Windows 7

[PARANOiA]

Don't know if this is interesting or not but...

I managed to kill my few-hour old Windows 7 install by resizing the (Windows 7) partition in Vista using Acronis. Acronis wouldn't do it from Windows 7 (and by that I mean during a reboot, it wouldn't perform the action). Running the same action from within Vista worked of course, but then Windows 7 wouldn't boot.

So I chucked in the Windows 7 disc again and it automatically found and repaired my Windows 7 install. But... and here's the interesting part... my boot menu now read "Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered) instead of the stock-standard "Windows 7". Interesting, I thought, and I selected the option. Following that, the boot screen switched to the Vista boot screen - scrolling green bar vs the glowing Windows logo. I actually thought I'd booted into Vista by mistake.

After that, Windows 7 eventually hit the desktop, but it was slower than my clean install... about as slow as Vista. My network also wasn't initialised when I got to it. In fact, if I didn't know better, I would have thought it was the exact same boot process/"optimisations" that I get from booting into Vista. After a few cold boots to make sure it wasn't anything odd, I deleted the partition and re-installed. Now I'm back to super-fast boots, and as soon as my desktop appears my networks are already initialised, and I can being using the PC.

I know it sounds odd, but if anyone feels like trying it, I recommend it. What do you think could have caused Windows 7 to revert to Vista's nasty performance levels?

 

[eastmen]

*backed up everything first.
**understand it's beta.

I went ahead and did a Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 to Windows 7 x64 Upgrade, not clean install.

Now I'm getting an issue where Catalyst Control Center is not only not starting but I cannot uninstall CCC nor overwrite the ATi drivers using the Win7 Beta drivers.

When trying to overwrite the Installer package hangs on "enumerating source media for installable packages".

Trying to uinstall causes the package to hang on populating the uninstall list.

Safe mode is no help, anyone else having this issue?
Any feasible workarounds?

I have the same problem. I can still run games and they run well but i can't install the drivers nor the cc

 

[DJ12]

have you tried something like driverclean to completely remove the drivers?

 

[eastmen]

have you tried something like driverclean to completely remove the drivers?

no , i will try it though when i get home.

I think its the card thats going though , this happened a month ago on vista too and just magicly worked after a reboot. This time its not though

 

[willardjuice]

http://forums.amd.com/game/messagev...=105310&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

That's the solution to the problem, check the last two posts of page 1.

 

[Dominik D]

What do you think could have caused Windows 7 to revert to Vista's nasty performance levels?

You can run xperf to see what's slowing down your machine. Since you messed up your partition, it's most likely IO.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx
BTW: you should have used diskmgmt.msc - it has shrink and extend volume features built in, and it's most likely better suited for Win7 than some 3rd party, legacy application.

 

[Albuquerque]

Just got my copy of Win7/64, and I've got a spare drive to install on my home rig. Will give it a shot perhaps this weekend...

 

[PARANOiA]

You can run xperf to see what's slowing down your machine. Since you messed up your partition, it's most likely IO.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx
BTW: you should have used diskmgmt.msc - it has shrink and extend volume features built in, and it's most likely better suited for Win7 than some 3rd party, legacy application.

Both Vista and Windows 7's disk manager doesn't let you resize the OS's partition size. This makes it a pain when you realise your OS install suddenly takes us far more space than you intended. It's good for other partitions though.

I'll be very interested to see how Windows 7's winsxs folder changes in size as time goes on. My ~3month Vista install grew to >5gb, which is a bit of a joke. There are a lot of angry forum posters complaining about this probelm, which doesn't really have a solution.

 

[Davros]

whats the winsxs folder for

 

[PARANOiA]

whats the winsxs folder for

http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/arch...in-Windows-XP,-Vista-and-Server-20032008.html

A coworker recently received his every two year work laptop refresh and was in the middle of loading his new laptop with Vista. For some reason, his hard drive C: was partitioned to only 25GB and the rest of the space reserved for a much larger drive D:.

Anyway, after loading many Windows Updates, he was left with hardly any drive space left on C:, and for some reason, the WinSxS directory had ballooned to over 8GB.

While I knew what the WinSxS (Windows Side-by-Side) directory was for, I wasn't quite sure why that directory would explode in size so fast with normal operating system updates.

A little digging and I think I have part of the answer, based on two different postings from MS's jonwin's blog. You can read the WinSxS specific posts here and here.

There's more on the article, but basically there's a folder in Vista's Windows directory (not sure about Win7) which grows at a rapid rate, and can't be shrunk without a very high risk of killing your system.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Incidentally, you can install Win7 onto a VHD file on your existing filesystem. This way you only need the disk space for Win7 but without having to (re)partition anything. Very neat technology.

 

[Dominik D]

Both Vista and Windows 7's disk manager doesn't let you resize the OS's partition size. This makes it a pain when you realise your OS install suddenly takes us far more space than you intended. It's good for other partitions though.

OS's partition? Do you mean system partition or boot partition? Boot partition can be easily resized. System partition I believe has certain limitations for min size, but there's no reason for it to be unable to grow (although it makes no sense to grow system partition if it's a separate one).

 

[PARANOiA]

The great stuff:

Windows 7 Tips and Tricks
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

Some of these are fantastic little additions that vastly improve the day-to-day use of the OS. My favourites are:
* Win + space desktop-peek shortcut
* Win + home minimise all non-active Windows
* Win + shift + left/right for multi-monitor switching - which is about bloody time, since I use my HDTV as a second monitor. If I left a window open on my TV it was a pain to bring it back over.
* Middle-clicking shortcuts on the taskbar to open a new process. This makes the new taskbar incredibly efficient
* CTRL-clicking a multiple-window application to browse through all the open documents
* mouse-gestures from the taskbar instead of right-clicking

Anyway, well worth a read for anyone using Win7. If you can't find one thing on there you like I feel sorry for you!

On the not-so-great news... I checked my winsys folder (c:\windows\winsxs) and my folder has already bloated to 6gb :/ The only real drivers I've had to reinstall a few times are my Logitech BT mouse/keyboard ones, since my bios issues from my other thread means I can't reconnect without fiddling and removing the dongle. What is the winsxs folder looking like for others using Win7?

 

[PARANOiA]

OS's partition? Do you mean system partition or boot partition? Boot partition can be easily resized. System partition I believe has certain limitations for min size, but there's no reason for it to be unable to grow (although it makes no sense to grow system partition if it's a separate one).

I find this odd - I've done about 4-5 Vista installs, and now two Win7 installs, and I've never been able to resize any partition with Windows installed on it except with a third-party application. I've even just gone into the disk management console and tried to do it then and it didn't work.

 

[Sxotty]

On the not-so-great news... I checked my winsys folder (c:\windows\winsxs) and my folder has already bloated to 6gb :/ The only real drivers I've had to reinstall a few times are my Logitech BT mouse/keyboard ones, since my bios issues from my other thread means I can't reconnect without fiddling and removing the dongle. What is the winsxs folder looking like for others using Win7?

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx

In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to the physical files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32, and it will be counted twice (or more) when simply looking at the individual directories from Windows Explorer...
While it’s true that WinSxS does consume some disk space by simply existing, and there are a number of metadata files, folders, manifests, and catalogs in it, it’s significantly smaller than reported. The actual amount of storage consumed varies, but on a typical system it is about 400MB. While that is not small, we think the robustness provided for servicing is a reasonable tradeoff.

 

[pjbliverpool]

* Win + shift + left/right for multi-monitor switching - which is about bloody time, since I use my HDTV as a second monitor. If I left a window open on my TV it was a pain to bring it back over.

I love the sound of this one. I too use an HDTV and had to create a custom icon to put on my desk just so that I could go directly to the screen switching screen in display properties. But even that takes time.

This will be a god send.

BTW, its easy to bring a window over from another screen even if you can't see it (as long as the screen you're using has the taskbar). Just right click the app in the task bar and click restore to take it out of full screen (assuming it was full screen in the first place), then right click it in the task bar again, click on move, then without moving the mouse at all, left click again. This will "grab" the window on your other screen and then you simply keep left click held down and drag it across.

 

[pcchen]

On the not-so-great news... I checked my winsys folder (c:\windows\winsxs) and my folder has already bloated to 6gb :/ The only real drivers I've had to reinstall a few times are my Logitech BT mouse/keyboard ones, since my bios issues from my other thread means I can't reconnect without fiddling and removing the dongle. What is the winsxs folder looking like for others using Win7?

Mine too... I have installed only a few things: Windows Live, Skype, iTune, Firefox, Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, Avira AV, an IME, and World of Warcraft, and now the winsxs folder is near 6GB.

 

[Kaotik]

Some tips etc:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

Regarding WinSxS, even though it appears taking huge amounts of space, it really isn't:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx

“Modularizing” the operating system was an engineering goal in Windows Vista. This was to solve a number of issues in legacy Windows related to installation, servicing and reliability. The Windows SxS directory represents the “installation and servicing state” of all system components. But in reality it doesn’t actually consume as much disk space as it appears when using the built-in tools (DIR and Explorer) to measure disk space used. The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point!
...
While it’s true that WinSxS does consume some disk space by simply existing, and there are a number of metadata files, folders, manifests, and catalogs in it, it’s significantly smaller than reported. The actual amount of storage consumed varies, but on a typical system it is about 400MB. While that is not small, we think the robustness provided for servicing is a reasonable tradeoff.

 

[DJ12]

Anyone know how to restart Aero?

It went off yesterday with an install I was running and it didn't come back on when the install had finished like it normally does.

I have stopped and restarted the appropriate desktop service but it still doesn't work.

I am sure a quick reboot would fix it, but I would prefer not to.

 

[Kaotik]

Anyone know how to restart Aero?

It went off yesterday with an install I was running and it didn't come back on when the install had finished like it normally does.

I have stopped and restarted the appropriate desktop service but it still doesn't work.

I am sure a quick reboot would fix it, but I would prefer not to.

You could try logging off and back on, but at that point it's essentially the same to just reboot