OS/Application Installation & Maintenance

So far USB 3.0 leaves a lot to be desired

Kevin Shyr — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:49:05 GMT

I now have a few docking station for my SATA drives that's hooked on to USB 3.0 PCI Express cards. I also have a laptop with 2 USB 3.0 ports. The straight up transfer speed is good, 86 mbps versus 20 mbps, my virtual PC now runs very well with USB drives. However, using those devices for file storage has not been a very good experience so far. With the old USB 2.0 drives, I could create multiple "move" instances between drives. The speed slows down, but I could initial some moves and leave the computer for a while. With USB 3.0, if I initial a second file move between the drive that are currently being moved, the drive drops off and corrupts the files. I thought it was the drivers, but my 2 desktops and my laptop all are doing the same thing.

For now, I am moving back to USB 2.0 when I need to move files, and only use USB 3.0 when I need something fast straight up. I'm definitely looking forward to new computers with USB 3.0 built in natively and will try other docking stations other than Vantec. However, my HP portable USB 3.0 drive is doing the same thing, so I'm not sure anything would help at this point.

I guess the first thing to do is to look through all the support page on Vantec, HP, Dell, and Gateway.

Thanks to my wife for a dream machine

Kevin Shyr — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:39:17 GMT

2 months ago I learned that there is going to be a Windows Azure Boot Camp, free, 2-day, code-intensive. The only catch at the time for me was that I didn't have a laptop, a requirement for this camp.

Thanks for my beautiful and tolerant wife, we provisioned and I got my dream machine. Waited and shopped for a long time to get a reasonable price, but I got the following spec:

8GB ram
Necessary for me to run my virtual environments
i-5 4-Core CPU
Want 4-core for virtual environments, but not a fan of hyper-threading, so no i-7
2 USB 3.0 ports
Hook up to my USB 3.0 portable external drive, it's like having a SATA drive. My virtual machines are flying.
dedicated video card
Free up system resources.

Now I am enjoying this Boot Camp and I got my DEV environments all set up and portable. I'm one happy man!

Windows Virtual PC vs. Hyper-V Virtual Machines vs. Windows Virtual PC after XPMode installation Advantages and Disadvantages

Kevin Shyr — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:29:24 GMT

Hyper-V Virtual Machines

Advantage:

64-bit support
dynamic memory allocation
multi-core CPU
Can install Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and later

Disadvantage:

Can't get sound to work on those machines yet
[Updated 2011-05-05] This is disappointing, but I guess it fits most people's requirement as most people don't use Hyper-V for personal development environment. Guess I'll just have to set up those machines for remote connect.
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/09/14/enabling-sound-on-hyper-v.aspx
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-troubleshooting-enabling-audio-over-rdp.aspx
Trying to add an new wireless adapter to create a new virtual network is a pain.

Windows Virtual PC after XPMode installation

Advantage:

USB connection
Direct access to all host drives

Disadvantage:

Not really intuitive management UI at first
No 64-bit support
No Windows 7

Regular Virtual PC

Advantage:

Simple and quick to get started
Virtual hard drive created here has the least problem getting migrated into other setup.

Disadvantage:

Not scalable at runtime
No 64-bit support
No windows 7 support

A network card did not show up in the Virtual PC networking adapter settings...

Kevin Shyr — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:43:37 GMT

This post saved my life: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windows_vpc/archive/2009/12/07/networking-in-windows-virtual-pc.aspx

Hitting a strange Vista Ultimate install issue

Kevin Shyr — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:58:53 GMT

[Update 2010-11-03]

This is really strange as I can restore the Vista Home Premium onto that machine and it works. Also, I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate and it works fine, too.

The curiosity will probably prompt me to try installing it again, but downloading the images from TechNet is taking me 3 days so far. ;)

Thanks, AreyouSerious, I'll try your suggestion, too.

[Original Post]

I'm hitting a really strange Vista Ultimate install issue. After the installation, the Windows Update cannot find any updates or extras, and Security Essentials cannot install with an installation error.

ISO
- TechNet
- MSDN
Burned using
- Windows 7 built in software
- Active ISO burner

Things I should try next

Different computer to burn ISO image
Different version of Vista

Just wondering if anybody else hit this error as well.

Switching my legacy desktop back to Windows XP from Windows 7

Kevin Shyr — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:47:17 GMT

I was happy with Windows 7 at the beginning, until I started to add in the peripherals. Windows 7 was never able to recognize any of my PCI video card (I know, I know, we should be in the DVI age).

Anyway, I went through another 4 days of trouble setting my computer up with dual monitor in XP (also did a bunch of other things like getting rid of my sound card and taking the computer off RAID.

Kind of feel stupid to put the computer on RAID in the first place because now I can have 2 drives:

double the page files
program seems to run faster
Microsoft Sync toy 2.1 takes care of my backup needs (Thank god they solved the network drive issue)

As of last night, the system is running beautifully. I still have a laptop with Windows 7, but even that is in dual boot mode.

Control Panel display as a menu does not work upon initial install of a Windows 2008 R2 server

Kevin Shyr — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:37:47 GMT

I've seen this a couple of times now. Upon initial installation of a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, the control panel is a button. But if you go to the task bar property >> Start Menu tab >> Customize, you will see the option is "Display as a menu". Click "Display as a link" and press OK, then come back to the same area and select "Display as a menu" will solve the problem.

Virtual PC BIOS password protection is a MOO point

Kevin Shyr — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:03:43 GMT

Sometimes what Joey said made sense. Need some recollection of comedy to cheer me up because I'm pretty bummed out right now.

For a while, I've been "protecting" my virtual PC by putting a password on the Virtual PC's BIOS.

Just so happens that I moved the vhd to another location without moving the vmc file with it. Created another vmc, and the VPC started without asking me password.

Lamenting on all the time I've wasted!

Bring back icons in system tray notification area, like the Safely Remove Hardware and the Display Link Manager icon

Kevin Shyr — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:27:56 GMT

I had this problem before on "Safely Remove Hardware" icon disappearing. I was able to use this method to access the dialogue box:

Start -> Run -> RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Right now trying to solve the problem where my USB display adapter is not working and not showing icon. But I think this might be a problem with the USB ports configuration instead of icon not showing up in System Tray.

Partition Wizard probably saved me at least 20 hours worth of work!

Kevin Shyr — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:59:08 GMT

I had my work laptop set up as dual boot to 80G for Windows 7 and 40G for Windows XP. As time went by, I had to install all the applications in Windows XP as well, and it was quickly eating away the space.

With Windows 7, I was able to use Disk Management and do a "Shrink Volume" to get 15G of space unallocated. But when I tried to extend Windows XP partition, I found out I didn't have that option. I followed this post (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2670-partition-volume-extend.html) and tried Method 2 and it didn't work. So as I read more into this post, I found that I had the same issue as ccchan.

I followed Dave76's advice and tried Partition Wizard, and voila! I got the space I need.

Partition Wizard: http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html