Hacking Windows 7 beta problems

I've put the Windows 7 beta through its paces, and mostly have been impressed. But I also found several problems with it, including hard disks that appear to vanish and turn into phantoms. Here are the hacks for fixing those problems.

As I write in Review: Windows 7 Beta 1 shows off new task bar, more UI goodies, I've been quite impressed with Beta 1. But I've found several problems, one with a hard disk that seems to have vanished, another with wireless networking, and another with getting the new Windows Aero Peek feature to work. After digging into the operating system, and with help from Computerworld readers, I've found hacks to fix them.

First some background about my hard disk problem. My Windows 7 beta is on a dual-boot machine. The C: drive boots to XP and the J: drive boots to Windows 7. When I boot into Windows 7, Windows 7 shows the J: drive as if it were a C: drive. That's not an issue. But the real C: drive is invisible -- it doesn't show up in Windows 7 at all. In Windows XP, there are no problems with recognizing both drives.

I've found that I'm not alone --- several people have reported that multiple disk drives don't show up in Windows 7. And several wrote to me with their fixes. Here's how to do it:

1. Right-click My Computer.

2. From the menu that appears, select Manage.

3. The Computer Management module appears. Click on Disk Management.

4. You'll see all the physical drives on your PC. One of them --- the missing one --- won't have a volume name. That's the problem you need to fix. At the bottom of the screen, right-click that drive and assign it a drive letter. That'll fix it. You can see this in action in the screenshot below.

The next problem I had was that the nifty new Aero Peek feature wasn't working. Normally, to make it work, you right-click the small Aero Peek rectangle at the far right of the taskbar, and select "Preview desktop." But in my case the Preview desktop feature has a check next to it, but is greyed out, so it's not working.

To fix the problem, type Aero into the Search box, and from the results that appear, select "Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects." An Aero troubleshooting wizard appears. Click Next, and the troubleshooter turns Aero on.

My problem was that the Desktop Manager Session Manager wasn't running, and that the Desktop Window Manager was disabled. The troubleshooter fixed the problem. You can see the results, below.

However, it only solved it partially, because each time I boot, I have the same problem. If anyone out there has a fix for this, please let me know, below. I did create a desktop shortcut to the troubleshooter, by right-clicking "Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects" when it appeared in my search results, and selecting Open. From the screen that appeared, I then right-clicked "Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual effects" and selected Create Shortcut. So now I have a shortcut to fix the problem. But I'd prefer not to have to run the troubleshooter every time I reboot.

The final problem I had was that my wireless network adapter didn't seem to be working. The issue wasn't hardware-related --- Windows 7 recognized and configured the adapter without any problems. The fix here is simple: click the wireless icon then click the troubleshooting link and let a Windows 7 troubleshooter do the rest. On my system, the issue was that the Windows wireless service wasn't running, and the troubleshooter promptly started it up. You can see details in the screenshot below.

However, as with my problems with Aero Peek, that only solved the problem after the fact. I can't figure out how to tell Windows 7 to run the wireless service every time Windows boots. If you've got a solution, let me know, below.