Window 7’s built-in Weather gadget defaults to showing weather for “New York, NY”:

An aside: The default of “Cupertino, CA” on Macs is a cute in-jokes for employees and fanatics, but aren’t there statistically better choices for US retail, like, say, the most populated US metro area? Windows 7 has fixed a ton of such duh-moment details. On Windows Vista, yep, it was “Redmond, WA.”

When we go to set our actual location, we see a disabled “Find location automatically” option:

Searching for “location” in the Start Menu, we find the “Location and Other Sensors’” control panel, and find what’s wrong… captain, sensors are offline!

So, can I install a sensor?

Yep.

Well, maybe you can. I can’t.

A Microsoft partner, JW Secure, built a software prototype location sensor using IP address to get estimated location.  But driver developers are the audience for this prototype… I’m no driver developer. I mean, I can sling an INF file, but there’d have to be an INF file provided to sling. I’d love to try this out as a consumer: if you can get LaptopLoJack working as a Windows 7 location sensor, please let me know. I got this far:

By fall there should be retail PCs that have all sorts of sensors, from real GPS, to laptops with 3G cards that provide cell-ID based location, to software sensors like this prototype in cheaper PCs. No INF slinging required.