Windows 7

[neliz]

What could possibly take 45 mins to load up just to log in? That's...inconcievable.

Setting up a roaming profile on a "fresh" machine where it needs to copy a users profile (several GB, wireless) including mail, some apps set-up by a script. You can literally wait for "setting up your profile, please wait" for at least half an hour, getting into the shell and executing the set-up scripts takes another 15 minutes (downloading several GB of mail from Exchange)

 

[Grall]

Why does it need to download so much stuff all at once? Why isn't this done dynamically as needed?

Especially gigs of mail, what the hell? Who needs several gigs of mail on a client computer, or even manage to collect that much in the first place? It'd take years just reading through that much text full-time all day all night all year round...

 

[neliz]

Why does it need to download so much stuff all at once? Why isn't this done dynamically as needed?

Local Application Data :/

Especially gigs of mail, what the hell? Who needs several gigs of mail on a client computer, or even manage to collect that much in the first place? It'd take years just reading through that much text full-time all day all night all year round...

people want to work offline and need to have most of their own mail (couple of GB) and for instance Sales data with them 24/7. DL'ing and Synching that stuff just takes time.

My personal (business and pleasure) mailbox is 3GB, the general Sales box is 10GB and currently our biggest users have mailboxes of around 6GB. Remember these are a lot of reports, word and excel documents etc.

 

[Arwin]

In other words, you're wasting a tonne of money and time by not implementing a decent document and email management solution. A limit of 100MB should be more than enough. Even if you don't properly and efficiently share your information, you might as well archive all those mails to a personal folders file that you backup to the network somewhere, because what you're doing now screws up the whole concept of roaming profiles anyway.

Oh and I believed that even before I moved to a company that professionally implements document management solutions.

Local Application Data :/

people want to work offline and need to have most of their own mail (couple of GB) and for instance Sales data with them 24/7. DL'ing and Synching that stuff just takes time.

My personal (business and pleasure) mailbox is 3GB, the general Sales box is 10GB and currently our biggest users have mailboxes of around 6GB. Remember these are a lot of reports, word and excel documents etc.

 

[neliz]

In other words, you're wasting a tonne of money and time by not implementing a decent document and email management solution. A limit of 100MB should be more than enough. Even if you don't properly and efficiently share your information, you might as well archive all those mails to a personal folders file that you backup to the network somewhere, because what you're doing now screws up the whole concept of roaming profiles anyway.

I grew up with a limited 2MB account on a Novell server, I'm all for keeping it small and simple. Yet everything is already on the network, people just like to mark "Make available offline" when they see their presentations, product documentation etc.
They also don't like improperly closed or corrupted PST's so bending over to their will is the path of least resistance.

i.o.w. teringlijsters.

 

[Arwin]

i.o.w. teringlijsters.

Heh. Your Dutch is excellent.

I do wonder what the costs are though! One of the solutions we implement has recently been upgraded with very nice new features that allow you to hook up your Exchange folders to workspaces in the solution. The data in these folders is then synched up automatically and flagged, so from that point on you can delete or archive those mails, and they automatically given the workspace meta-data, are indexed and full-text searchable on the document server etc. If there are any workspaces you want to have available offline, you can then choose to synchronise these to a local database that automatically synches stuff back up once you're connected again.

Ah well, going way too much off-topic here. And it's not likely to change at your company anyway until something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

 

[vazel]

Anyone having issues with Win7 automatically not going to sleep? I've already tried all the suggestions Googling threw at me.

 

[Grall]

Yes, I have my Win7 not automatically going to sleep constantly, but I don't consider that a problem; more like "normal operation"...

Are you actually wanting to say that your OS goes to sleep when you DON'T want it to? Weird. I had a weblink to OCZ's forums some time ago that showed a command that disabled hibernation, but now I've lost it. If someone could help track that one down (you had to issue it through the command line console) maybe it would help.

 

[vazel]

I want it to go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity(which is the default setting out of the box) but it won't. I have to manually put it to sleep.

And sometimes when I put it to sleep it would wake up by itself without me touching anything. Seems Win7 now lets the NIC wake the PC from sleep, I've disabled that in the NIC properties in device manager so hopefully that won't happen anymore.

Another problem with sleep mode is when I wake up from sleep mode my ati 4850 reverts from HDMI to DVI mode which means I lose the functionality of the audio on the GPU card and the pixel format settings.

 

[Arwin]

When going to sleep and when the UAC kicks in, my Wacom tablet doesn't work properly. I can't confirm or deny access with the tablet when the UAC kicks in, and after Win7 wakes from sleep the tablet no longer works. Then again the drivers for this thing have always been a bit shabby, and it's a rather old model. For now I hooked up a regular mouse besides it, fortunately they peacefully and usefully coexist.

Otherwise, no problems with sleep mode.

 

[Broken Hope]

I had a weblink to OCZ's forums some time ago that showed a command that disabled hibernation, but now I've lost it. If someone could help track that one down (you had to issue it through the command line console) maybe it would help.

powercfg -h off

 

[Grall]

Just tested hibernate today, it worked fine.

In my experience, sleep and power save modes have always been the most unstable and quirky feature of windows, and it's always been hit or miss for me wether they work or not at all. Typically, hibernate/sleep would often randomly either work fine for X number of times after a clean OS install and then stop working for no apparant reason whatsoever, or it wouldn't work period, even right after a reinstall where it DID work just fine on exactly the same hardware/software install...

This pattern has repeated itself across all my years and PCs when using windows, all the way back to when people sat around puttering with that god-awful Win95. Either MS can't program worth a damn, or the hibernate/sleep specs is a gigantic pile of steaming fail.

 

[vazel]

Yea it did actually work a few times at the beginning.

This sucks. Sometimes I fall asleep watching a movie from my PC to my plasma and it's nice to have the PC automatically sleep when the movie is over which in turn makes the plasma turn off when it doesn't receive a signal for a few minutes. Power usage matters to me not just for the electricity bill but also heat generation. That's why I bought a Gigabyte motherboard with Energy Saver feature and OCZ Blade low voltage 1066MHz RAM.

 

[Arwin]

I'd like to distinguish between hibernate and sleep though - sleep often causes issues, but I've yet to experience any problem whatsoever from hibernation. That feature seems to work flawlessly, up to the point where I fully rely on it for putting my laptop to sleep when my battery runs out for instance. It's a very good feature, especially on the road, particularly when I am using an external HDD with open VMWare images on it. Of course it's still important to remember to have the HDD plugged in when you wake it up. (although these days that doesn't end up being as fatal as it used to be, thankfully)

 

[neliz]

I'd like to distinguish between hibernate and sleep though - sleep often causes issues, but I've yet to experience any problem whatsoever from hibernation. That feature seems to work flawlessly, up to the point where I fully rely on it for putting my laptop to sleep when my battery runs out for instance. It's a very good feature, especially on the road, particularly when I am using an external HDD with open VMWare images on it. Of course it's still important to remember to have the HDD plugged in when you wake it up. (although these days that doesn't end up being as fatal as it used to be, thankfully)

Only problems I ever had with Hibernate was the display driver not coming up (just a blank screen) even after switching displays (fn+f4) it didn't help.
What actually did help was logging in blindly and that resets it.. Otherwise, Sleep/Hibernate works really good in 7 on my pc and notebook, sleep never seemed to work in Vista (it kept coming back online as soon as the screen went blank.)

 

[vazel]

'Otherwise, Sleep/Hibernate works really good...'

'Otherwise, no problems with sleep mode.'

A feature like this shouldn't have any problems. There is no 'otherwise'.

 

[neliz]

A feature like this shouldn't have any problems. There is no 'otherwise'.

A lot of this is driver or BIOS related, Like unplugging my mouse after sleep/hibernate wakes the machine up :/ (sometimes turning my monitor off initializes sleep mode as well)

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Thing with sleep is that all your hardware and drivers have to support it properly, as well as your BIOS, especially given the different levels of sleep there are now.

I found what helped a lot was to enable the setting my my BIOS that specified "S3 only". Whatever kind of sleep Windows wants to activate, the BIOS does a proper S3 to switch everything (including fans) down to sleep mode.

 

[Malo]

I just noticed that the Steam client is Windows 7 savvy. It supports the download progress meter on the taskbar icon like IE7.

 

[vazel]

Thing with sleep is that all your hardware and drivers have to support it properly, as well as your BIOS, especially given the different levels of sleep there are now.

They're called different things. Sleep/Standby has to be supported by your BIOS(S3). RAM is kept powered. Hibernate is an OS feature, there should be no issue with drivers/bios as it's just like shutting down. Content from RAM is saved in a hibernate file on hard disk, you can lose power and your data is still safe.