It seems that both Windows and the AMD motherboard aren’t too keen on the two video cards I put in my new system. Although they are both recognized and the drivers were loaded, the second card was causing some problems and the machine would repeatedly freeze. The mouse would still move, but nothing would respond when you clicked on it. After dozens of reboots and threats of sending the machine back to Dell (in pieces) or at least out the window, I took a moment to pause and reflect on the situation. I’m not sure where my happy place is, but I was searching for it.

I eventually turned off the second video card through Device Manager and low and behold the problem went away. (That’s what you get for thinking!) Funny, this same config worked perfectly under Windows XP and a Dell Dimension, both of which are at least 5 years old. But alas, the modern hardware and modern OS soils itself and can’t make it work.

Disappointing to be sure, but at least I have two monitors working and the stupid thing isn’t locking up all the time. I’ll have to figure out how to get that card back up and running. I do have the drivers loaded for both cards, but there might be a BIOS setting I need to check. You know me, I just put both cards in there and turned the thing on. Why would I bother to check any settings? Manual? What manual?

I pressed on and got quite a few apps reinstalled, and with the video issue worked out the machine runs very well. Apps load very quickly although every time there was a slight hesitation I thought the machine had lost its mind again. But I have my photo and video apps back in place as well as the insanely bloated Office 2007.

It’s funny how the only 64bit app I have is Lightroom. It’s still a 32bit world out there. Although seriously, is a 64bit version of Word even necessary? Is copy and paste really going to be noticeably faster?

I also spent a ton of time rooting through old directories deleting files I haven’t touched since 2004. I’m pretty sure that HMTL 1.0 tutorial isn’t going to do me much good these days. I found old apps and zip files I didn’t even think I had. Who knows what else I’m going to find?

There’s still a long way to go before I feel comfortable with this machine. Codecs are still missing and there’s all those little apps you forget about until you need them. But, at the least the machine is running and I got my own stupidity in check. At least for now.

What used to be a simple install of VPC additions to get copy/paste and other functionality to work is now multiple steps and has to be done for each VM you decide to work with. Maybe I wouldn’t have to do this if I built the images from scratch, but I don’t see a reason not to use my existing VMs. And no , I can’t just use the XP mode, I need a custom built VM. As stupid as it sounds I need IE6.

So here’s my latest frustration with Windows 7 and trying to get something simple to work.

Even though VPC 2007 doesn’t need it, Windows 7 requires hardware virtualization. That was annoying since you have to download a separate tool to get Windows to tell you it needs to be turned on. Clearly putting it into the actual installer escaped their minds. This kind of stupidity is a reason not to upgrade to Win7.

But moving on…

We had a slew of problems getting our old VMs to load correctly under Win7. We kept getting errors that Win7 couldn’t write to the disk even though we could copy files into all the directories we listed in the UI. This happened on two machines with identical hardware. On a third machine (mine) we didn’t run into that problem. That issue still exists, we just moved forward using different hardware.

The VMs actually loaded correctly on my machine and surprisingly started without incident. I thought we were in the clear. I was so terribly mistaken. Starting them is one thing, using them is another.

You need to install the new Virtual PC Integration Features for Windows 7. That’s no problem, I expected that. But it’s not quite that simple.

Here’s what I ended up doing…

Upgrade the Integration Features and reboot

The next time the machine comes up, it asks to install them again (did I miss an option somewhere?)

After the 2nd install don’t reboot, there is a little dialog box saying you need to go to website to download yet more components. (Maybe I missed it the first time, but I’ve since done it again and haven’t seen it at the end of the first install).

Download this RDP feature and reboot again.

Funny thing, after doing all this you don’t actually have the full functionality of Win7 VPC. Nothing is enabled yet. I find this all very annoying and very much the reverse of VPC 2007.

You have to enable the Integration Features and that means you have to be using a machine which has a username and password. This isn’t how I set up my machine since it’s a test box. I don’t want to have to mess with password in this environment. So you have to add a password for your sandbox environment and then you can actually use the copy and paste functions. Good Lord.

Finally, make sure you actually save the VM with these new settings in place or else you’ll have to do it all over again (which happened to me). None of this is tied to VPC, it’s all a part of the VM itself.

I’m sorry, but this is a hell of a lot of work for something that used to work without issue in the previous Virtual PC version. For VPC 2007 it was just install the extensions and everything worked. You could resize the window, copy and paste, and move between the host and guest machine. Now, there’s just too many damn hoops. Windows 7 Virtual PC is NOT better than the previous version.

So you could go through all that mess

OR

You could follow the steps in this article (make sure to read the comments for some clarifications on what to remove) to get rid of Win 7 VPC and install VPC 2007 onto Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/08/19/running-virtual-pc-2007-on-windows-7.aspx

I suppose the best course of action is to make a copy of the VHD file before tinkering with it, since I am damn sure once you save it with these changes there is no way in hell it will open in VPC 2007 again.

This is a whole lot of bullshit to get some USB support.

And we only have this working on one machine, two out of the three machines can’t load the previous VHD files. 66% failure rate, nice.

I upgraded my machine to Windows 7 and I have to say I am completely underwhelmed by it. Based on all the hype I was expecting bells and whistles, clowns and balloons. From where I sit, Windows 7 is the same as Vista with all those same annoying dialogs and poor design issues. Since it’s nearly 2010 the fact you can’t stretch the taskbar across multiple monitors is, well, stupid. Why is it Windows can’t actually open an ISO file? I believe I have more cause to open it to see the files than I do to burn it to a disc. And in what year will MS actually make a Windows Explorer that’s actually worth using? Yet again, the built-in file manager is pitiful!

Just for the record, breadcrumbs really aren’t that cool.

Maybe Win 7 is better with resources and memory management. Right now I can’t say its better at rendering the desktop. Maybe my videocard is weak, but it’s just a desktop I shouldn’t have to have a gaming card just to render some icons on it.

So you may ask if I don’t like it why did I upgrade? Well, after being stuck on other bastard child of the operating system world, Window XP 64-bit, I just couldn’t stand it anymore and even the problematic Win 7 seemed like Nirvana comparatively. Nothing runs on XP64 and it was abandoned right after launch, just like that troubled teen Windows Me. Apps complain relentlessly that they aren’t compatible and finding 64-bit drivers for XP is like finding an honest politician, they just don’t exist.

The only bright spot so far has been the setup, which I will admit is very impressive. It was very quick and all the components were recognized. Of course installing 300+MB of patches right after install was less than thrilling, especially since Win 7 has only been out two months, but I would rather have the patches than my ass hanging out on the web for all to see.

It took less than half the business day to install the OS and reinstall all the apps. That alone is pretty striking. It’s still Vista, but that’s a step up from where I’ve been. However, there is no way this OS is worth the $150 upgrade price.

Right now I’m using it to copy 250+GB of pictures to a secondary location. Using normal Windows it would copy one file at a time. With RichCopy it copies three at a time. It’s moving right along to try and make sure I don’t lose any more information because of the chaos Western Digital has caused.

If you haven’t looked into RichCopy it’s worth investigating. It’s a free tool that can speed up the copy process and be used as a sync tool as well since it does a file compare before taking action. Plus, it’s free. Again, this should be part of Windows and ironically it’s written by Microsoft, or at least a developer within Microsoft.

If you want to learn more you can read the article about it here:
Utility Spotlight – RichCopy
Or if you want to go for broke and just download it, click here:

RichCopy is a free utility that comes to us from Ken Tamaru of Microsoft. The tool was first developed in 2001 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with evolving needs. Trust me when I tell you, this is the answer to all your file copying needs. What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool. That means that rather than copying one file at a time in serial order, RichCopy can open multiple threads simultaneously, allowing many files to be copied in parallel and cutting the total time required to complete the operation several times over. You can also pause and resume file copy operations, so if you lose network connectivity at any point, you can just pick up where you left off.

Now it’s not like the drive has been pleading for help for weeks and I’ve just turned a blind eye to the situation. The drive literally started throwing errors a few hours ago and now it’s unreadable by Windows. Plus, I got the drive in October 2007 so the damn thing is just barely past two years old. Additionally I haven’t been using that machine very much this past year so the drive quite literally has only a few hours of actual use on it.

To put it bluntly I’m f@$king furious with Western Digital right now. The odds of two drives failing that close together are astronomical, but yet they did. And I can only count my blessings for getting a new drive and copying the files over before the other piece of $hit failed tonight. I was right on the cusp of losing four years worth of digital photos. Every single picture I’ve taken is on those drives. I thought a mirror would be the most practical way of having a backup. In this case it actually did work, but the backup is only as good as the drives themselves and from where I sit Western Digital drives are pieces of junk and can’t be trusted.

Suffice it to say that is the last Western Digital drive I’m ever going to buy and I will never recommend one to anyone ever again. Had the drives been five or six years old with thousands of hours on them this might make sense. But they’re not. Two years old and minimum usage hardly explains what’s happened.

I’m running a check on the drive that Windows can still partially access, although I’m not sure why since I can’t trust the drive and won’t ever put anything important on it. They’re nothing more than fancy paperweights with pretty blue and green flashing buttons on them.

As I write this I’m copying my files to a non Western Digital drive so I will once again have two copies. I really can’t believe these two pieces of crap failed this close together. Maybe the internal drives are better, but I’m never getting a WD MyBook or another version ever again. Having a mirror of my images definitely saved me, but this goes to show you your backups are only as good as the drives they sit on.

Western Digital, you suck.

Replacing the main drive is always filled with excitement and frustration. Soon, there will be tons of space to play around in and a place to store everything, but you have to wipe the slate clean and reinstall everything. It’s the reinstall part that is the drudgery; making sure you have everything you need so when the old drive comes out you don’t smack yourself in the forehead because you forgot the serial number to your graphics program or you forgot to grab the password to one of your online accounts.

So what do you need to do in order to go into summer with more space than you know what do with – at least for the first couple of months? First off, buy the biggest drive you can get your hands on. With today’s prices and the size of tomorrow applications I wouldn’t get anything less than 1TB. In fact, I bought 1.5TB just to give myself some room to work. 2TB drives are falling in price, at a little over $250 that is plenty of space to work with and you shouldn’t need to worry about any more drive upgrades until you get a new machine.

Getting Started

Before you buy the new drive you need to prep your old one. In the excitement of getting the new drive installed and putting on the OS and new apps we can sometimes forget the simple things – make backups.

You need to take the time to make note of what applications you have installed, and of those, which ones are you really using. I know I install dozens of apps just to check them out and then never go back and remove them. Now is a good time to take stock of what’s really important. If you have applications that need to be deactivated, like Photoshop, you should go through that process so you can install them on your new drive without error or making calls to technical support.

Make Backups

Next, you need to backup the important data. And not just the files in My Documents, but other important files like your PST or other mail database file, your banking files, Firefox and Internet Explorer bookmarks, passwords to your online accounts, blog posts, etc. This stuff is stored all over your drive so you need to spend some time gathering it all up so that when the new OS comes up you are reading to reinstall and get back to work. I was completely lost without my Outlook PST file and nickname cache. I had no email and no email addresses. It was a scary time to be sure.

But here is the dilemma, where do you store all this data since you don’t have the new drive yet? A couple of choices come to mind depending on how much information we’re talking about. You can always write to a DVD until the new drive is in. 8GB thumbdrives are quite cheap and can store your backup. Or you might need to invest in an external drive to hold your worldly possessions until the upgrade is complete. I already have a couple of external drives which I use for storing my photos so I simply made an image of the entire drive and stored it there until the new drive was in.

Now would be a good time to talk about disk cloning. Unlike a backup, a clone of a drive is an exact duplicate of the entire drive. This includes the OS, the registry, and other system related files. You can use programs like O&O DiskImage or Acronis True Image to make an exact duplicate of the drive which you can then mount as though it were still installed and get access to all your files. My personal recommendation is to get two external hard drives since you should use them for storing your photos anyway and clone the original system drive to one of them. Then after you have the new OS installed you can mount that image and act like the original drive never left.

Time to Download

You will also need to take the time to download your device drivers. If you skip this part, things can get really ugly. Make sure you get the drivers for your network card, video, audio, scanner, printer and anything else you may need. It’s best to do this while everything is still connected so you can get the exact model number. Plus, there is nothing worse than starting a new OS and not having the network drivers at hand and forgetting what card is in there.

It would also be wise to download the latest service pack so you can update the machine as soon as the install is done. For the adventurous types you could use Nlite and slipstream the latest service pack into the install. Either way, make sure to have it handy.

With the prep work done and CD keys and serial numbers copied it’s time to satisfy that hard drive lust and get a brand new install of Windows in place. Take the old hard drive and replace it with the new one. I already had a large secondary drive so I didn’t use the old drive as storage. Depending on the size it might make a useful backup drive.

A Clean Slate

Of course the first thing to do is to install the OS. I still prefer Windows XP so that’s the route I went. If you have a card reader in your machine Windows may try and install itself as drive F: or later. If this happens (and it did to me), disconnect the card reader and start the install over again. Windows should be on drive C:\, it’s just better that way.

Whenever I get a new drive I format it completely the first time, this way Windows can map out any bad sectors on the drive. It can take a few hours for a 1.5TB drive to complete, but I would rather get it out of the way.

Patch and Update

Get Windows installed and apply your service pack. For the sake of security you may want to keep the machine disconnected from the network until the latest service pack is installed. Once that update is finished you will want to install your network drivers and head to the Windows Update site. Depending on how things stand it could take quite a while to download and install the latest updates. But go ahead and do it now.

Once your machine is patched it’s time to install the other drivers. Get your video set to the right resolution and get your other devices online. Before you install your other applications I would recommend installing your anti-virus and firewall software. Make sure you have the latest updates for those as well.

Now you have a clean and fast install of Windows (embrace it because it’s all downhill from here). If you followed my previous advice about cloning software, this is the point where I would make a baseline image of my machine. This way if anything bad happens going forward you always have a clean image to go back to. And it takes a lot less time.

All new apps

This is where the fun begins and you reinstall all the apps you use the most. This will probably be the longest part of the process. As I mentioned I only installed about half my apps since I realized I wasn’t actually using all of them anymore. What gets installed will be different for each person, but since you wrote down all your CD keys and serials it should go pretty smoothly. Once all the apps are installed then it’s time to copy over all their respective date files, like PST files for Outlook, bookmarks, and other documents you will need in order to use your software. You can use the original drive if you made it a backup drive, you can use the image if you went that route or you can use the DVD or thumbdrive which holds all your data files.

Final Cleaup

You should now have a ton of room to work with an faster running apps since you don’t have tons of things running when it starts up. Since you have been installing software and extracting files you probably should take the time to clean out the Windows temp directory since it is probably loaded with setup files.

With everything clean and new it’s probably a good time to defrag the drive for the first time just to get everything aligned.

Again, since I’m using the cloning software, I make another image of my drive after I have all my apps installed. This is my baseline with applications. If something goes wrong I can at least get back to a useable OS in no time at all. This is just my personal preference, your mileage may vary.

In reality it may take a full day just to get Windows installed and updated, especially if you do a complete format of the drive. It may take another day or so to reinstall your apps and put everything back in place. And you may also find you need install an program here and there as you begin using your machine and get back into your routine. While that may make you hedge at replacing the drive, the thrill of having a faster running Windows and vast amounts of hard drive space are all worth it! It may seem like a lot but with just a little planning it will go very smoothly and at the end of the weekend you will have a new machine that is performing better than it has in years.

While not every step is a charmer and not every app has my interest, there are plenty that do. I’ve already got the essentials like Notepad++ and AnyDVD, but some new ones like Digsby, and Media Player Classic have been a welcome addition. I still think there is some life left in this machine and these two articles might help boost that.

The 32 Totally Essential (and Free) Apps for Every New PC
21 Essential Steps to Make Your PC Better/Faster/Stronger

Just getting Windows installed and updating it correctly now takes the better part of a day. All those damn Windows Updates will keep you busy for hours and trying to sift through which are necessary is actually quite annoying.

But once you get that behind you then comes the fun part of putting all the apps back on. And that previously has been my downfall. Last time I wiped the slate clean I went headlong installing every app I could get my hands on and pretty soon the machine was just as clogged and a slow as it ever was. I downloaded apps and files “just to check them out” and never got rid of them. Now I have dozens of gigs worth of junk that needs to be deleted and files scattered all over the place with no structure whatsoever.

This time I’m doing it differently. I’m trying to bring order to the chaos that are my files. Old versions of apps and test files have all been trashed. Only tried and true apps are getting installed. And so far it’s been working pretty well. The machine is still quite fast on a restart and only 4 apps launch at startup. I didn’t realize just how much of a mess my previous install was until I took a step back to see which programs I was actually running on a daily or weekly basis.

As it turns out I’m only using Word, Outlook, OneNote, Firefox, Live Writer, Notepad++, Irfanview and 7zip on a daily basis. When it comes to a weekly basis it’s only DxO, JAlbum, Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Money. So clearly my palate of apps is pretty small which means I need to keep with my minimalist approach to software. Unless I plan to use it more than once I probably don’t need to install it. I do plan on getting VirtualPC loaded back up so I can test out apps without interfering with my regular OS. Probably should have been doing that all along.

I think I’m just about done installing apps, but there’s still plenty of files to move around and delete. I do have to say that O&O DiskImage has been invaluable during this process. I imaged the drive before I took it out and now I can load that image as a virtual hard drive and copy my files off it as I need them. Very handy.

And with this latest rebuild I brought all my drives online, which now gives me a total of 4.5TB of online storage. I should now have more than enough space to organize this mess and sort out where things belong.

I bought 2 4GB bundles from TigerDirect. Dell doesn’t give you a whole lot of room to work with inside their cases, but after some slight contortions the memory was in and I was ready to load applications with reckless abandon.

Of course I was immediately hit with the ridiculous 4GB barrier of Windows which, no matter what you do, will ALWAYS show less than 4GB of memory. On my generic machine with no system upgrades I get 3.6GB. On my main machine with dual video cards I get 2.6GB. I have to say I don’t buy the line MS is feeding us all about why this happens. If the system really is holding off memory for peripherals and system devices then the total memory should always be incorrect, but with anything less than 4 it’s perfectly fine. I think this is just a case of some really bad coding and MS never thinking people would ever get that much memory in their machines before they got the next OS out the door.

Stupid technicalities aside, both machines are performing quite a bit better. They have quite a bit more room to work with and they should be able to cache a ton. It’s a darn shame that memory is so damn cheap but that our hardware and operating systems really can’t take advantage of it. This new generation of 64-bit processors will eventually force us all to a new platform, but personally, I don’t see myself upgrading hardware for at least another year. These 32-bit XP systems may be getting a little long in the tooth, but I better see some kick ass features make their way into Windows 7 or else and upgrade will be even longer in coming. I’m not willing to go 64-bit with the likes of Vista or a knock off little brother in the form of Windows 7. Let’s hope Microsoft gets back on track and focuses on actually making an OS rather than building a platform to make pretty widgets.

But anyway, 4GB is cool, I highly recommend it!

But over the Christmas break I put together a new server, using a more powerful even though somewhat dated machine. The original machine is a PIII 700mhz with a gig of ram.

Go ahead and laugh. The machine was kick ass back in 2000 when I built the thing. Dual processors and 1GB of ram was a rarity in those days. Now cellphones and DVD players have as much processing power.

I have leftover machine parts all over the place, so it was easy to bring up another machine. I chose an Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz machine as my new server. Go ahead and laugh again, but I’m not trying to build some crazy scalable datacenter used by hundreds of people. I just want a blog and a place to host images, so this will be more than adequate.

Since the machine is EIDE, (you remember that format right?) I have several extra drives which I can use with it. The boot drive is 80GB and I gave it a backup drive of 120GB. And since I can buy old EIDE drives for the cost of gum, I have plenty of hardware for this rig.

It was light on the memory so I ordered up 2GB of ram which just arrived last night. I spent the break installing Windows 2003 Server Web Edition (same as the current server) and transferring everything over.

Windows 2003 is already several years old so it would be cool to use Windows 2008, but since I don’t actually have Windows 2008 yet I didn’t use it. And since the hardware I’m using is closer to 2003 vintage it seemed a better idea to match up the hardware with the OS. No reason to get the sexy new OS and put on old hardware. That would be like sticking a hot bikini model in a Pinto. You might be able to make that word, but what are you going to get out of the deal?

While it may not be uber powerful with quad or even dual cores, I should get at least two years worth of service out of this rascal before I feel the need to upgrade again. The server has actually been running or a couple days now and it looks like things are going pretty well. And by well I mean nothing has crashed.

2009 will kick off with a brand new server that has 4 times the power of the original machine. It may be old and certainly won’t raise any eyebrows for it’s processing power, it will keep things running along very nicely. And I did all of this with about 1 minute of downtime as I switched the network cables over and put the new ram in last night. Didn’t notice anything did ya? I’m stealthy like that!