I am no longer a user of Windows Vista.

It has been nearly a year since Microsoft released Vista. I first wrote about it when I tested the upgrade process from Windows XP to Vista Business Edition. Shortly after that I upgraded my laptop and resolved a few minor issues with the optical drive, the Intel wireless configuration utility, Media Player, Explorer, Small Business Server, and constant system beeps that were starting to drive me nuts.

For most of the year now I’ve used Windows Vista Business Edition on the laptop in my home office and the laptop at my work. Both are about the same hardware spec - dual core CPU with 2Gb RAM. The home office laptop originally ran Windows XP Professional with only 1Gb RAM and was very fast. I later upgraded it to 2Gb RAM after Vista was installed. The laptop at work arrived with Vista pre-installed by Dell (which I stripped right back, removing all the ridiculous apps they ship with) and had 2Gb RAM from the start.

Why have I stopped using Windows Vista?

My primary gripe is the performance of the work laptop. It is just unacceptably slow. When I sit and consider my morning office routine I realise that it is based around how long it takes for Vista to boot and be at a functional desktop with my email and web browser open ready to start work. It takes forever.

Read the rest of this article…

Every now and then I’ll see someone in a forum post the results of a ping or tracert in a troubleshooting thread, and comment that it took a long time for them to type out the results manually.  Obviously thats the hard way of doing it, so here are some very simple tips to make using the Windows command line a little easier in these situations.

Lets start with what the default command line window looks like.  The command line is accessed by going to Start -> Run, typing ‘cmd.exe’ and pressing Enter.  There is also a shortcut to it in Start -> All Programs -> Accessories.  It launches in a smallish window, with fairly dull grey text.

The default window size is not that handy if you want to see a long list of results in one screen, such as a ping or tracert to an overseas server.  One of the things you can do about this is adjust the window’s vertical size by moving your mouse to the bottom edge of the window and then clicking and dragging to make it bigger.

This is all well and good, but the next time you open a command line window it will be back at the smaller, default window size.  The good news is you can make the new window size permanent, as well as enable some other handy features, by adjusting the properties of the command line window.  You can access these properties by clicking in the top left corner of the window (on the little icon), or right-clicking anywhere in the blue title bar at the top of the window, and selecting Properties from the menu that appears.

The first setting I like to turn on is QuickEdit Mode.  This is the feature that enables you to more easily copy/paste information from your command line window to other applications.  More on that shortly.

Moving to the Layout tab you can see settings for controlling the width and height of the window, as well as the width and height of the screen buffer.  The difference between the two is that the window size controls the size of the window you see on screen, whereas the screen buffer controls how much information you can use the scrollbars to view.  For example, a screen height of 50 means 50 lines of information will be displayed on screen, but the buffer size of 999 means you can scroll back to see the last 999 lines of information.  This is handy if you’re running lots of commands and want to scroll back to see the results of one you ran a while ago.  In the screenshot I’ve included my usual settings.

If you don’t like the default text colour of grey you can use the Colors tab to change it.  Most people I know like the light blue, yellow, or light purple.  The light green was pretty popular when the first Matrix movie was released as well.  You can use the darker colours if you like but you would need to then change the background colour to something lighter to contrast it and keep it easy on the eye.

Once you are happy with your settings click OK.  You will be prompted how you want to save these settings.  If you want the settings to apply to all command line windows you open in future then be sure to choose “Modify shortcut that started this window”.

Now lets road test the new settings with another tracert.  Note first of all that the text is a little clearer with the new colour you chose (if not feel free to go back and select a different colour).  Also with the width of the window set to 120 instead of the default 80 more information can fit on one line, which makes the results appear neater than when they are wrapping across multiple lines.

Now you can easily copy and paste the information to another application.  With QuickEdit Mode enable it is as simple as clicking and dragging your mouse across the section you wish to copy, which will highlight it in white.  Once you have selected the area you want to copy, simply right-click your mouse to copy it to the clipboard.  The white highlight will disappear at this point.  Go to your other application (such as the forum you are trying to post the information to, or a Notepad window in my example) and right-click -> Paste (or use the shortcut CTRL+V) to paste the information.

These tips apply to Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

My licenses for Windows Vista Business Edition arrived last week and so I thought I would document the process I followed for upgrading from Windows XP Professional.

The first step I took was to download and install the Vista Upgrade Advisor, to test for software and hardware compatibility.  Note: on one of my VMWare test pc’s I had to download MSXML 6 in order to install the Upgrade Advisor.

Once the Upgrade Advisor is installed you can run the scan to generate a report of software and hardware issues that should be resolved before you attempt to upgrade to Vista.  For example, on my Dell Inspiron 6400 the report advised me to upgrade the laptop system BIOS before performing the upgrade.  It also alerted me to some compatibility issues with some development tools I run on that laptop.  For my VMWare test pc it advised me to increase the amount of RAM for the system and also to upgrade my video card (on the host machine) to receive the full Vista experience.

After you have investigated and resolved any of the issues identified by the Upgrade Advisor you can proceed with the installation of Windows Vista.  Insert the Vista DVD, launch it if it doesn’t autoplay, and choose “Install Now”.  A decision to make is whether to allow the installer to connect to the internet for the latest drivers and security updates during installation.  If you have an internet connection available I highly recommend this.

Enter your product key when prompted, accept the license agreement, and then choose Upgrade so that your files, settings, and programs are preserved.  You will receive a warning if there are any issues from the Upgrade Advisor report that you did not resolve.  After that the upgrade begins.

When the upgrade has finished installing you are prompted to choose how to keep Windows Vista up to date and secure.  I recommend choosing “Use recommended settings”.  Next, set your clock and timezone.  If a network is detected you are also prompted to choose your computer’s location.  Choose the appropriate location for your needs.  If you aren’t sure choose “Public location”.

The upgrade is now complete.

Almost anyway.  Vista now runs through a process of checking your computer’s performance and setting up the desktop and certain application settings.  It should only do it this one time so future startups will be faster.

The first significant issue I encountered was AVG Free 7.5 failing to load, displaying a licensing error.

I didn’t have the license details handy (even though its free it still has a license key) to reactivate it, and a bit of searching on the web revealed this is not an uncommon problem, so the solution was to reinstall AVG Free 7.5 from the installation file, being sure to choose to run it as an administrator when I launched the installation file.  I chose to perform a “repair installation” and this was successful.  This required a restart, and then also required me to update AVG again as I had reinstalled from an older installation file.

Overall this particular upgrade to Vista went quite well.  That was the VMWare test pc, so the next computer to be upgraded will be my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop.  I’ll post any significant issues and their solutions here but hopefully it will go as smoothly as the test pc.

I was out at a customer site on the weekend setting up their new computer. Should be no problems at all as it was the same Dell model as one they had purchased a few months before, and I had taken the time to create a RIS image when I built that first one.Having used different disk imaging tools over the years I’d never had a problem with disk sizes, as long as the image was smaller than the disk you were putting it on. So for example a Ghost image made with a 60Gb disk would happily load onto a 20Gb disk as long as the actual data was less than 20Gb.

This is not the case with RIS, as many have found out before me it seems. If you create a RIS image on say a 160Gb disk (because Dell was running a special that day) and then later try to apply that RIS image to an 80Gb disk, you receive an error documented here. There are a couple of causes of this problem, the applicable one in this case was (in Microsoft’s words):

The hard disk on the source computer is larger than the hard disk on the destination computer. The disk volume information is contained in the Imirror.dat file during the creation of the RIS image, and is stored on the RIS server for that image.

Bingo, I thought. The exact problem I’m having, lets see the solution…

Re-create the RIS image on a smaller hard disk.
Install a larger hard disk on the destination computer. The hard disk must be as large as or larger than the hard disk in the source computer.

Ah… thats no help. I don’t have a larger disk available to install, and I don’t really want to have to go through the process of reinstalling Windows XP from scratch to create a new RIS image when I have a perfectly good one already on the server.

Google to the rescue. The Microsoft article mentioned the IMirror.dat file, so searching for “imirror.dat” I came across Bart De Smet’s blog where he has documented a simple solution. In his case he suggests starting a RIS upload from a computer with a smaller disk, just long enough for the IMirror.dat file to be created, and then snagging that file and copying it into the source of the RIS image you want to install. Fortunately in my case I had RIS images for older hardware models on the server as well, that had smaller disk in them when the images were created.

So it was a simple matter to grab the IMirror.dat file from one of those, copy it over to the image I wanted to install, and start the RIS install again. This worked great, and got me out of the woods on this problem.

While the image was installing I looked around for a bit more information on the topic and found this forum thread (and here is a Google Cache link in case it won’t load). Johan Arwidmark describes how to use WinHex to edit the values in the IMirror.dat file that contain the disk size information. I downloaded WinHex and opened the file and saw the values he referred to. Comparing those to the values in the IMirror.dat for a smaller image I modified them to match and retested the RIS load. This method worked perfectly as well.

So there you have it, two methods of applying the same solution to the problem of trying to load a RIS image on a smaller disk than it was created on.