Deliberations from Dave

Replacing the Windows 7 Network Indicator

One of the things missing from Windows 7 is the network activity indicator in the system tray. It's been replaced with a static icon, supposedly to reduce power consumption on laptops and reduce visual clutter.

I'm not sure I believe the first reason, and the second is invalid because it could be left disabled as it was by default in Windows Vista.

Nevertheless, I've written a tiny .NET replacement for the icon. It's not identical - it's more visual than the original icons. It's also configurable so that the two indicators can show disk or disk activity instead of the network, or show error-type conditions - for example, show the light if the CPU is running at more than 95%.

The download is attached to this post - it's a small MSI. It's really an early beta version, but seems to run OK on my Windows 7 workstation and on the Vista development workstation I built it on.

Please post any bugs in the comments!

VMWare Workstation and Windows 7

I've been having weird connectivity issues with Windows 7 and VMWare Workstation 6.5.2. None of the networking "really" worked, even in bridged mode - nslookup worked, ping worked, but anything using TCP did not (http, ftp and so forth).

Quick Fix for Bridge mode at least: An Inbound firewall rule that permits the VMWare worker application to send and receive all traffic.

Open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Right-click on Inbound Rules and choose New Rule:

Ensure Create a Program Rule is selected , and click Next:

Enter the path to the VMWare worker process, vmware-vmx.exe. I'm running Windows 7 x64, so for me it was C:\Program Files (x86)\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe - yours may be different;  then click Next:

Accept the default values for the Action and Profile pages, and click Next:

Enter a name and an optional description for the rule, and click Finish:

Locate the rule, right-click it and choose Properties. Select the Advanced tab and change the Edge Traversal setting to Allow Edge Traversal:

That's it - networking should work a lot better now.