Ahhh..Microsoft
I picked up a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade for $250 yesterday, after laboring over all the various options (5 different versions, OEM full install or retail or upgrade, 32-bit or 64-bit...sheeze). I was extremely disappointed that the only feature I really wanted that wasn't on the Home Premium edition, was a working remote desktop. What a farce. So, I went with the upgrade after finding out that Microsoft was planning to severely limit my ability to migrate an OEM copy to new hardware in the future. But then I had also heard that you had to have the oringal OS (WinXP or 2K) installed to complete the compliance check (rather than being able to just put in the disk). This made it impossible to do a clean install. Oh, and there were also rumors that the upgrade would "consume" your old key for the previous OS (makes sense, but sort of sucks).

So, I wanted to upgrade my main computer, which has WinXP Pro on it (to support a remote desktop). But it didn't make sense to burn up a perfectly good WinXP Pro key to upgrade, when one of my 3 other WinXP Home installations would suffice. But, now, I had to erase my Pro installation, and reinstall Home on my new computer just to upgrade to Vista. Grrr. It gets better. I have long wanted to eliminate the space taking floppy from my system. I never use it...except to install Windows XP, when it asks for the driver disk to boot the RAID drivers to recognize the HDD. With Vista, I was happy that it was first of all a better GUI install (fully 32-bit), and it recognizes more than just 130GB of a drive, plus it FINALLY recognizes most RAID drivers.

So, I didn't bother putting a floppy in my new system...praying it wouldn't be necessary. I mean, there are USB drives, CD, DVD, flash cards, network and USB transfers...SOMETHING else should be useable. Sigh. Yeah, except that NOW, I have to try to put WinXP Home back on my system, just to install Vista. F!$#!K. Don't I OWN four perfectly valid full copies of WinXP already? And didn't I just get done paying $250 for an UPGRADE to Vista? Then why can't I UPGRADE?!?!?

So, I decide to try just install Vista on a clean system (no previous system). Maybe I can call Microsoft and explain and get a way to do it with the disk and key from WinXP Home in hand. Nope. It boots from the DVD just fine, and pops into a very refreshing GUI installation screen, and even better, it recognizes my full array of disks (even running my main twin-250GB array as a RAID1 mirror for data integrity). Cool! I can format and partition everything right there. Sweet. No blue screen with white text for this install! Now comes the bad part. It informs me that the installation key I have provided is not authorized to perform a blank install because the proper certified copy of a previous windows installation can not be found (and Microsoft tech support confirms there is no way around this or to bypass or manually give them my old WinXP key and disk). So, I try again with tech support and inform them that my drive with my old Windows installation crashed and died during the Windows Vista Upgrade installation proceedure (which was true, actually, and one of the reasons I'm trying to ensure that my OS install is always done on a RAID1 mirror install). I have a new drive installed and would like to try to get Vista installed. I'm placed on hold 3 or 4 times, and even disconnected twice. I finally get the response that I will HAVE to reinstall WinXP and they transfer me to them. I calmly explain that I can NOT install WinXP, because I do not have a 3.5" floppy drive to load the necessary drivers to get the WinXP installation disk to recognize my HDD's. I'm again placed on hold...and then promptly disconnected.

Sigh. I can tell where this is going to lead, so I don't waste any more time on this, and just remove the RAID array (with the new drive installed) back to a standard IDE interface and hope that I can convert it after the installation. side note: I must be a real nerd, as I have BRAND NEW spare 250GB drives, just sitting around, because when ever I see a great deal on drives, I buy some. Part of that has to do with me hacking xbox's too, but that is another story. After all, mirroring shouldn't corrupt the data right? LOL...wrong (but that is for later). I get WinXP Home installed without the RAID (sort of...it only detects my drive as 130GB rather than full 250GB, but I trust this will be "ok" later in the full version detect...still makes me nervous formating/partitioning on a drive not fully recognized). Anyway, I don't do anything more than type in the certification key for WinXP Home and select basic options. No internet is working (most of my hardware isn't detected these days with the basic WinXP or even SP2 install). No additional driver disks or even SP2. I don't even get online and "certify/validate" the installation. I want to see if Vista Upgrade will work with this half way installation. Surprise, it does...although it informs me that I have to do a full CLEAN install of Vista for the combination of OS's I'm trying to upgrade. No F!#$!King DUH...that's what I wanted to do to begin with...so, it backs up my old OS into a windows.old directory and begins to install.

So, I spend another 90 minutes installing 64-bit Vista and playing around with basic settings, which goes surprisingly smooth. It recognized and installed drivers for EVERY SINGLE piece of hardware I have. It takes me a little while to find all the normal things I access (like drive manager and settings), but it works! It even connects to the internet with almost no help from me and downloads the most recent drivers for everything. Stuff is looking GREAT! Uh...all except I had a 400GB drive in my system that had a bunch of movies I had pulled off DVD's that I OWN (as well as some not-so-legal copies of Lost that both my wife and I are now hooked on), for playing on my HTPC and XBox stream that got corrupted at some point between booting with it in IDE/RAID/IDE mode and WinXP install. Bummer, but not catastrophic. Oh, I also still have a directory called "windows.old" that has my old install, but it looks like it was true to its word and didn't take ANY settings from my old install...at all, not even the time zone settings. It connected to the internet and validated the installation. I'm not sure if it burned my liscense on the old copy of WinXP that I used to base the upgrade on or not. I'll try to boot that PC (my HTPC) later and see. If it did, fine, I want WinXP on that box anyway.

Now comes the part that you look back on and go...why did I do that. Well, I had always wondered if I could convert a normal disk into a RAID1 mirror array. I knew that when I originally built this system, I just unhooked one of the mirrors from the old PC and threw it in the new system and it worked just fine and dandy (old PC noted that the mirror array was "degraded" because of a missing/failing drive, but even it would still boot just fine too). Well, so, I switch it over to RAID in the motherboard BIOS and go into the RAID config to mirror my two 250GB drives. It says I will lose all data on the drives, but they always say that stuff, right? Hit execute, save and reboot. blank screen during HDD boot. Ok..full power off. Same thing. Ok...back to IDE and delete the RAID. Reboot. Hum...garbage on the screen during boot. Uh-oh. Sigh. At this point it is 12:30AM.

I turn everything off and go to bed, knowing I'm going to HAVE to pull the old floppy drive out of my old computer, pop it in, use the drivers to install an old copy of WinXP Home (yet again) on a RAID1 config and reinstall Vista Upgrade. I hope I don't have to talk to Microsoft UNsupport. Plus, all my movies are now gone and I know my wife is going to be pissed that she can't watch Lost tonight. Hey! See, the new Windows DRM thingy IS working...grin.

Spending another $150 to get the full version doesn't seem so expensive now...sigh.

Update (2/1/2007): After a couple friends read this, one finally pointed out an article that has found a work around for doing a clean install without needing ANY form of previous Windows to be installed. Great, this works and saves me from having to spend 60 minutes formating and installing WinXP, just to destroy it to put vista on, AND allows me to finally boot the floppy out of my system!!! Woot! This sort of sucks, because this same back door allows people to circumvent the legit reason for trying to limit what an "upgrade" copy is meant for. I don't have a problem with Microsoft trying to make sure that someone actually HAS a valid liscense for a previous version. But they should let me type in the old key and compliance check the old disk, if that is how they want to play the game. This work around is now, actually less of a check than they use to have in WinXP. So, just like DRM's and the whole HDCP fiasco, the causual user pays the price in loss of convienence while the true pirates and hackers that do a lot of this suffer very little to get around this. Nice job Micro$oft.

Update (2/2/2007): Well, after the tip in the above paragraph, and 1 hour later, I have a fully installed copy of Vista Ultimate, without having to wait for the WinXP format and tedious install to complete (this took >3 hours last night doing it that way) and without me having to spend another hour pulling the floppy out of another system to get the drivers to even DO a WinXP install on a RAID1 mirror setup. As it was, the Vista DVD recognized the drives with no need for other drivers (though it did have an option to load other drivers...and I think it supports floppy, CD, DVD, and flash media). I'm very happy. Too bad Microsoft couldn't help me get to this resolution.

Update (2/13/2007):OK, I just found possibly the coolest part of Vista I've seen so far. And it is something simple. And most of you are probably going to say "So?", but it is something that has bugged me for a LONG time. I have a bunch of digital pictures that sometimes didn't have the date set right (my old digital camera always reset every time the batteries went dead or you changed them...thank god the new one somehow saves that, even with dead batteries). Well, we like to know when things were taken, and if the date resets to 1999 all the time, it sucks, especially when you are looking at camping pictures or pictures of the boys. Well, good luck figuring out how to change the "Date Modified" or "Date Created" on a file in Windows. You would THINK it would be in the right click->properties or something, but you can't change it. I've downloaded a couple freeware tools that lets you modify file attributes, but they aren't integrated and seemless, and a lot of them don't work all the time (crash, and you can't select MULTIPLE files and change them all at once).

I've also tried to figure out a good way to add "Captions" or comments to my JPG photos. Something easy that even Sarah could do. Some programs allow you to put comments in a .txt file with the same prefix name as the photo, and it will automatically put these in the slide show (like my JAlbum photo show program), but that is brittle and tough to keep synced to the photos. move a picture, but forget to do the .txt file too, and you lost the hard work of all those comments. There ARE provisions in the JPG format to allow comments and titles as well as key/value tags to be added in the header (as well as the camera settings and stuff), but a lot of programs don't always use or look at those, and none are really simple.

Well, last night, I was playing with the "Windows Photo Gallery" that pulls up when you click on the little side bar photo preview gadget. And it is a LOT like the latest Windows Media player, where you can sort pictures by date, year, key tags, as well as file structure. AND you can add title and comments (or caption) to each photo. You can also...drum roll...change the Creation/Modified Date on the picture. You can do this all in a VERY cool thumbnail layout mode, and you can do it in BATCH. Meaning, you can highlight a whole bunch of pictures, change the date or add a sort tag (like "Moab Trip" or "Camping" or "Christmas") or multiple ones, and then it is searchable/sortable by that tag. You can also "rank" photos, just like songs, from 1 to 5 stars, just by clicking on them, and then it will remember this and you can sort by "favorites". Nice for slide shows to only flip through the 5-star ranked photos. I think this ranking is still "separate" from the file, and I've had problems trying to retain this ranking for songs in the past when I back up songs and reinstall windows, but it should be easy enough to figure out how to retain that too for backups.

Sarah has HATED having all the pictures of the boys and our various camping trips separated out into different directories, and has wanted to look at pictures all together (for example, I have sorted out a directory for Riley, and one for Brady, and then a different one for Riley & Brady, which seemed good when I started, but you break up a lot of other "categorizations" when you do that when the attribute you are sorting on is really a "one of many" factor). Now, I think I can block highlight a bunch of pictures, and mark them all with a "Riley" tag. Then do the same for Brady. And if they are BOTH in the picture, they get both tags. And if it is a picture of them camping, then they also get a "camping" tag. Basically, one tag isn't mutually exclusive. And now Sarah can look at pictures sorted a BUNCH of different ways.

This alone is prompting me to upgrade Sarah's computer to Windows Vista Premium too...

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- posted by Jeff @ 6:34 AM | 1 comments

 
New Intel Core 2 Duo system
Finally picked up a 64-bit CPU, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. Paired it with an ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi motherboard that has DDR2 800MHz (PC6400), PCI-Ex16, SATA 300 support. Planning to upgrade the WinXP OS to Vista at the end of the month. Also got an ATI X1900GT with 256MB of memory PCI-Express x16 graphics card. Popped in 4GB of DDR2 PC6400 modules in it. Also got a fairly nice Broadway Com Corp ATX mid tower case that seems to do the job ok (just wish it came with nicer variable speed fans, a front HDD LED, and a better 500W power supply).

The CPU seems to over clock from the 2.13GHz to 2.4GHz easily enough, even at 1.35v, and runs cool with the smart speed step tech (which drops it from 8x to 6x speed when idle). The memory was a bit flakey at the 1:1 1067MHz FSP timing, but seems rock solid at 900MHz (5-5-5-18 timings) and 1.8v. I was also surprised with several BSoD's when trying to run manual timings for CL6 (not going to waste too much more time on what is failing right now). The X1900GT video card will only overclock reliably from GPU 513MHz to 535MHz and DRAM from 657MHz to 800MHz.

Performance testing it all out, it is turning in well over double the scores I use to get on my older 2.8GHz P4 system. And a quick Auto Gordian Knot encode of Black Hawk Down (85% quality-single pass) went from 145 minutes down to 71 minutes on this new dual core. Also, Never Winter Nights 2 will now work at 1920x1200 at over 30fps with most features turned on (this was a bitter 2-4fps slide show on the older system).

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- posted by Jeff @ 1:58 PM | 0 comments