Category: Tech stuff

If you run Firefox and try and view Windows Media (movies) in a browser you have most likely been hit with a message saying that you need to manually install a plugin but it doesn’t work. Here is the solution. Click here.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours at Microsoft in Reading, learning about the home-centric fun features of Vista. Things like Volume Shadow Copy and how it protects us from oursleves, the control-scroll trick to zoom in and out when viewing pictures in explorer and just how much photo tweaking you can do with Photo Gallery before ever needing to fire-up the Gimp. I was planning to install Picasa this week but I’m convinced otherwise. I will have to work out how to upload pictures to my Google photo gallery however.

We also got to see Microsoft’s answer to Google Earth. Take a trip there yourself to make up your own mind.

From the demos, Movie Maker and DVD Maker combined can turn any photo set into a polished DVD whilst adding an Xbox and/or TV Tuner begins to make the Sky box, video recorder and stereo look a bit ancient.

Trouble is, I don’t want an XBox to play games and the promise of other media extenders at lower prices hasn’t bourne fruit. I’ll keep waiting. In the meantime, I’ll also dream of being able to sync my iPod to Windows Media Player and not have to use iTunes whilst considering if the Microsoft Zune will do a better job – doubt it.

The impending arrival of Home Server will be welcomed in this house as it helps backups, seems to give us back Remote Desktop for Vista Home Premium and moves us one step closer to doing the file storage thing properly. If it let me load Apache and Mercury on it too, it would be perfect. I’m sure it won’t though.

I’m on the beta list but have not surfaced enough to be given a test pack. The nice chaps today have said they’ll pass our details on to the Product Manager and ask him if we can shuffle up the stack a bit. So who knows…

One last point. The people at Microsoft UK seem a contented bunch, even when assualted with some really dumb-ass questions. I know MS are an easy target for assault but let’s be honest, other than the occasional bit of over-the-top bloatware (MS Office), they are not a bad bunch. That’s my view anyway. Even if we didn’t get a goody bag at the event. Not event a new pen.

Vista didn’t like me simply dropping my hard-disk into the new rig so I had to reinstall Vista. Not as bad as it sounds becasue the USERS and PROGRAM FILES folders are saved by the install routine. So after a fresh build and some driver updates, I simply created the user accounts from scratch and copied-in the relevant copy of C:\WINDOWS.OLD\USERS that was needed.

Sure the registry is blank and I need to reinstall all my programs again but clever apps like Firefox and iTunes picked-up my old settings and didn’t need to be tweaked at all.

All-in-all the computer is now much faster. WinTV has even decided to work proerly which is actually a relief because I realised that I would be dropping my Audigy 2 sound card in favour of the on-board sound and that meant no “line-in” to patch the TV card into. But it just magically works without the cable now.

Old Vista rating 3.0. New rating 4.5. So now the slow thing is my 1GB of 667MHz rather than 800Mhz memory that the board can take. But I’ll put that in my wish-list for Christmas 2008 along with a processor upgrade, a pair of SLI grpahics cards and a SATA disk. What I’m really saying here is that I do have upgrade options over the next 3-5 years whereas my old board was pretty much at the limit.

So, all I have to do now is get my old board into another case and build it for one of Julie’s friends. Until then the living room is a bit cluttered. She hasn’t complained yet but I don’t want to push my luck much further.

So I suffered all the pain of moving Vista from one disk to another and NOW they decide to release a tool that moves your programs as well. Easy Transfer Companion will fill the gaps that Easy Transfer doesn’t cover. If this works it seems like a simple hassle-free option for moving between one PC and another.

I of course am making more work for myself by upgrading the motherboard and processor of the home machine this weekend. As such, I’ve not re-activated Vista yet. So I will drop the current hard-disk into the completely rebuit machine on Friday night and will then be calling the Microsoft call-centre in India to ask for a new activation key. As I run an OEM version, I may be refused. That would be a real pain. Apparently some people have been successful in getting their OEM build transferred.

As my old A7V333 board runs AGP rather than PCI-Express, which for the unintitated means that it is old technology. Changing the processor for a faster one meant changing the board which meant changing my video card. So A big upheaval. Should keep me busy whilst my better half is out and about this weekend.

On a different note, I got an email published in PC Pro this month (cryptically dated June 2007). Which was nice.

I was determined this blog was’t going to be a tech-only rant but it just seems I’m doing lots of tech things right now… I’ve just noticed that some email didn’t make the “Windows (deceivingly) easy transfer” process. I’ve since fired-up the old disk and ran an export and import to get all my old mail back. If you have to transfer Vista to a new disk, I’d suggest you use this method to move mail messages as it actually works.

Windows Easy Transfer is looking increasingly pants.

You cannot restore a backup from the same disk you run Windows. So spending all last night backing-up to a folder on the new disk was pointless. In the end, a clean install, followed by re-installing the core apps, a restore from “Windows Easy Transfer” to get some of the profile settings and it is working. Good old XCOPY /s/h/e/y got me through the rest.

“Windows Easy Transfer” works great for accounts that don’t exist on the new machine. But as I had created my own account at install, my mail has gone off the radar. Never mind.

So in summary, backup everything with something other than Windows Backup (even if you are just copying all your music and photos to a blank DVD using XCOPY), take a note of all the applications you have installed (and get their disks to-hand), save your settings using “Windows Easy Transfer”. On the new disk, install Vista, then your applications and get any updates you had before. Now run “Windows Easy Transfer” to restore your profiles. Recover any missing files from your backup.

Far too painful. Moral is to only trust Vista to format a bootable disk partition and to use good old XCOPY and a USB-attached backup disk to be sure you have everything rather than Windows Backup which is slow and quirky.

I get kit donated to me now and again. Recently it was the pair of servers from Martin at work. They both had bits missing and so far I’ve managed to sell some of the bits and buy others to get one good dual-processor box running. It needs a disk and a clean Windows build but it looks promising as a possible replacemnt for Pixie. The other box however doesn’t have any processors. And it needs a pair of Athlon MP parts.

After eBaying some stuff, I’ve decided that rather than continue to bid like crazy for every Athlon MP processor pair that arrives (circa £200), I’m going to instead upgrade my main home PC and transplant my current parts into one of the cases that the MP boards arrived in.

The other thing I’ve done (because I’m mad like that) was to buy a bigger hard disk. The current 80GB was fine until we started bulk loading our CD collection into itunes. Now we are running a bit low. The question is though, how do you move Vista onto a new disk.

The easy option is Acronis Disk Director which will copy he paritions and resize on-the-fly. It takes about 15hours but that’s fine. I left it overnight. In the morning, I made the new disk the primary master and restarted. Didn’t work.

It appears that Acronis still don’t know how to crack the Vista file-system. So I’m not tempted to shell out again for Migrate Easy even though the product description states exactly what I’m trying ot do.

Vista comes with a feature called “Windows easy transfer” but that assumes you’ve performed a clean install and installed all your apps before running it. Which kind of makes the utility a bit marginal.

I’ve now performed a clean install onto the new disk and am running a backup job under the smaller disk, dumping into a file on the new one. The plan is to restore from that folder after booting back as the new disk. I have no idea if this will work but I really can’t suffer having to reinstall all my applciations from scratch again. So it is another overnighter running the backup and I’ll need most of tomorrow to do the restore. I’ll run the “Windows easy transfer” as well just to make sure I get everything.

Taking the computer out for another day will not make me popular. I hope it works this time as I’m back to work on Tuesday and have run out of time.

At some point next week my new Asus MN4SLI motherboard, PCI-E graphics card and AMD 64 x2 4200+ will arrive and that’ll be even more of a distraction from my cycle training and Cisco studies….