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Microsoft has locked some of the upcoming features in the Windows 7 release that they distributed among attendees of the Professional Developers Conference 08 in Los Angeles. The build has made its way on various P2P sites shortly thereafter and is now in the hands of thousands of additional users who downloaded it from there. Features came to light shortly after the end of the conference that had been locked by Microsoft. Unlocking those features involved fiddling around with the command line which is not to everyone’s liking.

Rafael Rivera has spent a busy few weeks fulfilling the dreams of Windows users everywhere and his latest tool is a magnum opus of sorts: The Blue Badge tool, which unlocks all hidden features in Windows 7 M3:

"Last week, I revealed a weird protection scheme around some unfinished features in Windows 7 (build 6801). I provided a buggy tool to enable the new Taskbar, then teased everyone with other features such as gestures, panning, and Desktop Slideshow. It wasn’t intentional, I just needed some time to rework the unlocking tool, which went faster thanks to some code snippets from my Vize friend surrounding the headaches of TrustedInstaller and PendingFileRenameOperations.

As the dialog indicates, patched files are not backed up. I suggest all users back up, by copying into a temporary folder somewhere, the following files:

Understanding the risks involved in patching core system files, you may download a copy of the tool for x86 or x64 (available tomorrow). Please keep in mind this tool is not affiliated, sponsored, supported by, written by, or endorsed by Microsoft Corporation. Blue Badge is compatible with previously patched (superbar) systems."

Source: Within Windows
Full Article: Here
Tags: Microsoft, Windows 7, Blue Barge, Locked features
Date Posted: 10 November 2008