Windows - 3

Windows 8 (or 8.1) is one of the not-so-popular operating systems. Even Microsoft employees admit Windows 8 is 'the new Vista'. Ok, they failed on that. Perhaps Windows 9 will be better.

Now that we have that out, there are a number of weird things in that OS. The one bugging me most is the fact that the full screen app icons that appear when you move the cursor to the top-left corner of your desktop are failing to display. This happens to me very often. It seems to have something to do with sleep/hibernate on my Win8 laptop. It should look like this:

But it looks like this instead:

Not cool.
There are some shadows from the icons, but nothing usable or nothing that I could use to identify which icon is for which app.

I don't know what's the problem, but I found a fix. The culprit is your classic explorer.exe. The fix is simple. Zap your Windows Explorer with a magic kill process -wand and create a new better one. The new explorer won't know anything about already running full-screen apps, but it will sure learn if you manage to get into one.

Here is the fix. First start the Task Manager. Since the idea is to kill explorer.exe, you'll need a tool to eradicate the old one and make sure you can start a new one. The sequence starts from Task Manager's Details tab-sheet:

After that your explorer will be back and your icons will be back after you visit all of your apps.

Today, this tuesday, is the last time Windows XP gets security updates from Microsoft. Apparently Dutch and UK governments are willing to pay seven figure sums per year to keep their XPs running, but the rest of us, anything smaller than a government we don't get to have those. Last autumn I visited Windows 8.1 release in Helsinki and there a Microsoft MVP said "Microsoft is not that evil company, they just might release something really critical if it comes down to that". There was some chuckling in the crowd. Anyway, very interesting things will happen to XP, see the CVE-list for non-fixed flaws.

In Finnish media, the XP has gotten a lot of media coverage all year. I guess it got to the point of scaring regular users in the national TV. This I figured when my mother called me about her Windows 7. The another thing was at my neighbor's computer. She has an old XP-box with really poor specs. She asked for my help, but after initial assessment there was nothing I could do with her old computer. I happened to have an old Dell OptiPlex GX260 desktop computer with steroids, a SSD-drive in a ATA-to-SATA -adapter. I was about to do the decent thing and comply with EU 2002/96/EC directive, aka. throw the electronic junk where all electronic junk ends up at. The computer has only 512 MiB memory, but given the 2,0 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, it runs 2009 released Windows 7 in a reasonable acceptable manner. The best part for my neighbor was, that I promised to donate the hardware free of charge. It was only a matter of getting a license key for Windows 7.

My old OptiPlex booted from installation DVD without problems, I must say I was amazed about that. Any old low-quality CD/DVD-drive typically has issues with dust in the lens and the read head eventually deteriorates to the point, that the drive refuses to read anything. Anyway, the Windows 7 installer found the SATA-connected SSD-drive, the installer copied the files, booted for the initial Out-Of-the-Box-Experience. Everything seemed to be ok, I had network connectivity and even some sound.

What every legacy PC does after install is, that the display resolution is something unbelievable. This case I had a VGA 640x480. It sure looked nice on my 22" LCD-screen!
The thing is: no W7 drivers for my Dell. It seems to have a built-in Intel 82845G graphics adapter in it. The Dell support knows about my machine and the display driver in its Download Center, but the latest supported OS they have is Windows XP. WDDM driver model was introduced in Vista and XDDM drivers was the last one Intel ever did for 82845G. This was confirmed in Microsoft TechNet's Windows 7 IT Pro forums discussion How do I get Windows 7 Graphic driver for the Intel 82845G Graphics Controller?

Lucky for me, somebody had posted a link to another article For Older Hardware to Run on Windows 7 How to Install intel 82845G graphics driver on Window 7, and there was a solution for my exact problem. I didn't realize that it was possible to still use XDDM drivers, but it is possible. In device manager, there is a Add Legacy hardware:

I took the 82845G driver package 14.10.3, unzipped it and Windows 2000 XDDM driver installed. After rebooting the Windows 7, everything was ok. The driver actually claims it can go up to 2048x1536, but given the analog VGA-connector I chose not to go that far.

Finally, I installed Microsoft Security Essentials into it and I was done. My neighbor had a nice "new" computer till year 2020. I'm wishing people would upgrade before that, but knowing that doing nothing is always the preferred action on non-hackers, so plenty of people will be taken by surprise when Windows 7 updates run out.

I don't have a Windows-domain at home, so the Internet time client (NTP) is on relaxed settings. Your typical Microsoft documentation about NTP will have phrases like: "The default value for domain members is 10. The default value for stand-alone clients and servers is 15" in it. So, it really makes a difference if the computer is in a domain or not.

It is a well established fact, that the hardware clock on your computer is quite inaccurate. On a modern computer, there is no point in using expensive hardware to make the clock run smoothly, you can always set the time from a reliable clock source from Internet. That's what the NTP was made decades ago, to make sure that everybody has the same time in their boxes.

The real question here is: Why does my Windows 7 clock skew so much? I have set up the internet time, but it still is inaccurate.

As a Linux-guy I love doing my stuff on the command-line. To question about the clock skew I'll do:

w32tm /monitor /computers:-the-NTP-server-

... and it will respond something like NTP: -0.7900288s offset from local clock. So it's almost a second behind the accurate time source.

The initial fix is easy, force it to get the accurate time from the configured time server:

w32tm /resync

But I cannot be doing that all the time. Why cannot the computer maintain a well disciplined clock like I configured it to do? There must be something fishy about that.

A command like:

w32tm /query /status

will say that Poll Interval: 10 (1024s), but I cannot confirm that requests for every 1024 seconds (or less). It simply does not do that. There is a TechNet article with the title of Windows Time Service Tools and Settings describing a registry setting of MaxPollInterval located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config, but that has no real relevance here. The update mechanism does not obey that setting.

However, Microsoft's knowledge base article 884776 titled How to configure the Windows Time service against a large time offset gives more insight about the update interval. It describes a registry value of SpecialPollInterval located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient for manual peers. I'm guessing I have a manual peer, whatever that means. I don't have a domain and I did set the server manually. The original value seems to be 604800 seconds, making that 7 days or a week. Whoa! Way too much for me.

While sniffing the network traffic with the Wireshark, indeed I can confirm that putting a small value into that will make my Windows 7 to poll on that interval. I put 10 seconds there, and it seems to work. For any real life scenario 10 seconds to update time is ridiculous. For a computer on a domain, the value is 3600 seconds, making the updates for every hour. I chose to use that.

Please note that changing the registry value requires a restart for the Windows time client. From a command line a:

net stop w32time
net start w32time

will do the trick and start using the newly set registry value. You can also restart the Windows Time service from GUI.

Now my computer's time seems to stick with a reasonable accuracy. I'm still considering of purchasing a GPS-time box of my own. They seem to be quite expensive, though.

One day my laptop shut itself down while I was getting a cup of coffee. No big deal, I thought. I'll just plug it into charger and things will be ok again. It took me by surprise to see, that the battery was 80% charged and the laptop had done a "crash landing". Apparently it chose to turn itself off. I'm guessing to avoid an over-heating situation.

Couple of weeks later I realized that a machine that does not do anything, chews about 25% CPU constantly. The natural guess would be a virus scanner, but it turned out to be a process called IEWebSiteLogon.exe:

I've never heard of such an application. Google didn't reveal anything useful, but the process properties revealed that the file was located at C:\Program Files\Lenovo Fingerprint Reader\x86\, so the conclusion is that my fingerprint reader's software is running a piece of software to eat up a lot of CPU-resources to do exactly nothing.

The file name gave me a hint, that it has something to do with Internet Explorer. I was running IE 11:

I opened the add ons manager:

and there it was. My initial idea of disabling the stupid thing didn't pan out. The Disable-button is grayed out. Searching The Net revealed two interesting pieces of information: How to Remove Unneeded Plug-Ins in Internet Explorer By Andy Rathbone from Windows 8 For Dummies, which proved to be useless, it instructs to disable the add on. The second yielded results: Can't remove Internet Explorer Add-On. It described a way to track down the component by its class ID. Nice, but not nice enough. Somewhere there is a piece of code to attempt to load the missing component. Why not remove the requirement?

The details of the add on are:

Now I had the class ID of {8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}. According to SystemLookup.com is a valid piece of software, they say: "This entry is classified as legitimate". That class ID can be found in my Windows system's registry from the following locations:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\

The interesting ones are the system setting of Browser Helper Objects and user setting of Approved Extensions. Removing the helper object surely will disable the add on completely. Also it will be a good idea to make it a not-approved extension. And to un-register the component. All that should give the stupid add on a decisive blow and make it not waste my precious CPU-cycles.

The following PowerShell-commands run with administrator permissions will do the trick:

Remove-Item -path
  "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"
Remove-Item -path
  "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"
Remove-ItemProperty -path
  "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions" -name "{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"

If you don't have admin-permissions, the commands will fail. Also please note that every time Internet Explorer is started, it will make sure that permissions in the registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions are set so, that user is denied any modification access. See this:

I tried to remove the deny ACL with PowerShell, but it seems to be impossible. The API is not mature enough.

After removing the deny ACL and running the PowerShell-commands and finally stopping and starting the Internet Explorer, the add on was gone. I managed to "disable" it completely.

Microsoft announced version 3.5 of Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. An ISO-image is available for download at Mirosoft's site.

In one of my earlier articles I was wondering if it really matters when Hyper-V indicates the Linux guest status as degraded and tells that an upgrade is required. This version does not change that. Looks like they just added some (weird) new features and improved set of virtulization features for Windows Server 2012 R2, but didn't touch the network code. However, there is a promise of TRIM-support for 2012 R2.

So, the bottom line is: not worth upgrading.

That should be an easy task, right? You guessed it. If I'm writing about it, it isn't. Once in a while I still test with a real IE8. The IE10 and IE11 emulators should be good enough, but they aren't. Here are the stats from this blog:

People seem to run with IE8 a lot. They shouldn't but ... they do.

Here is what I did:

1. List of Windows updates installed on the computer:
   
2. Managed to find Internet Explorer 9 in it (on Windows 7, that's pretty normal):
   
3. Un-install starts:
   
4. Yep. It took a while and hung. Darn!
   
5. I waited for 20 minutes and rebooted the hung piece of ...
6. Reboot did some mopping up and here is the result. No IE anywhere:
   
7. Guess who cannot re-install it. On a normal installation it is listed in Windows features, like this:
   
   In my case, no:
   
   

No amount of reboots, running sfc.exe or anything I can think of will fix this. This is what I already tried:

1. Attempt fix with Windows Resource Checker:
   PS C:\Windows\system32> sfc /scannow
   
   Beginning system scan.  This process will take some time.
   
   Beginning verification phase of system scan.
   Verification 100% complete.
   
   Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.
   It simply fails to restore the files, because all the bookkeeping says, that IE8 shouldn't be there!
   
2. Let' just download the installation package and re-install manually. Download Center - Internet Explorer 8
   
3. Ok, we're not going to do that, because the IE 8 installation package for Windows 7 does not exist. Reason is very simple. Win 7 came with IE8. It is an integral part of the OS. You simply cannot run the Windows 7 without some version of IE. No installation packages necessary, right? Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7 is not available for download
   
4. Right then. I took the Windows Vista package and ran the installation anyway. All the compatiblity modes and such yield the same result. Internet Explorer 8 is not supported on this operating system
   
   
5. Re-installation instructions, part 1: Reinstalling IE8 on Windows 7. Not much of a help. The
   
6. Re-installation instructions, part 2: How to Reinstall Internet Explorer in Windows 7 and Vista. No help there either.
7. Registry tweaking into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions to see if {7B849a69-220F-451E-B3FE-2CB811AF94AE} and {CF7639F3-ABA2-41DB-97F2-81E2C5DBFC5D} are still there as suggested by How to Uninstall IE8. Nope. No help with that either. That article mentions "European Windows 7". What could the difference be?
8. Perhaps re-installing Service Pack 1 would help? But well... in Windows 7 SP1 cannot be re-installed like it was possible in Windows XP. That actually did fix a lot of operating systems gone bad at the XP-era.
   

The general consensus seems to be, that you simply cannot lose IE from Windows 7. Magically I did. Just based on the Wikipedia article about removing IE, it is possible.

Some of the symptoms I'm currently having is Windows Explorer Refuses to Open Folders In Same Window. Some of the necessary DLLs are not there and Windows Explorer behaves funnily.

I don't know what to attempt next.

Why doesn't my setting of NOT installing important updates automatically stick? Every once in a while it seems to pop itself back to the stupid position and does all kinds of nasty things in the middle of the night. From now on I'll start a counter how many times I'll go there to reset the setting back to the one I as system administrator chose.

All this rant is for the simple reason: I've lost data and precious working time trying to recover it. This morning I woke up and while roaming in the house in a semi-conscious state attempting to regain a thought, I noticed couple of LEDs glimmering in a place there shouldn't be any. My desktop PC was on and it shouldn't be. On closer inspection at 3 am it chose to un-sleep for the sake of installing Windows updates. This is yet another stupid thing for a computer to be doing (see my post about OS X waking up).

The bottom line is that the good people (fucking idiots) at Microsoft don't respect my decisions. They choose to force feed me theirs based on the assumption that I accidentally chose not to do a trivial system administration taks automatically. I didn't. I don't want to lose my settings, windows, documents, the list goes on.

The only real option for me would be to set up a Windows Domain. In Active Directory there would be possibility of fixing the setting and making it un-changeable. I just don't want to do it for a couple of computers. Idiots!

Earlier I wrote about upgrading my Windows 8 into Windows 8.1. At the time I didn't realize it, but the upgrade lost my Media Center Pack.

At the time I didn't realize that, but then I needed to play a DVD with the laptop and noticed, that the OS is not capable of doing that anymore. After Windows 8 was released it didn't have much media capabilities. To fix that, couple months after the release Microsoft distributed Media Center Pack keys for free to anybody who wanted to request one. I got a couple of the keys and installed one into my laptop.

Anyway, the 8.1 upgrade forgot to mention that it would downgrade the installation back to non-media capable. That should be an easy fix, right?

Wrong!

After the 8.1 upgrade was completed, I went to "Add Features to Windows", said that I already had a key, but Windows told me that nope, "Key won't work". Nice.

At the time I had plenty of other things to take care of and the media-issue was silently forgotten. Now that I needed the feature, again I went to add features, and hey presto! It said, that the key was ok. For a couple of minutes Windows did something magical and ended the installation with "Something went wrong" type of message. The option to add features was gone at that point, so I really didn't know what to do.

The natural thing to do next is to go googling. I found an article at the My Digital Life forums, where somebody complained having the same issue. The classic remedy for everything ever since Windows 1.0 has been a reboot. Windows sure likes to reboot. I did that and guess what, during shutdown there was an upgrade installing. The upgrade completed after the boot and there it was, the Windows 8.1 had Media Center Pack installed. Everything worked, and that was that, until ...

Then came the 2nd Tuesday, traditionally it is the day for Microsoft security updates. I installed them and a reboot was requested. My Windows 8.1 started disliking me after that. The first thing it did after a reboot, it complained about Windows not being activated! Aow come on! I punched in the Windows 8 key and it didn't work. Then I typed the Media Center Pack key and that helped. Nice. Luckily Windows 8 activation is in the stupid full-screen mode, so it is really easy to copy/paste a license key. NOT!

The bottom line is: Media Center Pack is really poorly handled. I'm pretty sure nobody at Microsoft's Windows 8 team ever installed the MCP. This is the typical case of end users doing all the testing. Darn!

Lot of my Windows 7 testing is done in a virtual installation. I run it under KVM and aim for small disc footprint, I have a number of other boxes there too. One day I came to realize that my Windows 7 installation is running out of disc space. That would be strange, I literally have nothing installed in it and it still manages to eat up 30 GiB of space.

There is Microsoft KB Article ID: 2795190 How to address disk space issues that are caused by a large Windows component store (WinSxS) directory explaining this behavior.

The fix is to use Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool DISM. Run something like this as administrator will help:

C:\Windows\System32\Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded

it will say something like "Removing backup files created during service pack installation". It will remove more than 4 GiB of space. Rest of the garbage will stay on the drive as they originate from regular windows updates.

Why does everything have to be updated via download? That's completely fucked up! In the good old days you could download an ISO-image and update when you wanted and as many things you needed. The same plague is in Mac OS X, Windows, all important applications. I hate this!

Getting a Windows 8.1 upgrade was annoying since it failed to upgrade my laptop. It really didn't explain what happened, it said "failed rolling back". Then I bumped into an article "How to download the Windows 8.1 ISO using your Windows 8 retail key". Nice! Good stuff there. I did that and got the file.

Next thing I do is take my trustworthy Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to create a bootable USB-stick from the 8.1 upgrade ISO-file. A boot from the stick and got into installer which said that this is not the way to do the upgrade. Come on! Second boot back to Windows 8 and start the upgrade from the USB-stick said that "Setup has failed to validate the product key". I googled that and found a second article about getting the ISO-file (Windows 8.1 Tip: Download a Windows 8.1 ISO with a Windows 8 Product Key), which had a comment from Mr. Robin Tick had a solution for this. Create the sources\ei.cfg-file into the USB-stick with contents:

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0

Then the upgrade started to roll my way. To my amazement my BitLocker didn't make much of a stopper for the upgrade to proceed. It didn't much ask for the PIN-code or anything, but went trough all the upgrade stages: Installing, Detecting devices, Applying PC settings, Setting up a few more things, Getting ready and it was ready to go. It was refreshing to experience success after the initial failure. I'm guessing that the BitLocked made the downloaded upgrade to fail.

Next thing I tried was to upgrade my office PC. It is a Dell OptiPlex with OEM Windows 8. Goddamn it! It did the upgrade, but at that point my OEM Windows 8 was converted into a retail Windows 8.1. Was that really necessary? How much of an effort would that be to simply upgrade the operating system? Or at least give me a warning, that in order to proceed with the upgrade the OEM status will be lost. Come on Microsoft!

Is it just me, or has somebody at Microsoft really dropped the ball on network location setting? When a Windows computer detects a new network, which it has not be attached into earlier, it pops you the question and asks about how to profile the security in that particular case. If everything goes ok, there is no need to change anything. However, when you install your computer, you don't get to answer that. Also, there is commonly known that people make mistakes. What if you simply fumbled the question and clicked wrong.

In Windows 7 the setting is simple:

You go there, click the value and select a better one. In Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 that is not the case. The setting cannot be changed. Period. Wtf?

There is a way to change the setting. I found this article with Google: How do I set my wireless network to be private instead of public? The "Easiest" and "Most direct" are crap, IMHO. The part with Local Security Policy seems to work:

That seems to be working from Windows 7 onwards. Whose bright idea it was to make the change that difficult?

I've been using IPv6 on my own LAN for years. Most of the things I use on daily basis have IPv6 and it seems to work. For example a Sony television or iPhone 4S does not use IPv6, but iPad does.

On my router there is a Router Advertisement Damon to do stateless auto-configuration. On Windows 7 and 8 they have really weird things running out-of-the-box, but I'm in a habit of running (as admin):

netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled store=persistent
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=active
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled store=persistent
netsh interface teredo set state disabled

That way I'm using fixed IPv6-addresses and disable the unnecessary Teredo-tunnel.

I don't exactly know why or how, but on one of my computers (running Windows 7), the IPv6-sockects started to not work properly. The symptoms include lot of reconnections and for example in SSH-client, the connection would simply drop. I did everything I knew, but nothing helped. A failing SSH-connection would look like this on the wire:

After 31 seconds of connection, there is a sporadic retransmission. That is not dangrous and it happens sometimes. My Windows 7 would respond with a duplicate ACK into it, waits 3 seconds and goes ballistic. It simply starts re-transmitting the already transmitted data with 1, 3 and 5 second intervals before determining that the connection has died. WTF?! The connection is not bad! It works on all other computers. The issue can be easily repeated and it works the same way every time. Windows thinks it needs to start a burst of re-transmissions and disconnects when they seem to fail.

During one of the Google-session for the fix, I found netsh interface ipv6 reset command. I tried it:

PS C:\Windows\system32> .\netsh.exe interface ipv6 reset
Reseting Global, OK!
Reseting Interface, OK!
Reseting Subinterface, OK!
Restart the computer to complete this action.

Did the Windows restart, ran the above commands to disable privacy, randomization and teredo-tunnel. Everything started to work! Whooo-hoo! Now my SSH-connections don't drop anymore. How cool is that!

The fix is very microsoft-ish. Some counter ticked into illegal value and in their mind the correct fix is to reset everything to the post-installation state. On *nix-world network-stack -code would be of much better quality and the entire issue would never happen!

I've been using a Windows 8.1 preview for a while and being a web developer, I stumbled into couple of noteworthy issues with IE 11. See my previous entry about Win 8.1.

User-Agent string

There are pretty much 2 variants:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C)

or:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The only way I could get the "like Gecko" -mode enabled on a XHTML 1.0 -site, was from developers tools in the Edge-mode. My site also has a <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" /> in it, but removing or adding the tag does not seem to have any effect. I'm guessing, that Edge-mode works out-of-the-box only in HTML 5. The important thing to not here is, that IE 11 declares itself as a IE 7.0, but unlike a "real" IE 7, this has Trident rendering engine 7.0. Also there is declaration of a "real-version" or rv:11.0.

Emulating previous browser versions

Gone. The good thing is that F12 developers tools have been completely re-written, but it is impossible to get the classic standards selection. I found two discussions about that. First is from superuser.com and second from stackoverflow.com.

Microsoft's idea is to go to http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools  and use their virtualization service / tools to use a proper old browser. My advice would be: just ignore anybody using the ancient crap. I'd draw the line on IE 9, it still is pretty popular browser, but on my statistics anything older than IE 8 are totally gone.

Getting Zend Framework 1 to detect IE 11 properly

On my projects I have the ZF 1 running. I've been using Browser Capabilies Project's browscap.ini on PHP. It has solid integration into ZF 1. The bad thing is that BCP is not well maintained anymore due to key persons losing interest into maintaining one. Anyway, here is my patch into 5020:

--- php_browscap.ini.orig       2013-07-31 16:20:08.749140271 +0300
+++ php_browscap.ini    2013-07-31 16:24:14.563058655 +0300
@@ -31179,6 +31192,64 @@
 Platform="WinNT"
 Platform_Version=3.1

+;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; IE 11.0
+
+[IE 11.0]
+Parent=DefaultProperties
+Comment="IE 11.0"
+Browser="IE"
+Version=11.0
+MajorVer=11
+MinorVer=0
+Beta=true
+Win32=true
+Frames=true
+IFrames=true
+Tables=true
+Cookies=true
+BackgroundSounds=true
+JavaScript=true
+VBScript=true
+JavaApplets=true
+ActiveXControls=true
+CssVersion=3
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.1*64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win7"
+Platform_Version=6.1
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.1*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win7"
+Platform_Version=6.1
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.2*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8"
+Platform_Version=6.2
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3; WOW64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3; Win64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; IE 10.0

 [IE 10.0]

The 2nd glitch is that ZF 1 heavily relies on seeing string "MSIE" in the UserAgent identification to determine, that we're talking about Internet Explorer. IE 11 doesn't state that anymore. It want's to be like Mozilla's Gecko-engine, and happily says so. My patch for ZF 1:

--- library/Zend/Http/UserAgent/AbstractDevice.php.orig 2012-11-16 17:23:41.000000000 +0200
+++ library/Zend/Http/UserAgent/AbstractDevice.php      2013-07-31 13:58:15.422657840 +0300
@@ -512,6 +512,19 @@
         } elseif ($product == 'mozilla' && $result['browser_version'] < 5.0) {
             // handles the real Mozilla (or old Netscape if version < 5.0)
             $result['browser_name'] = 'Netscape';
+        } elseif ($product == 'mozilla' && isset($result['comment']['full']) &&
+            preg_match('#^([^;]+);.+Trident/(.+);\s+rv:(.+)#', $result['comment']['full'], $real)) {
+            // MSIE 10+ in native mode.
+            // In emulation mode, will match MSIE 7.0
+            $result['browser_name'] = "MSIE";
+            $result['browser_engine'] = "MSIE";
+            $result['browser_version'] = $real[3];
+            $result['browser_token'] = 'MSIE ' . $real[3];
+            if (isset($result['others']['full'])) {
+                $result['compatibility_flag'] = $result['others']['full'];
+                unset($result['others']);
+            }
+            $result['device_os_token'] = $real[1];
         }

         /** windows */
@@ -523,6 +536,8 @@
             if (strpos($result['device_os_token'], 'Win') !== false) {

                 $windows = array(
+                    'Windows NT 6.3'          => 'Windows 8.1',
+                    'Windows NT 6.2'          => 'Windows 8',
                     'Windows NT 6.1'          => 'Windows 7',
                     'Windows NT 6.0'          => 'Windows Vista',
                     'Windows NT 5.2'          => 'Windows Server 2003',

That makes ZF 1 react alike for IE 11 and all other versions before that. I did test that on IE 8, IE 9, IE 10 and IE 11. Also I confirmed that to function with IE 10 and IE 11 in IE 7 emulator mode.

64-bit process

Normally I run only 64-bit browsers. Google's crappy Chrome won't do that, so I try to stay away from it. Firefox has excellent spin-off project of CyberFox, most IE versions have 64-bit counterparts, Opera has 64-bit version. The thing with 64-bit browsers is that there are a number of exploits for browsers which are tailored to run on 32-bit processes.

Anyway, the story is that on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 the tile-mode IE is always 64-bit, but desktop-mode is always 32-bit. Ghacks.net has a story about getting IE 10 in Windows 8 to run 64-bit in desktop-mode, but I fail to confirm the results.

On IE 11 I found a setting of "Enable 64-bit processes for Enhanced Protected Mode":

... I don't know how it should affect the browser behaviour. I'm still getting:

The root-process of IE seems to be 64-bit, but anything with a real web-page in it, is always 32-bit on desktop side. Tile-mode looks like this:

So, no avail for me. Any ideas are welcome.

I was fiddling with a virtual machine and eventually messed it up. My fail made the Linux un-bootable and after a swift assessment I decided to extract the application data and re-install the OS. During my re-install I wanted an expanding virtual disk. As a default Hyper-V Manager creates fixed-size disks, but as my machine is not disk-I/O -dependant, I wanted to consume disk space to make my transfers easier.

Discarding the previous disk and creating a new dynamically expanding one wasn't the hard part. After I attempted to boot my machine for install I got into trouble. The darn thing wouldn't boot! The error text said: "Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID -blah-blarh-blaa-): Failed to Power on with Error 'General access denied error'. IDE/ATAPI Account does not have sufficient privilege to open attachment."

This type of error is widely documented. For example in Microsoft Support Knowledge base Article ID: 2249906. However, they fail to mention how to extract the virtual machine ID. Petri IT Knowledgebase has an article how to get that Get Hyper-V Virtual Machine Process ID and GUID. However, that fails to mention where the virtual machine description files are located at.

After all this research I still didn't have much to go on. Based on the petri.co.il-article, I made a search for files on my computer and deduced the path to be C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines.

Now that I had the virtual machine ID, I made an observation about the file's permissions. In the Microsoft KB-article they instruct you to grant full access -permission for the virtual machine. On my computer the other virtual drives have only read and write access. See this pic:

Full access sounds like an overkill anyway, I think R/W should do the trick in this case. This is what I ended up doing in PowerShell:

C:\Windows\System32\icacls.exe `
 "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual hard disks\CentOS-V.vhd" `
 /grant "NT VIRTUAL MACHINE\90DBD878-001C-412B-A668-D5BC8311C12E:(R,W)"

Now my machine boots into install.

Well... the short version is: there is nothing new in it. In medium version the new Internet Explorer 11 is an improvement from IE 10, but is still letting me down.

The install-process didn't go without hiccups. Naturally I didn't read any documents and my install halted on serial number requirement. In the Windows 8.1 preview: FAQ Microsoft provides the correct serial, though.

About the IE 11: It seems bit more robust than IE 10 which failed on trivial things if using IE 7 emulation. On IE 11 the developers tools are completely re-written. That's good news to me, who am a web developer. The problem seems to be, that they completely dropped emulation for previous versions. It is pretty much the way to go but ... why did they have to introduce such functionality in the first place?

I get it, browser race is on. It was on hold for 10 years, but in 2008 when Google entered the race with its Chrome, all the other players sure started putting some effort into their product. Which is a good thing. Microsoft's latest response is IE 11 and they simply have to drop the legacy and start shifting gears to catch up with the others. The real problem is that according to my logs, pretty much every IE-version is still in use. With IE 7-10 it was possible to state in HTML, that this site uses IE 7 rendering rules, or alternatively select a rendering mode manually. Now I cannot seem to find such a switch.

About IE 11 speed: It is not that fast. It has some improvements, but still appears sluggish. The IE's Trident (also Opera) layout engine still renders things only after the page is pretty much loaded. This is exactly the opposite way of Chrome, Mozilla and Webkit -engines way of doing things. In IE the page load appears slow to user since there is always a delay when nothing happens. Also IE appears to be bit slow on CSS / DOM -parsing. Most of development effort has gone into JavaScript-speed.

In conclusion: Windows 8.1 upgrade is a major letdown. The new "start" button does not deliver, I'm still using Classic Shell as a start button, IE 11 doesn't deliver. I'm sure I'll update, but it's nothing worth waiting for.