of DVD movies which involves not only the storage subsystem but the graphics subsystem as well. The neat thing about this scenario is that you also want to optimize for the CPU utilization (which you might not even notice while playing back the movie) as that dictates the power consumption.
System tuning. A significant amount of performance work falls under the umbrella of system tuning. To ascertain what work we do in this area we routinely look at the overall performance of the system relative to the same tests on previous builds and previous releases of Windows. We're looking for things that we can do to remove operations that take a lot of time/space/power or things that have "grown" in one of those dimensions. We have build-to-build testing we do to make sure we do not regress and of course every developer is responsible for making sure their area improves as well. We left no stone unturned in terms of investigating opportunities to improve. One of the areas many will notice immediately when looking at the pre-beta or beta of Windows 7 is the memory usage (as measured by task manager, itself a measurement that can be misunderstood) of the desktop window manager. For Windows 7, a substantial amount of architectural work went into reducing the amount of memory consumed by the subsystem. We did this work while also maintaining compatibility with the Windows Vista drivers. We did similar work on the desktop search engine where we reduced not just the memory footprint, but the I/O footprint as well. One the most complex areas to work on was the improvements in the taskbar and start menu. These improvements involved substantial work on critical sections ("blocking" areas of the code), registry I/O, as well as overall code paths. The goal of this work is to make sure these UI elements are always available and feel snappy.
It is worth noting that there are broad based measures of performance as well that drive the user interface of a selection of applications. These too have their place--they are best used to compare different underlying hardware or drivers with the same version of Windows. The reason for this is that automation itself is often version dependent and because automation happens in a less than natural manner, there can be a tendency to measure these variances rather than any actual perceptible performance changes. The classic example is the code path for drawing a menu drop down--adding some instructions that might make the menu more accessible or more appealing would be impossible to perceive by a human, but an automated system that drives the menu at super human speed would see a change in "performance". In this type of situation the effect of a micro-benchmark is magnified in a manner inconsistent with actual usage patterns. This is just a word of caution on how to consider such measurements.
Given this focus across different types of measurement it is important to understand that the overall goal we have for Windows 7 is for you to experience a system that is as good as you expect it to be. The perception of performance is just as important as specific benchmarks and so we have to look to a broad set of tools as above to make sure we are operating with a complete picture of performance.
In addition to these broad strategies there are some specific tools we've put in place. One of these tools, PerfTrack, takes the role of data to the next level with regard to performance and so will play a significant role in the beta. In addition, it is worth reminding folks about the broad set of efforts that go into engineering for performance:
* We’ve been building out and maintaining a series of runs that measure thousands of little and big things. We’ve been running these before developer check-ins and maintaining performance and responsiveness at a level above which all that self-host our builds will find acceptable. These gates have kept the performance and responsiveness of our daily builds at a high enough level that thousands have found it possible to run their main systems on Windows 7 for extended periods of time, doing their normal daily work.
* We’ve been driving down footprint, reducing our service costs, improving the efficiency of key code paths, refactoring locks to improve scalability, reducing hangs, improving our I/O efficiency and much more. These are scenario driven based on real world execution paths we know from our telemetry to be common.
* We’ve been partnering closely with the top OEMs, ISVs and IHVs. Our tools have been made public, we’ve held numerous training sessions, and we’ve been focusing heavily on shipping systems in an effort to insure customers get great performing systems out of the box, with great battery life too.
* Within the Windows dev team, we’ve placed a simple trace capturing tool on everyone’s desktop. This desktop tool allows each person to run 24x7 with performance tracing enabled. If anything seems slow or sluggish, they can immediately save the last minute-or-so of activity and send it for automated analysis. Additionally, a team of people visually inspect the traces for new issues or issues not yet decipherable by our automation. The traces are incredibly rich and allow us to get to the root of top issues most of the time.
* For all Pre-Beta, Beta and RTM users, we’ve developed a new form of instrumentation and have used it to instrument over 500 locations in the operating system and inbox applications. This new instrumentation is simple in concept, but revolutionary in result. The tool is called PerfTrack, and it has helped confirm our belief that the client benchmarks aren’t too informative about real user responsiveness issues.
Perftrack is a very flexible, low overhead, dynamically configurable telemetry system. For key scenarios throughout Windows 7, there exist “Start” and “Stop” events that bracket the scenario. Scenarios can be pretty much anything; including common things like opening a file, browsing to a web page, opening the control panel, searching for a document, or booting the computer. Again, there are over 500 instrumented scenarios in Windows 7 for Beta.
Obviously, the time between the Stop and Start events is meant to represent the responsiveness of the scenario and clearly we’re using our telemetry infrastructure to send these metrics back to us for analysis. Perftrack’s uniqueness comes not just from what it measure but from the ability to go beyond just observing the occurrence of problematic response times. Perftrack allows us to “dial up” requests for more information, in the form of traces.
Let’s consider the distribution below and, for fun, let's pretend the scenario is opening XYZ. For this scenario, the feature team chose to set some goals for responsiveness. With their chosen goals, green depicts times they considered acceptable, yellow represents times they deemed marginal, and red denotes the poor times. The times are in milliseconds and shown along the X axis. The Hit Count is shown on the Y axis.
Graph measuring responsiveness goals and real world data.
As can be seen, there are many instances where this scenario took more than 5 seconds to complete. With this kind of a distribution, the performance team would recommend that we “dial up” a request for 100+ traces from systems that have experienced a lengthy open in the past. In our “dialed up” request, we would set a “threshold” time that we thought was interesting. Additionally, we we may opt to filter on machines with a certain amount of RAM, a certain class of processor, the presence of specific driver, or any number of other things. Clients meeting the criteria would then, upon hitting the “Start” event, configure and enable tracing quickly and potentially send back to us if the “Stop” event occurred after our specified “threshold” of time.
As you might imagine, a good deal of engineering work went into making this end to end telemetry and feedback system work. Teams all across the Windows division have contributed to make this system a reality and I can assure you we’ll never approach performance the same now that we have these capabilities.
As a result of focusing on traces and fixing the very real issue revealed by them, we’ve seen significant improvements in actual responsiveness and have received numerous accolades on Windows 7. Additionally, I’d like to point out that these traces have served to further confirm what we’ve long believed t be the case.
This post provides an overview of the ways we have thought about performance with some specifics about how we measure it throughout the engineering of Windows 7. We believe that throughout the beta we will continue to have great telemetry to help make sure we are achieving our goals and that people perceive Windows 7 to perform well relative to their expectations.
We know many folks will continue to use stop watches, micro-benchmarks, or to drive automated tests. These each have their place in your own analysis and also in our engineering. We thought given all the interest we would talk more about how we measure things and how we're engineering the product.
--Steven and Michael
Posted by e7blog | 124 Comments
Filed under: Perf
Sunday, November 30, 2008 12:00 AM
Accessibility in Windows 7
This post is from Michael Bernstein, a development lead on the User Interface Platform team where he focuses on accessibility. Accessibility is the term we apply to the APIs and features that enable Windows to be used, to be accessible, by as many people as possible so that, regardless of physical or cognitive abilities, everyone has the ability to access the functions of Windows. To enable this, Windows includes both built-in accessibility utilities as well as APIs used by third party assistive technology aids and by application developers to make sure their software is also accessible. This is a topic that is extremely important to Microsoft and one that is a key tenet in the engineering of Windows 7. Microsoft also has a corporate-wide group dedicated to making sure that PCs are easier to see, hear, and use. You can read more about Microsoft’s accessibility initiatives on http://www.microsoft.com/enable/. --Steven
Hi, I’m the development lead for Accessibility and Speech Recognition experiences in Windows 7, and I wanted to write about how we thought about Accessibility in Windows 7.
We wanted to make Windows 7 the most accessible operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. It became clear as we planned this release, however, that the notion of Accessibility is not as simple as it may appear. It is tempting to think about Accessibility like Security: either you have a known failure, or your system is believed to be secure/accessible. This definition turns out to be limited, though. How do you deal with the fact that the needs of customers who are blind are very different from the needs of customers who are deaf? The needs of customers who are blind are even different from those of customers with reduced vision: a magnification tool is useless for one group and crucial for the other. And what do we make of cases where something is technically accessible but practically frustrating, like a common user scenario that takes 36 keystrokes to execute? Clearly, Accessibility wasn’t going to boil down to a simple yes/no question. It is really more like a particular kind of usability, but usability for a specific set of audiences with individual needs.
Since the questions we were asking were complex, the answers ended up being complex, too. We chose a four-part strategy to improve Accessibility in Windows 7.
I. Build a firm foundation with UI Automation
In Windows Vista, Microsoft delivered a new core component for Accessibility called UI Automation. UI Automation enables a user’s assistive technology (AT) to programmatically drive the UI of an application, and allows applications to expose their accessible functionality in a richer way than was possible in previous versions of Windows. More questions can be asked about a piece of UI, and that UI can be manipulated in richer ways. UI Automation also introduced the idea of Control Patterns: any given piece of UI can decide how it should be controlled. Buttons expose the Invoke pattern, indicating that they can be pushed; Combo Boxes expose ExpandCollapse, indicating that they can be opened and closed. We let different controls be different, instead of trying to force them all into the same mold. All this was introduced in Windows Vista and adoption is still ongoing.
In Windows 7, we invested in improving the performance of the UI Automation system and created a new, native-code API for UI Automation to make sure that it can be used effectively by a wide range of assistive technology software. Now applications written in C++, as well as those written using the .NET Framework, can take advantage of UI Automation.
We also did a bunch of work to make sure that the UI Automation system was integrated even more closely with the legacy Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) system and developed new bridging techniques between the best of the new and the old technologies. UI Automation Clients can read Accessibility information from MSAA applications, and vice versa, to ensure maximum Accessibility regardless of which accessibility API an application used originally. Since the UI Automation and MSAA systems cooperate closely in many scenarios, we decided to name the combination of the two, calling it the Windows Automation API. This architecture forms the foundation for the rest of our Accessibility effort, and we’re pleased to have this Accessibility foundation Windows 7.
II. Improve our included Accessibility utilities
We also improved the Accessibility utilities that we include in the box with Windows. Microsoft works closely with many different AT software companies who deliver software to make Windows more accessible to customers with disabilities, but we also include a set of utilities to make sure that our customers’ early experiences are accessible, even before installing any other software. We decided to enhance two of those utilities in Windows 7: the On-Screen Keyboard and the Magnifier.
The most noticeable change to the On-Screen Keyboard is the improved look and feel, but there are also more subtle enhancements. The appearance of this utility had not changed since Windows XP; our customers were also asking for it to be resizable. We addressed both of these by working closely with Tablet developers to share a common code base between the Tablet Soft Keyboard and the On-Screen Keyboard. Both keyboards now have an attractive appearance that is in tune with Windows 7 and both are now resizable. The keyboards still are distinct, though, because customers use them differently: Tablet users may want to switch dynamically between handwriting and typing, whereas On-Screen Keyboard users may need modes where they can hover or scan to keys, if they have disabilities that prevent them from clicking. Along these lines, we also added basic text prediction to help customers with disabilities enter text more quickly. If you have ever tried typing with an on-screen keyboard, you can appreciate how significantly text prediction can improve text entry speed.
The Magnifier came in for a deeper overhaul. The Magnifier in Windows Vista and Windows XP was not an intuitive experience: when you pointed at part of the screen, the magnified content appeared in a separate window, usually docked at top of the screen. You had to point at one place and look at another. We considered two basic solutions to this problem: you could zoom into the entire screen or you could make the magnified area follow the pointer while leaving the rest of the screen the same. These became our two primary modes for the Windows 7 Magnifier: Full-screen mode and Lens mode.
Full-screen mode is great when you want to increase the size of everything on the screen at once. As you move the mouse or keyboard focus around the middle of the screen, the view stays still; if you move towards the edge, the Magnifier scrolls the view to keep up. One downside of this mode is that you can lose track of your context. To address that usability issue, we added a context animation that zooms out to show you where your work area is relative to the whole screen, and then zooms back in.
Lens mode, on the other hand, is nice when you just want to zoom in on one particular thing. In this mode, the lens centers on the mouse pointer, which feels much like using a magnifying glass. You can re-size the lens to be very wide and short, which can be nice if you are reading a document and want to magnify it line by line. We based our design on the popular Microsoft IntelliPoint magnifier, a design you can now enjoy with any mouse.
We also addressed customer feedback about the Magnifier window taking up too much space on the screen. We moved the most commonly used controls like zoom in/out to a small toolbar, which fades out to a semi-transparent watermark when you aren’t using it. The remaining options are available in an Options dialog when you need them. Last, we gave almost everything a keyboard shortcut, so if you really don’t want to see the UI, you don’t have to use it. Win-+ will zoom you in any time you are using Windows 7.
These tools directly improve Accessibility for customers with low vision and dexterity disabilities. It should be obvious, but making the PC easier to see or interact with benefits everyone and so these two examples also show the broad appeal of AT tools – at the PDC we showed both the On-Screen Keyboard and the Magnifier and I think it is fair to see everyone saw the benefit of using these tools themselves, regardless of abilities.
III. Make it easier to build Accessible software
Windows APIs cannot provide Accessibility all by themselves; it is vital for Windows-based applications to do their part in providing Accessibility data for AT programs to use. For example, a screen reader may sound excellent, but if it can’t read your favorite web browser, what good is that? Assistive tools like screen readers and magnifiers are clients of the Accessibility system, while the applications that you want to use, like web browsers and word processors, are providers. It takes both to make the whole experience accessible--you need both a high-quality client and a well-written provider to have a good Accessible experience. There are more providers in the software ecosystem, so it is hard for us to work one-on-one with every provider to make sure they are well-written.
To address this challenge, our team developed the UI Accessibility Checker (AccChecker for short) and UI Automation Verify (UIA Verify) utilities, which can scan an application (a provider, really) and report on common Accessibility problems. Software developers can use AccChecker and UIA Verify to detect problems in their provider code before a customer ever uses it. Quality assurance engineers can use them to verify the quality of their firm’s work. We believe this is so important that we released AccChecker and UIA Verify as open-source software to make it available to the widest possible audience. If you are not a programmer, you may never use these utilities directly, but you may well benefit from the bugs they helped to eliminate before they ever reached you.
IV. Plan for Accessibility from Day 1
To make sure that Windows features themselves were good providers, we borrowed an idea from the Software Development Lifecycle, risk assessment. Before a line of code was written, each planned Windows 7 feature was rated on its Accessibility risk. Features that use more basic, off-the-shelf common controls are usually more accessible because Windows provides built-in providers for off-the-shelf components; features that do fancy, custom drawing have more work to do. This planning process made each team aware of how much accessibility risk it was taking on, so that they could plan appropriately. Once the features were all rated, the list was sorted by risk so that our team could reach out to teams with high-risk features and make sure that they had the resources and tools they needed to make their feature properly accessible. We also ensured that they received more hands-on testing and validation. As a result, most Windows features are more accessible than they have been in previous releases, making for a better overall customer experience.
To wrap up, we've emphasized Accessibility in engineering Windows 7. We’ve made good progress on improving the core architecture for Accessibility and enhancing the included tools like On-Screen Keyboard and Magnifier. The AccChecker and UIA Verify tools have made it much easier to validate applications to ensure that they will be compatible with current assistive tools as well as future tools based on the Windows Automation API. Our approach to Accessibility for the features and providers in Windows itself has become more thorough, consistent and integrated, thanks to the hard work of hundreds of engineers across the company. We’re proud of what we have accomplished in Windows 7 and hope that it will help customers with disabilities to realize their full potential and have a more enjoyable experience with Windows.
--Michael
Posted by e7blog | 47 Comments
Filed under: Design
Thursday, November 20, 2008 12:00 AM
The Windows 7 Taskbar
Happy Birthday Windows! Given all the interest in the most used user-interface of Windows we thought it would be good to take a look back and see how we got to Windows 7. --Steven
We were very excited to unveil elements of the Windows 7 desktop at this year’s Professional Developers Conference (as seen in the Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop session, among others). In previous posts (User Interface: Starting, Launching, and Switching and Follow-up: Starting, Launching, and Switching) we looked at the history, anatomy and areas for improvement of the taskbar. In this post, we will continue the conversation. Don’t let looks fool you though—the UI may feel new to Windows for some of you or old hat for some of you, but rest assured it represents a careful evolution that strives to address customer feedback while retaining its familiar Windows DNA.
It was 23 years ago on November 20, 1985 when Windows first shipped. As it just so happens, this first Microsoft graphical shell actually holds relevance to this post as it surfaced one of the industry’s first taskbar-like concepts.
Windows 1.01
Fig 1 Windows 1.01: Icons at the bottom of the screen represent running windows
Windows 1.0 supported zoomed (full-screen), tiled and icon (minimized) windows. Since there was no support for overlapping [that big debate between charless and billg, Steven], a dedicated portion of the desktop was kept visible at the bottom of the screen to surface non-tiled and non-zoomed windows. By minimizing a window or dragging it to the bottom of the screen, the person was able to populate this rudimentary taskbar with a large icon corresponding to the running window. She could then get back to this window by clicking or dragging this icon to the desktop. As simple as this mechanism seems today, it cemented an important concept that is with us even in Windows 7—when people switch between tasks, they are really switching between windows. Although it took Windows 95 to introduce a mature taskbar with launching, switching and notification functionality, the experience of surfacing and switching between windows via a dedicated region at the bottom of the screen is as ancient as Windows 1.0.
Setting Goals
In the previous taskbar posts, we discussed some high-level principles we defined after digesting the mountain of data and feedback on the taskbar. Here’s a more detailed look at the goals we identified and how we began to frame feature concepts.
Things you use all the time are at your fingertips
It is easy to get to the programs and destinations you use all the time, with less mouse movement and fewer clicks.
Accessing commonly used programs within a single click required us to enrich Quick Launch by increasing its presence on the taskbar and making more top-level room for pinned items. We began looking into how Quick Launch interacted with the taskband and how launching and switching were sometimes separate and other times duplicative. For example, almost all single-instance programs in Windows interpret an attempt to re-launch them as a switch if they are already running. So, clicking Outlook’s icon in Quick Launch would merely switch to the program if it was already running and present in the taskband. To make room for more items on the taskbar, we knew we had to remove some of the redundancy and free up valuable real-estate.
When researching and modeling a person’s workflow, we came to realize that there were three basic steps that a person frequently seems repeats. First, she finds the program and launches it. Then, she uses the program’s UI to open a file she wants to work on. Then finally, she gets to work. We asked ourselves whether we could help people jump directly to these items by skipping the first two steps. We called these files, folders, links, websites and other items that programs create or consume “destinations” as they represent where the person is ultimately is navigating to. We decided that these destinations should also be easily accessible from the taskbar. However, for real success and adoption, we needed to think through how destinations could be effectively surfaced to the person without the need for manual customization or by requiring developers to do lots of work.
Manage your windows with confidence
You can switch to the right window quickly without mistakes and effortlessly position windows the way you want them.
This goal spoke to the very heart of the taskbar—the ability to switch between windows. This challenged us with seeking a more predictable method of surfacing windows on the taskbar, meaningful use of text and a reliable method of helping people consistently switch with confidence. We’ve had text on the taskbar for years and Vista introduced thumbnails, but customer feedback informed us that there was room for improvement. Interestingly, we found inspiration in old features such as Windows XP’s window grouping and Alt-Tab’s visual layout of individual windows.
During our investigation, we also spent time looking into why a person would switch windows in the first place. Two interesting scenarios emerged—one in which she needs to get some information from a window (e.g. getting a phone number) and to interact with a window’s options (e.g. controlling background music). We wondered whether we could address these task switching cases in a novel way—by actually removing the need to switch completely.
You are in control
The desktop reflects your style. You get to personalize the experience, choosing what is important to you, including how and when you receive notifications.
By far the biggest target of feedback, the Notification Area had to put control back in the hands of people. It was decided that instead of the opt-out model that required the person to clean up this area, we would start with a clean experience. Only system icons would appear by default and then people can to customize this area to their liking.
Clean and lightweight
The desktop experience feels organized, lightweight, open and is a pleasure to use. Visuals and animations are delighters the first time and every time.
A successful product is more than the utility it serves—it is also an experience. From the very start we wanted the taskbar, and the desktop as a whole, to draw an emotional response from the person. This required a set of scoped delighters that demoed well and retained their appeal over time. We began to define a personality for the UI using terms such as “glass and energy,” Chi, authenticity and many others. These investigations helped define a visual and animation language that we could then apply to several aspects of Windows 7. Expect a future blog post that delves much deeper into this important design process—much of which Sam discussed in his PDC session.
The Taskbar, Evolved
The Windows 7 taskbar is about launching with ease, switching with confidence and all the while remaining in control. The UI is made up of several key features that complete common end-to-end scenarios. Let’s dive into each of these elements and how they work.
Refreshed Look
The taskbar has undergone a facelift. We’ve enabled large icons by default (as seen in Windows 1.0 and also an option of Quick Launch since Windows 95 with IE 4). This affords a richer icon language, improves identification of programs and improves targeting for both the mouse and touch. Yet, one of the most important advantages large icons provide is a means to promote the taskbar as the central place to launch everyday tasks. We joke that the new taskbar is the “beachfront property of the Windows OS” and in turn, we are already seeing many people populating the UI with their commonly used programs. Somewhat if a visual trick, the taskbar is only 10 pixels (at 96 DPI) higher than its Vista counterpart (when used as a single row, since multiple rows are still supported, along with positioning around the screen edges).
Windows 7 taskbar
Fig 2. The Windows 7 taskbar: Default settings include large icons, no text and glass surface
To mitigate its slightly increased height and the larger icons, we decided to impart the UI with a more prominent glass treatment. This also allows us to better showcase the person’s color preference (you’ll recall that in a previous post we revealed that almost 30% of sessions have personalized glass). We also changed the Vista behavior so that when a window is maximized, both the taskbar and the window’s title bar continue to remain open and translucent. We received lots of feedback on Vista that many people didn’t like these UIs turning opaque and dark.
Pinning
You can still pin programs to the taskbar by dragging them or via a context menu, just like you have always done with Quick Launch. Destinations can also be pinned via a drag/drop, but they are designed to be surfaced differently as we’ll see under the Jump List section.
Unification
If one increases the size of Quick Launch, one must then determine what to do with the taskband. As previously discussed, we observed that under many scenarios of single-instance programs, launching and switching were equivalent. Hence, we decided to standardize this behavior and have program launchers turn into window switchers when they are launched. Effectively, we unified Quick Launch and the taskband. While some other operating systems have similar concepts, one difference with our approach is that our default experience always optimizes for a single representation on the taskbar. This means that regardless of a window’s state (e.g. minimized, maximized or restored) there are no new or duplicate buttons created. Also, the default taskbar doesn’t allow destinations to be pinned to the top-level which prevents duplication of a pinned file and a running window with that same file open. When we say there is “one button to rule them all” we’re serious. This approach to a single, unified button keeps the taskbar uncluttered and gives the person a single place to find what she’s looking for.
Combining launching and switching also made it easier to provide the most requested feature—the ability to move taskbar buttons. Quick Launch as always allowed this, but combining this mechanism with the taskband naturally extended rearrange functionality to running windows.
Interactive, Grouped Thumbnails
Vista showed thumbnails when the user hovers on a taskbar button and Windows 7 improves upon this design. Unlike Vista, these thumbnails are now an extension of their corresponding button so the person can click on these visual aides to switch to a given window. The thumbnail is also is a more accurate representation of a window complete with an icon in the top left corner, window text and even the ubiquitous close button in the top right.
Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnails
Fig 3. Thumbnails: Grouped, interactive thumbnails make it easier to manage windows
One of the most important functions of the taskbar is to surface individual windows so people can easily switch between them. Having unified a program launcher and a single window switcher, the next logical step was to determine how multiple windows of a program could be combined and presented. We looked no further than a feature introduced in Windows XP called window grouping. When the taskbar became full, windows of a program could collapse into a single menu. However, there were a few challenges with the design. First, the behavior isn’t predictable. People don’t really understand when this scaling mechanism is triggered. Second, a listview of windows isn’t always the best way to represent these items. Finally, opening the menu always required a click, which slowed some people down. Our solution was to combine buttons by default for a predictable experience, to use grouped thumbnails and to have these thumbnails appear on hover as well as on click. Think of this approach as a contextual Alt-tab surfaced directly off the taskbar. When the person brings her mouse to a taskbar button, all the thumbnails of a program appear simultaneously making for a organized, light-weight switching model. To polish off the experience, we show a visual cue of stacked tiles that provides feedback on whether there are multiple windows running for a program. We also recognized that a set of people may still wish to see an individual buttons for each window and an option permits this behavior.
With the Windows 7 taskbar, there is a single place to go regardless of whether the program is not running, running with one window or running with several windows. Rich thumbnails provide more intuitive ways of managing and switching between windows.
Aero Peek
Here’s a riddle for you—what’s the best size for a window’s preview that will guarantee that the you can accurately identify it? Grouped thumbnails look and feel great, but we know these small previews don’t always provide enough information to identify a window. Sure they work great for pictures, but not so for emails or documents. The answer is simply to show the actual window—complete with its real content, real size and real location. That’s the concept behind Aero Peek.
When the taskbar doesn’t offer enough information via text or a thumbnail, the person simply moves the mouse over a taskbar thumbnail and voilà—the corresponding window appears on the desktop and all other windows fade away into glass sheets. Once you see the window you want, just click to restore it. Not only does this make finding a window a breeze, it may also remove the need to switch altogether for scenarios in which one just needs a quick glance to glean information. Peek also works on the desktop too. Show Desktop has been moved to the far right of the taskbar where one can still click on this button to switch to the desktop. The control enjoys a Fitts magic corner which makes it very easy to target. If you just move your mouse over the control, all windows on the desktop turn to glass allowing the desktop to be seen. It’s easy to now glance at a stock or the weather gadget or to check to see if a file is on the desktop.
Windows 7 Aero Peek
Fig 4. Aero Peek: Hovering over a thumbnail peeks at its corresponding window on the desktop
We spent a lot of time analyzing different aspects of Peek. For example, we recognized that when people are using the feature, they won’t be necessary focused on the taskbar as they look at windows on the desktop. An early prototype triggered Peek directly off the top-level of the taskbar but this revealed issues. Moving the mouse across a small a region to trigger different previews exited Peek since the natural arc of hand motion resulted in the mouse falling off the taskbar. By only triggering Peek off the thumbnails, we gained much more room for the mouse to arc and we also reduced accidental triggers.
Jump Lists
As far back as Windows 1.0, there has always been a system menu that shows contextual controls for running windows and their programs. This menu is accessible by right-clicking on a taskband button or in the top left corner of most windows. By default, the menu exposes windows controls such as close. (Random trivia—ever wonder why the system menu off a taskbar button always shows close in bold when close isn’t the double-click behavior? Well, the answer is that double-clicking the top left region of most windows will close it and the bolded option makes sense in this context. The same menu just happens to be hosted in both locations.) Over the years, some programs have extended the system menu to surface relevant tasks. For example, Command Prompt reveals tasks such as editing options, defaults and properties in its system menu. However, this is a bit of a free-for-all for programs to opt in or not, resulting in an inconsistent experience for people. Another blow to this scenario is that the system menu is only accessible when the program is running. This makes sense since the default commands are about window management, but what if you wanted to access a program’s tasks even it isn’t running?
As we discussed under the goals section, we thought about the various steps people have to take to accomplish tasks and whether we could reduce them. Be it getting to a destination or accessing the commands of a program, we wanted to make it easier for people to jump to the things they are trying to accomplish. Jump Lists are a new feature of the Windows 7 taskbar that accomplish just this. Think of this feature as a mini Start Menu for each program or an evolved version of the system menu. Jump Lists surface commonly used nouns (destinations) and verbs (tasks) of a program. There are several advantages this new approach provides. First, the you don’t need to even start the program to quickly launch a file or access a task. Second, destinations don’t take up valuable space on the taskbar; they are automatically organized by their respective program in a simple list. Should one have ten programs pinned or running on her taskbar, this means she could have quick access to over 150 destinations she uses all the time, without even the need to customize the UI! Since the Jump List shows lots of text for each of its items, gone are the days of having identical icons on your taskbar that are indistinguishable without a tooltip. Should you wish to keep a specific destination around, you can simply pin it to the list.
Windows 7 Jump List
Fig 5. Jump List: Right-clicking on Word gives quick access to recently used documents
To make sure we provide a consistent and valuable experience out-of-the-box, we decided to pre-populate Jump Lists and also allow programs to customize the experience. By default, the menu contains the program’s shortcut, the ability to toggle pinning, the ability to close one or all windows and a program’s recent destinations (assuming they use the Common File Dialog, register their file type or use the Recent Items API). Programs are able to replace the default MRU (Most Recently Used) list with a system-maintained MFU (Most Frequently Used) list, should their destinations be very volatile. For example, while Word will benefit from a MRU just like the one in their File Menu, Windows Explorer has opted to enable the MFU because people tend to visit many paths throughout a session. Programs are also able to provide their own custom destination list when they have a greater expertise of the person’s behavior (e.g. IE exposes their own history). Still others like Windows Live Messenger and Media Player surface tasks or a mix of tasks and destinations.
In case we haven’t yet impressed it upon you, the taskbar is about a single place to launch and switch. Jump Lists offer another important piece of the puzzle as it surfaces valuable destinations and tasks off a program’s unified taskbar button.
Custom Window Switchers
All the major web browsers offer tabs and a method of managing these tabs. One could argue tab toolbars are really like taskbars since they facilitate switching. These TDI (Tabbed Document Interface) and MDI (Multiple Document Interface) programs have always resorted to creating their own internal window management systems as the Windows taskbar was not optimized to help their scenarios. Some programs like Excel did custom work to surface their child windows on the taskbar, but this approach was somewhat of a hack.
Since the new taskbar already groups individual windows of a program under a single button, we can now offer a standard way for programs that have child windows to expose them. Again, the taskbar offers a single, consistent place to access real windows as well as child windows. These custom window switchers also behave as regular windows on the taskbar with rich thumbnails and even Aero Peek.
Thumbnail Toolbars
In the earlier taskbar posts, we discussed how Windows Media Player’s deskband offers valuable background music controls, but only a mere 3% of sessions ever enjoy the functionality. The new taskbar exposes a feature called Thumbnail Toolbars that surface up to seven window controls right in context of taskbar buttons. Unlike a Jump List that applies globally to a program, this toolbar is contextual to just a specific window. By embracing this new feature, Media Player can now reach a majority of people.
Windows 7 Thumbnail Toolbar
Fig 6. Thumbnail Toolbar: Window controls easily accessible in context of a taskbar thumbnail
Thumbnail Toolbars leave the taskbar uncluttered and allow relevant tasks to be conveniently accessible directly from a taskbar thumbnail. Surfacing tasks reduces the need to switch to a window.
Notification Area
We’re happy to announce that the Notification Area is back under your control. By default, only a select few system icons are shown while all others appear in a menu. Simply drag icons on or off the taskbar to control the experience. Better yet, every balloon tip that appears in the system has a little wrench icon that allows one to quickly “swat” an annoying alert by immediately seeing what is causing the notification and a direct way to disable it.
Windows 7 Notification Overflow
Fig 7. Notification Overflow: By default icons appear in an overflow area that you can then promote
Interestingly a very popular change to Notification Area isn’t about reducing noise, but rather showing more information. The default taskbar now reveals both the time and the date. Finally!
Overlay Icons and Progress Bars
Cleaning the Notification Area warrants us to consider other ways that programs can surface important information. We’ll always had overlay icons throughout Windows (e.g. to show shortcuts in Explorer) so we decided to bring this functionality to the taskbar. An icon can now be shown over a program’s taskbar button. Furthermore, programs can also give feedback about progress by having their taskbar button turn into a progress bar.
Windows 7 Progress Bar
Fig 8. Progress Bars: Explorer utilizes taskbar progress to show a copy operation in process
A program can now easily show an icon or progress in context of its taskbar button which furthers the one place, one button philosophy of the taskbar.
Color Hot-track
Color hot-track is a small touch that typifies the new taskbar’s personality. When a person moves her mouse over a running program on the taskbar, she will be pleasantly surprised to find that a light source tracks her mouse and the color of the light is actually based on the icon itself. We calculate the most dominant RGB of the icon and dynamically paint the button with this color. Color hot-track provides a delight factor, it offers feedback that a program is running and it showcases a program’s icon. We’ve always believed that programs light up the Windows platform and now, we’re returning the favor.
Windows 7 Color Hot-track
Fig 9. Color Hot-track: moving the mouse across a running window reveals a dynamically colored light effect
Start Menu
Vista introduced several changes to the Start Menu so we decided to minimize churn to this UI in Windows 7. Notable improvements include the availability of Jump Lists and a better power button that defaults to Shutdown, but makes it easy to customize.
Different, Yet Familiar
Despite all the features of the new taskbar, it is worthwhile noting the UI retains its familiarity. We like to describe our work as evolutionary, not revolutionary. The taskbar continues to be a launch surface, a window switcher and a whisperer of notifications. Whether one is relatively new to Windows or a seasoned pro, we realize change comes at a cost. It is for this reason that we took the time to carefully evaluate feedback, we performed numerous studies to validate our designs and finally, we will continue to provide scoped settings that keep the UI flexible.
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