(Quick note: There is no setting to add a search bar to IE9. You either search from the address bar or add a third-party search toolbar like Google, Yahoo or Bing toolbar.)

With Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 I tended to use Firefox, Chrome or other browser-of-the-moment for personal surfing and use IE for work use, partially because many work sites relied on IE-specific functions or plugins. By default IE enables searching from the address bar, and this resulted in quite a few mistyped corporate intranet URLs being sent to the public internet as search queries. The paranoid part of me sees this as a security risk (exposing intranet desgin since the public can see some query stats), and it also was a simple pain in the butt because the address was now a search string instead of my original mistype that I could edit and resend. So I got in the habit of always turning off search-from-address-bar in IE, which setting in IE6, IE7 and IE8 was in the advanced tab of internet options.

Enter IE9, which is more-or-less unusable without search-from-address-bar. Nowadays I tend to have IE, Firefox and Chrome open simultaneously logged into different Twitter, Google or other accounts. IE8 had the cool search bar like Firefox, so I never changed back my search settings. After installing IE9 the search bar disappeared, and my don’t-search-from-address bar settings carried over from IE8, and the setting no longer appears in the advanced tab. It took me several tries, but I finally found it under Manage Add-ons, highlight Search Providers type, and the check box is in the bottom pane of the window along with a check box to prevent programs from suggesting changes to your search settings.

Okay, I was able to open the task manager. There are no applications available to close, but I used the processes tab to close all Norton and Symantec processes. hopefully that didn’t mess anything up.

If you have an agree button, you must have a disagree button!

A more generic name for this is link-local addressing. These addresses only speak to other devices on the same switch or LAN that have also autoconfigured themselves, but they cannot speak across routers to the rest of the networked world. IPv6 devices always create a link-local address that will only speak to other devices on the same switch or LAN, whether or not another address is assigned. IPv6 link-local addresses are in the fe80:/10 prefix, meaning they will begin with fe8, fe9, fea or feb. Let’s take a look:

Windows IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : ad.itkia.com
   IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2001:db8:192:0:6470:6fb9:76c7:aa85
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::6470:6fb9:76c7:aa85%11
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.56
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : fe80::214:d1ff:fe1a:a533%11
                                       192.168.1.1

I highlighted in red the link-local addresses in the “ipconfig” output. Note that the gateway is a link-local address instead of the router’s public address. The link-local address for my machine is the first one highlighted.

But what is that “%11″ at the end? Remember, these are link-local addresses, and there is no concept of routing to other networks. Your computer may have or think it has more than one link. If you try using a link-local address and get an error, add the “%11″ to the address to tell Windows which link to use. This is the Scope ID and tells Windows which link to look on for specified link-local address. The Scope ID is a Windows-specific concept and isn’t really part of IPv6 itself, and the Scope ID never enters the packet or the network. In Linux, most commands have a command line option (e.g. ‘-i eth0′, ‘-I eth0′) to specify the interface link when the address is ambiguous (which is always the case when using link-local addressing when there is more than one interface).

When I first started playing with IPv6 I tried pinging and accessing web sites on my local LAN using the link-local addresses, and it wasn’t working. (It’s working fine now, so I can’t demonstrate failure.) I had to add the %n Scope ID, and then it worked for me. Expect to encounter this issue if you are pinging link-local addresses from a multihomed host.

If you have public or even private IPv6 addresses you can just ignore the link-local addresses. They are used by IPv6 extensively for autoconfiguration, multicasting and neighbor discovery, but they aren’t meant to be used by applications or users, and they should never have names resolving to them.

Then about a month ago I performed a laptop refresh for an industrial company where the new laptop was a Configuration Manager (SMS)-managed Vista Business operating system. This was actually problematic, but the issues were due to client network latency between the laptop and the software distribution point, not to Vista itself .

Today I saw Server 2008 in production at a big box retailer while testing a newly installed KVM, and I made an appointment for this week to refresh a laptop user at at IT services firm to a new managed laptop running Windows 7 64-bit. I’m speaking about real, managed deployments here, not a lab machine or a rogue user installing his own software. Color me impressed.

I don’t think this is simply coincidental to the upswing in adopting Windows Deployment Services that I’ve seen over the past two years. Before two years ago, all client images I dealt with were Ghost, Altiris or various Linux-based imaging software, but then I noticed more and more clients using WDS for their newer hardware deployments. Now I have several clients using DVD, PXE and flash boot to image their systems with WDS. And once you have that infrastructure in place, imaging Vista or Windows 7 is as easy as Windows XP. And now apparently patch and application management for Vista, Win7 and Server 2008 is deployed more widely in the enterprise. Welcome to the present!

A client was getting blue screen errors with STOP 0x0000007E. This indicates drivers or hardware, and given that the machines were fine until upgrading to WinXP SP2 I decided it must be a driver.

Through trial and error I found that Logitech Mouseware 9.76 was installed on the PCs and was causing sporadic blue screens when a USB mouse was connected. Just uninstall Mouseware, let Windows XP install the native driver and all is well.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that this problem may be related to DeviceLock USB security program installed on my client’s computers. It’s possible that Mouseware and SP2 alone won’t cause the blue screen crashes but that Mouseware and DeviceLock are conflicting.

It can index your filesystem, too. By default as installed on Windows XP it indexes your My Documents folder. And not just the filenames; it can index the contents of many file types including Word documents, PDFs, EXIF data from digital images, zip file contents and more. You can also extend the types of files it can search.

However I have many file archives I don’t particularly want indexed. I usually search these by right-clicking on a folder in Explorer and choosing Search. The new Windows Desktop Search pops up when you do that now. The old Seach Companion is still available, but you have to click a link in WDS when it tells you it doesn’t have that folder indexed. I may give up and just let it index everything I might search as I’ve been running into this a lot lately.

WDS puts a search box on your task bar. That’s somewhat handy, but that’s valuable real estate as I keep a lot of windows open and use Quick Launch, so the search box leaves little space for my task buttons. I hid the search box, and now I can search with windows-F or by clicking on the WDS icon in the task tray.

WDS is available as a free download for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1. Vista ships with WDS.