Restore XP bootloader after trying Windows 7 July 23, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology, Science and Technology.Tags: bootloader, dual boot, easybcd, fixmbr, vista, windows 7, xp
add a comment
If you have installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate in dual boot alongside Windows XP, you may eventually for whatever reason wish to remove Windows 7. Today that is exactly what I had to do. First I will tell you what did not work:
What did not work was what may be considered the “usual” way to get rid of the second OS. I began by deleting my Windows 7 partition. The Windows XP install CD is capable of this, but I used a GParted Live CD. GParted is a free Linux based utility that allows not only adding and removing partitions, but resizing as well. I opted to expand the Windows XP partition to fill the entire hard drive.
With Windows 7 gone, I rebooted the machine off the Windows XP CD. When prompted, selected “R” to enter the Recovery Console and ran the fixmbr command to rewrite the boot sector.
Now here’s what happened…I rebooted and found myself facing the Windows 7 bootloader despite the fact that Windows 7 no longer resided on that system. I ran a search on Google and found that I was not alone in XP failing to restore its bootloader after a Windows 7 – and apparently sometimes Windows Vista – removal. I could still boot into XP by selecting “Earlier version of Windows” from the boot menu, but who wants to do that?
I would strongly recommend a small, free Windows utility called EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies. Once installed all you need to do is click on “Manage Bootloader”, select “Uninstall the Vista Bootloader” and click on “WriteMBR”. That’s it! The Windows 7 (or Vista) bootloader will be removed and you will be operating exactly as you were before dual booting.
Some thoughts on Windows 7 July 6, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology.Tags: family pack, license, microsoft, preview pane, touchpad, windows, windows 7
add a comment
I have been playing around a bit with the Windows 7 Release Candidate, particularly at work where it resides on a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP Professional. Lately I have been using that laptop a bit and I must say that I am loving this OS.
Working in a live environment
As a member of a Windows 2003 domain, Windows 7 sometimes displays a little exclamation mark on the system tray’s network icon, and the Network and Sharing Center indicates that there is no internet connection despite being able to connect to the web using both IE8 and Firefox 3.5. For the most part this remains little more than a bug that does not really impact any functionality and I suspect to be due to our proxy settings. That said, it’s a Microsoft network through and through, so as far as I am concerned this should not be happening at all.
Windows 7 is of course able to access the file server without issue, and Symantec Endpoint installed over the network just as well as with a Vista or XP client. All software thus far has worked flawlessly including a legacy 16-bit application. The laptop suspends upon snapping the lid about as fast as the XP installation on the same system and resumes to the welcome screen instantly upon re-opening the lid.
One feature that I liked is the fact that the screen dims after a period of inactivity while on battery power. I have seen this feature before on Ubuntu Linux but it is a newcomer to the Windows world, at least as a native feature of the OS. This is a good way to conserve battery charge before enough time has elapsed to shut off the display entirely.
Laptop Touchpad
The most significant annoyance I had with the laptop installation of Windows 7 RC was the loss of the touchpad’s scrolling functionality. Windows 7 detected the touchpad as simply a PS/2 mouse. My advice is to forget the websites that suggest downloading the drivers from Synaptics’ website. You won’t break your touchpad but getting back your scrolling capabilities is strictly hit or miss. I suggest installing the Vista touchpad drivers for your laptop – it worked perfectly for me.
Preview Pane
One feature I am especially impressed with is the preview pane. At first I didn’t like the new right-side orientation of the preview pane, but once I got accustomed to scrolling through photos up/down instead of left/right it was like second nature. What excited me though is the ability to preview many different types of documents simply by selecting the icon in explorer. I have used this to preview not only images but text files, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets and even a C source file. I have included a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet being previewed in this manner.
Windows 7 Preview Pane - Excel spreadsheet
Family Pack
I have encountered in my readings that Microsoft may be offering “Family Pack” for Windows 7. It turns out there is some wording in the Microsoft Software License Terms for Windows 7 that suggests Microsoft may be offering a Windows 7 package that permits installation on up to three (3) computers in the same household. I wonder what the pricing may be like on an offer such as that? It does make sense for Microsoft to pursue this sort of arrangement as there are now a great deal of households with multiple personal computers. I ran across this at CNET News’ Beyond Binary by Ina Fried which in turn referenced Kristian Kenny’s Digital Life.
Conclusion
The more I use Windows 7 is the more I am finding it to be everything Vista should have been. It is just as sleek as Vista, but it is faster, just as stable as 2000, XP and Vista were before it and well thought out. It is not flawless, but it is still quite good especially considering that while the Release Candidate is close to the finished product, it is not the final build.
Id10t errors June 29, 2009
Posted by Emir in Humour, Information Technology.Tags: funny, id10t, technology, user error
add a comment
Working in the field of IT, or even just as someone who knows something about how to flip a switch, you are going to be dealing with those who are not as well versed in “technology”.
I am sure many of us such “tech savy” people can relate to being the go-to guy/gal for anything that plugs into an electrical socket. Sometimes however, the problems people run into have nothing to do with some complicated thigamabob.
I remember for example once being called by a rather nervous sounding lady who said her computer had suddenly tripped off and was not coming back on. Truth be told, she had somehow stretched out and had her high-heel make contact with the little switch on the power strip from which her “personal confuser” had been feeding.
Problems with forgetting about the power button and expecting everything to work while various cables such as power and video are disconnected are common. These occurrences are often accompanied by rants and raves followed by awkward silence once the situation is addressed.
When I get these sorts of user errors I of course have to be nice about it, and professional especially at work, but deep down inside I feel like Roy from episode one of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd. I just want to yell out, “I’m sorry, are you from the past???”
You may be wondering what inspired this entry so I’ll be nice and tell you. Besides; I’d probably spontaneously combust and burn to a cinder if I didn’t. It goes like this: Tonight a certain family figure called me because the keyboard of the computer being used was not working. I hit some keys, looked for a Num Lock or Caps Lock light and truly, it was dead. I then took a gander at the back of the system and immediately saw the problem. To miss it would be like ignoring a large elephant dance about in a pink tutu and earrings on the hood of my car. In an effort to connect another device, the keyboard’s USB connector had been pulled out and then pushed back in. The only thing was that the keyboard plug didn’t go back into a USB port. It was instead jabbed into the pins of the serial port.
Oh boy.
Windows 7 RC June 28, 2009
Posted by Emir in Information Technology.Tags: microsoft, os, windows, windows 7
1 comment so far
Microsoft Windows 7
Those of you who follow the IT industry would probably know by now that Microsoft is set to release Windows 7 later this year; October 22nd to be exact. For those not in the know, Windows 7 is the followup to the heavily criticized Windows Vista. Now while I am going to be speaking fairly well of 7, do not think of it as a major overhaul of Windows. As far as version numbers go, Vista is Windows 6.0 while 7 is in fact Windows 6.1. What this means is it is a considerable update of the 6.0 (Vista) Operating System but not a full overhaul in the way Vista was to XP. In one sense though, it is fitting to name the OS Windows 7 after the stigma associated with Vista following its performance issues on older hardware.
Now, the really exciting news here is that a while back Microsoft made the Windows 7 Beta publicly available, and now more recently they have also made the Release Candidate available to the public. I downloaded it as soon as it became available on Microsoft’s website but it was not until this week that I had a chance to install. If you are interested, the Release Candidate is available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx complete with activation for up to three (3) computers valid till June 10, 2009.
Test Systems
I installed Windows 7 RC on two different machines; one at home and one at work. At home I installed it on my older PC; a home brewed AMD Athlon 64 system with 1 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 6200 video card. At work I installed it to a brand new Dell Latitude E5500 laptop with Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM and Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics. Both systems were set up in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP and Windows 7 on the same hard drive.
First impressions: The good
As with Vista, Windows 7 uses an image based installer. That is, you select (or create) the partitition you intend to install to, enter a few bits of information and in just a few minutes the entire operating system is installed. On both systems most drivers had been installed with the Windows setup.
The new boot screen is animated with four lights coming together to form the Windows logo. The welcome screen looks similar to Vista’s with new artwork, and the system picked up that I could use Aero on both computers right out the box with full transparency enabled. I must say that while I am a little more used to Vista’s version of Aero, 7 has a pretty nice feel to it as well. By default the taskbar is a bit thicker than before with larger icons, no labels for open applications and both the date and time displayed. I quickly adjusted these settings to provide smaller icons, labels and the thinner taskbar with just the time displayed as in XP and Vista.
Windows 7 desktop with Aero
The interface runs significantly faster than Vista with no performance tweaks required. In fact I will go so far as to say that in terms of the the general feel Windows 7 does not appear to be much slower than XP with SP3 on the same system. It appears at the moment to have about the same level of stability as 2000, XP and Vista, which is to say that as long as one is not reckless with computer usage then it should run quite smoothly and reliably. There are the usual annoying messages asking if to run programs and change settings but that is easily disabled with a User Account Control that has four different settings.
I will say that it is a significant improvement to Vista in terms of its ease of use and its performance but it is not perfect. Let me tell you a bit about the hiccups I encountered thus far.
First impressions: The bad
The welcome screen, just as with Vista, provides no option to revert to the classic XP login screen. For home users this is just fine but in a domain environment this makes it a chore if one switches frequently between local and domain accounts. I simply do not see it as an improvement to have to enter domain\user or user@domain instead of selecting the domain from a drop-down box.
One big problem that Windows 7 suffers is lack of driver support. Many vendors simply have not made Windows 7 drivers available and this is a particular problem if you have older hardware. At home for instance, my older Logitech Quickcam Messenger webcam is unable to be installed at all while my Realtek AC’97 audio is installed with what appears to be a ported Vista driver. They work, but I am asked after each reboot if to run soundman.exe. This is with User Access Control turned off. I also have a “Base System Device” at the office which I cannot seem to locate a driver for but that has not impeded any functionality. I suspect it might be part of the Intel AMT mechanism and will check further into that during the week.
soundman.exe prompt
I cannot hold Microsoft fully accountable for vendors not releasing drivers, however, I would have thought that they (Microsoft) would have created built-in drivers for common legacy hardware such as AC’97 audio.
I also had a peculiar problem that baffled me for a little while until the Internet Bible (Google) pointed me in the right direction. A little while after installing my applications at home I lost internet connectivity. Not network connectivity; just internet. I for some reason had two gateways detected on my network adapter, the first set to 0.0.0.0 and the other the correct one. Running ipconfig /release and /renew did not help, nor did a restart. It turns out that Apple’s Bonjour service was responsible, which is installed with Safari as an option (which I opted out of), iTunes (which I did not install) and Adobe CS3 and CS4 (I did install CS3).
The solution was to go to the Windows Services, stop and disable the service in question and then restart. The service as installed under CS3 was not called Bonjour but rather an obscure name starting with ##Id_String. For those unfamiliar with the Windows Services snap-in, it is easiest accessed by using the run command (Windows key + R) and running services.msc. It is also available in Computer Management (right-click Computer and select Manage).
Speaking of network problems, there does seem to be a minor bug at the office. There, Windows 7 is part of a Windows 2003 domain with internet access via an ISA proxy server. In short, a fairly common configuration for an office. While able to browse the internet and connect to Microsoft for Windows Activation, the system tray network icon and the Network and Sharing Center insist that there is domain access but no internet access. This does not impede the functionality of the system but it is a bit of an annoyance.
Summary
So far, Windows 7 RC seems quite promising and I while mentioning the above bugs I must also make note that this is the Release Candidate and as such will have several bugfixes before the final product is released to market. Vista, while running fairly well following the releases of Service Packs 1 and 2 has suffered from a very bad image after its initial launch and how slowly it ran on fairly modern computers. Windows 7 on the other hand is both significantly faster on the same hardware than its predecessor while the market in turn now has heftier hardware installed.
Windows 7 at first glance is not a major overhaul of the Windows OS but it is certainly what Vista should have been in the first place.
