You probably know now that Windows 8 RT has been released to the public amid much comments alongside the launch of Microsoft’s own Surface tablet. Obviously there’s the usual comments and arguments, and counter-comments and counter-arguments from the press, Apple fanboys, Microsoft fanboys etc. etc.. What has surprised me is how people seem to be … Continue reading Windows RT and Surface – separate the two
Moving your OS to another drive
I got myself a new 120GB SSD drive this week – the 64GB drive I have works fine, but given that I have VS2010, SQL, PES2011 and Starcraft 2 all installed – well, I was down to about 5GB left. I think that a 120GB drive should give me ample space for my OS and … Continue reading Moving your OS to another drive
Zune and Windows 7
What’s this then? I’ve just downloaded the latest version of the Zune software to see what it’s like as a media player / centre. Supposedly it works well with Windows 7 libraries. However, this is what I get when I start up: - Notice how the “Music” bit points to three folders, none of which … Continue reading Zune and Windows 7
Windows 7 Virtual PC & configuring TFS 2010 in a test environment
I recently installed TFS 2010 on my local machine for testing, but after playing around with it, decided that I wanted to try the new Labs feature of TFS plus some of the other stuff. Plus I didn’t want to keep running TFS all the time (and SQL) just in case I decided to do some development. So I downloaded Windows Virtual PC (WVPC) for Windows 7 and installed a version of Windows 7 on it. I then installed TFS 2010 along with SQL Express 2008 and hey presto, working TFS in its own environment. WVPC is pretty good; the only criticism I have with it is that it only emulates a 32 bit CPU (even though I have a 64 bit one). This is a little annoying as I can’t run Windows 2008 R2 through a virtual pc (as it is 64 bit only). However, aside from that, the whole process did not take that long:- Downloading the ISO for Windows 7 off MSDN: 15-20 minutes. Installing on the VPC: about the same. Installing and configuring TFS: 10 minutes The only thing that did take a while was installing SQL Express 2008 Management Studio and then exposing the SQL service to my host machine via Windows Firewall. But it’s all up and running now. I want to try TFS Labs but we’ll see how that goes…
Windows 7 install
I’ve been using – pretty much full time – the release candidate of Windows 7. I finally decided today to install Windows 7 RTM on my PC. As I wanted to install onto the same disk, I decided to use, for the first time ever, the file transfer wizard thing built into Windows 7. I have to say, I’m impressed! It took a fair while to run – I had around 1.5GB to backup/restore – but it was well worth it. You can choose individual folders and areas of the PC to include in the transfer wizard process, at which point it creates an image (compressed – mine got around 50% of the original size) of all the files to transfer. This process took around 15 minutes for me. Then, after installing the Windows 7 cleanly, I installed a couple of apps – Firefox, Windows Live Essentials etc., and then re-ran the transfer wizard. I’m amazed just how well it worked! All my emails and settings for Windows Live Mail. All my blogs in Windows Live Writer All my settings, passwords and extensions from Firefox Profile – including backgrounds, task bar pins etc. Libraries It also includes a nifty little report to tell you which programs were installed so that you can re-install them from the list. All in all, this has saved me lots of time and effort – I’m really glad I used it. Thumbs up to Microsoft on this one!
Fixed Windows 7 Sound Issues
Fixed the main sound driver issue – I downloaded the drivers from VIA which refused to work at first because they do a check on the OS and don’t know what Win 7 is – so I ran the installing in Vista SP2 compatibility mode – hey presto! But now I find another problem, which is latency from any line in sources. So in my case I pipe to output on my Line 6 POD X3 into the Line In of my PC – but there’s a noticeable delay between my striking the strings of the guitar and the sound coming out the speakers – very annoying. Don’t have this in Vista.
ASP .NET Development Server under Vista
If you try running ASP .NET development under Vista, you may find that getting to localhost does not work, although if you replace localhost with 127.0.0.1 it works fine. I read a couple of posts talking about IPv6 and how if you disable it completely in the registry it fixes the problem. I didn’t fancy doing that! I then saw a post to just disable it in the network adapter that you’re using, but that didn’t work – I assume because localhost goes via the loopback adapter. The easiest solution I found was to open the .hosts file in e.g. C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc and then add another : to the start of the last line of the file so that it looks like this: :::1 localhost This fixes the problem – I have no idea what it does though!
Windows 7
Currently testing out the beta of Windows 7. I downloaded the 64-bit install version – a 3gb download, more or less. After one failed burn to a DVD, I finally got it burnt and installed to a spare hard disk (I disconnected my main Vista drive so that it didn’t put a boot menu on the disk). The install was fairly painless – the whole thing took around 20 minutes from booting off the DVD the first time until starting Windows 7 for the first time! I think it restarted three times. The only problem I found was that it did not have a 64-bit driver for my Belkin wireless USB stick, so I had to boot back into Vista to download the driver. I’ve only been using it for a couple of hours but the main things I’ve noticed are: - Taskbar has been redesigned; you now share active windows with shortcuts. Interesting. Also no text on the taskbar icons by default. Media Player has been revamped – the default play screen is much simpler now, and the tabs are all gone. You can get to media library etc. by single-clicking an button on the player. Documents/ Videos/ Pictures etc. in your profile are now also virtual folders in that you point them to other locations and all results are collated in that folder. Nice touch. If I remember correctly, this also syncs up directly with your Media Player library. Window handling in generally has been spiced up – you can dock windows to a side of the desktop just by dragging them there. Will see what else I find in the coming days…
ReadyBoost – stupid, stupid, stupid!
I had an old 256mb USB lying around, plugged it into my PC and discovered that it's ReadyBoost compatible - nice surprise. I decided to buy a nice 2GB ReadyBoost stick to replace it. I bought one stick but discovered that, despite one consumer review stating that it was RB-compatible, my one wasn't. Great. So I bought another one that specifically is designed for ReadyBoost - the DataTraveler 400. Nice stick, and does indeed work with RB. What annoys me is the way that Vista uses ReadyBoost sticks. When you first initialise a ReadyBoost cache, you specify the size of the cache (in my case, ~2GB), and Vista then proceeds to initialise it. For a 2GB cache, this takes a few minutes of hard disk thrashing. The problem that I have is that whenever you turn off your PC and boot up into Vista, the damn thing re-initialises the cache all over again. You can see this using the Reliability and Performance Monitor (check the Disk pane, sorted by the Write column). So every time you boot up, the hard disk thrashes about for a few minutes whilst you can't do anything at all on the PC. Pointless, absolutely pointless. I never noticed this before because my 256 MB stick probably was much quicker to initialise the cache as it was so much smaller. Apparently some people don't have this problem, so it seems like either a bug in Vista (wouldn't be surprised by this) or maybe it's specific to the USB stick? I've tried changing various settings etc. but nothing seems to affect this.
The problem with dual channel memory
A few problems have cropped up on my PC simultaneously, this is the first one… I bought a 2 gig stick for my PC only to discover that the PC wouldn’t boot up with more than 2 sticks in the PC at once! It’s an ASUS M2N – it has 4 DDR2 slots for up to 8GB of RAM. Of course, you would need a 64-bit OS to address more than 4GB at once. I already had 2 sticks at 1GB each, so this new stick would have put me up to 4GB. But no matter what I tried, the board refuses to boot with more than 2 sticks in at a time. I have narrowed the problem down to something called dual-channel architecture. The board has four slots, and thus two RAM channels (2 slots per channel). As long as I only use just one channel at a time i.e. put two RAM sticks on the slots of the same channel, the PC is fine. As soon as I put two sticks on different channels, the PC refuses to POST. So effectively I can never put in more than two sticks of RAM at once, so for time being I am stuck with just 3GB of RAM (2GB + 1GB). I am considering selling the 2x1GB sticks and buying a single 2GB stick, but not sure yet. I’ve also been in contact with ASUS regarding this but so far they’ve not suggested anything that I’ve not yet tried (changing various settings in the BIOS etc.). Lastly – I’ve also noticed that my Memory Speed rating in Vista Performance Index has suddenly dropped from a 5.9 to a 5.2!! I don’t know why. I even put the original memory sticks back into the PC and it made no difference. Weird.
The Cockney Coder 