[Linux + Vista + Xp : Dualboot Scenario Guides]

Hi Falcon1986

Ya, Vista is a real Monster when it comes to setting up a Dual or Triple boot situation now.

The fact that boot.ini is no more and Vista uses the BCD instead makes dual booting a nightmare compared to how simple it used to be.

I've been working a bit (very little so far) on an article to try and explain this to our members but it's difficult. That article you linked looks well researched and concise and I'm glad it has Linux boot flavors as well.

If you want to put something together for us here from what you can gather from that and other articles on this, we'd be more than glad to look at it for a tutorial. If this link is all you want to do tho, that's great also and I'll continue working on one in between all my other stuff to do...

Either way, we'll get something on this together someday and post it for our members. We're working on a seperate Vista section I think, because it's so damn different, it needs it's own section.

Thx for the Link!

[Bytes In Kb, Kb In Mb?]

Also remember that it makes a difference how you type it as to what it means. CAPS means something different than regular type does.

For instance...kb or Kb means Kilobits, where kB or KB means KiloBytes.

Same for mb, or Mb means Megabits, and mB or MB means MegaBytes.

Whenever the lower case "b" is used it represents "bits" and the Upper case "B" means "Bytes"

This can make a HUGE DIFFERENCE if you use the wrong letter case in some aspects, so keep those straight.

[..anyone Got A Socket 478]

Hi Martint

It looks like you found what you were looking for so I'm going to close this thread as Completed.

If you're still looking for possibly more of this item, just PM me and we'll reopen this for you, but as of now this one looks like it's done.

Thx for using the Besttechie Garage Sale!

[Dual Core Processors - Vista Tweak]

Actually, I had to open this topic to make a small change to this.

The "Run" option is still available on the Start menu in Vista while using the Aero theme. You don't have to run the Classic Style to have the Run box on the start menu. It's still available by right clicking an open part of the taskbar, or the Start Orb, select Properties, click Start Menu tab, check the "Start Menu" box and then click the Customize button, and it's available in the list for you to choose.

Sorry JSKY, but I had to add that for our Vista users!

[Check It Out]

Thanks guys-N-gals

No, I haven't forgotten anyone here....um...(what's his name again...) um..(heheh-heh)

Kidding, it's good to be back!

Sorry for the really extended MIA this time, I really needed some time to myself and still haven't gotten everything back to normal yet but working on it.

I have missed everyone allot and that's why I had to come by and say Hi and make a few posts too. I have so much to say about Vista these days that I really want to share it around here.

I've spent the last 2 months doing some really in depth digging around in this new monster and have much to pass on to our members who may be struggling with, or looking into getting Vista.

I know others here have been using Vista as well (Jeff & JSKY at least) and they probably have much to say too, so I have an idea I'm going to post in Admin & Staff for consideration.

Anyway, I'll be around, maybe not as much as I was before I took an extended Leave of Absence, but I'll be here. I can never leave my desire to help and teach others about computer stuff behind, and our BT Community members come first.

[Check It Out]

Hi Everyone!

Sorry it's been so long, I'll be in just "now & then" for awhile before I can get my full "legs" back I think, we'll see.

Till then I thought you maybe interested in a small tutorial I wrote about Changing the Default Hard Disk Percentage Size for System Restore in Vista and why it could need doing in the first place.

I'll add more to it later concerning "VSS" and "Previous Version", which are both briefly touched on in the article, and which have everything to do with System Restore Bloat in Vista. I hope some of you find this article useful, I've seen many folks upset with the fact that you can't alter this setting in Vista anymore, so I thought I'd share this little tidbit of excess knowledge I have about it with you.

There are a few other things that were useful in XP but have been Omitted from Vista's Interface level that can be adjusted through a command line session, I'll work on those later for you.

I also have some very interesting and Fun tweaks for those of you who remember how to edit the Registry from a previous tutorial!

I'll show you how to change and personalize a few items that we all have on our Vista machines. Be it funny or a tad on the "naughty" side, these tweaks will bring out the "You" on your Vista Box!

Take Care

[Change Vista's Default System Restore Size Per Disk Percentage]

Hiya!

In Windows XP, users could adjust how much percentage space System Restore could use on any disk. The default was 10% of the disk size was reserved for System Restore, but knowledgable users could adjust this setting in the System applet located in Control Panel.

With Windows Vista though, a few things have changed in System restore, and I must say that it's "Not for the Better" IMHO. Users have no interface available in which they can change the amount of disk percetage System Restore uses, and Vista now uses a 15% default instead of the 10% in XP.

Not a big deal you say....Wrong I say!

With Hard Drive Disk capacities shooting skyward on almost a monthly basis, it's not uncommon for users to have 150, 200, 250, and even 300 Gigabyte drives, and if you have these spanned across a RAID Array, the amount of space reserved for System Restore can be staggering!!!!!

I have 3, 250G drives installed in my system, but not in a RAID Array so the system sees 3 separate 250G drives instead of one massive 750G one. Still, 15% of 250G is 37.5G of space, and that's allot of restore points. More than I would ever suggest, or dare to go back to those earliest ones. If I went with a RAID0 array, this would be a whopping 112G's of drive space reserved for System Restore. I don't think so, thank you very much Mr. Vista!

Another thing one might notice in Windows Vista, is that individual Restore points also take up considerable more space than they did in XP. In XP the typical restore point size was 20 to 30MB per restore point. In Vista however, it's not uncommon to see a single restore point that can take up to 2 GIGABYTES of space and more, WAY More, possibly 4 Times more.....and yes..I said GIGABYTES TOO!!!

That's over 100 times larger in the smaller example and 400 times larger is possible and proven...why the differnce??

VSS, (Volume Shadow Service) and a little thing called "Previous Version". Previous Versions basically keeps track of EVERYTHING you do on your computer, so if you happen to one day "barf" that spreadsheet you've been working on for weeks, you can retore it back to a previous version and save your butt. Now this seems like a great idea and it can be at times, but a big problem is this...Previous Versions is not available to Vista Basic & Home Premium users, but VSS still keeps track of the changes on those systems regardless. This equates to a big waste for users of these operating systems because while VSS keeps track of all changes made to everything in your Vista Computer, you don't have any way to use it to restore these things if needed. So why is it there??? Basically so MS can make it more "Appealing" for you to upgrade your lowly Vista version to Ultimate..no more than that really.

But by far the biggest issue with this can be the Performance Hit you can take from a severly fragmented System Restore space. It can be a pretty significant hit and unfortunately, the Windows Defrag tool does NOT defrag System Restore, so with a full slot of restore points you could be getting less than average performance from your Hard Drives and System.

But I digress slightly, I promised to show you how to adjust the size of disk space Sytem Restore can use in Vista. It's not a simple thing either, it requires a somewhat convoluted command line process, but I'll try to explain it in easy terms for you here.

1) Click Start

2) From the Start menu Click All programs - Accessories

3) On the Accessories menu Right Click on the Command Prompt option

4) From the drop Down menu that appears, click the Run as administrator option

5) When the Command Prompt window opens type: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=X: (sp) /For=X: (sp) /Maxsize=XX.XGB

and Press Enter

NOTE: X: = Drive Letter of Target Drive, EG; C:

NOTE: (sp) = Space

NOTE: XX.X = the maximum size in GB's or MB's

6) If everything is done correctly you should see a message saying "Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association"

This is how it should look for drive C:, remember there are Spaces between each command group:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=12.5GB

I recommend around a 6 - 8% size on drives smaller than 60G, and possibly less on larger drives. Remember, I DO NOT RECOMMEND using restore points older than 1 week!! It's up to you if you do, but remember that the further back you go, the more chance of a failed or unstable restore occuring.

Now there is a way to keep the fragmentation problem under control, actually a couple of them. You can get a Third Party Defrag Tool that also defrag's System Restore (many of them do just this), or every now and then you can just delete your restore points and start anew by turning off System Restore and running a Disk Cleanup, then turn Sys Restore back on. This will reclaim some space temporarily and in a sense, defrag the Sys Restore files.

Thanx, and Good to be Back!!!

NOTE - This is a tested tweak and done properly will cause no harm, however, Besttechie.net makes no Warranty on anything concerning system changes.

[Windows Xp]

when you buy a xpcd

it is yours until you install it then it becomes a borrowed

disk and is the property of microsoft

read the eula

Thats not quite how it goes Marty. You Don't ever "own" the OS, even before you install it. The only thing you actually "Own" is the plastic the disk is made from, the rest is the Property Of MS and only Licensed to you to use as instructed or allowed by your license agreement terms (single, commercial..etc)

You never "Buy" software, you only kind of "Lease" it as you will never own the actual code because it's the intellectual property of someone else and they're allowing you a license to use it. They can totally control HOW you use it since it is their legal property still, and this is what bugs and confuses people still. Too many folks think that they actually have bought the software on a disk they purchase, but that's just not so and it's almost impossible to explain that to some.

[Yea Or Nay]

GOOD LORD!!

Can we consider this an "Illegal Topic" because of TT75's link....????

Hmmm...ban TT...don't ban TT....THAT is the question...

Heheh.

Nah, that's a very useful bit of info there. How many times have we fielded questions about using a retail disk to fix an OEM key install or vice-versa eh.

I had run across that page some time ago too but I had forgotten about it till I read this, so I think it's time to add it as a file on my system for future use.

Thx Don!

Hi Preston!! Write me you idiot!!

[Now What?]

"No Icons or Start Bar" tells me Explorer.EXE either isn't loading at all, or hasn't finished loading.

Same here.

Sounds like it's hanging up and not initializing properly.

Doing a Repair Install may fix that up also.

Liz, doing a Repair install leaves all your personal data intact, all it does is rebuild the Windows Installation Files and the shell (Explorer.exe) is part of that. You will have to go to WinUpdate and reinstall any updates past what your install CD is up to. If it's SP1, then SP2 will need to be reinstalled, if it's SP2 then just the 68 or so new updates since then need to be installed....heh. (can't wait for SP3)

[Downgrading To Windows 2000]

While more memory is definately the most likely fix for your slow XP install, there are other factors. As Bill asks, can we see your specs please?

Also, as stated, you can't dowgrade from XP to W2K using a W2K install disk, it won't let you do that. You have to reformat the XP partition first and then install W2K clean.

If XP is super-slow on this machine, don't expect W2K to be blazingly fast either...

[Windows Not Booting .... Puzzled]

That's a rare occurence with XP...fortunately, but not rare enough that you didn't get bit by it so I guess that's little consolation eh..

Try running fixmbr at recovery first and see if that gets the install to boot again. Sometimes this causes a boot sector corruption (no idea why) but it may be the fast & dirty way to get it back. I might still run a repair install afterwards tho, that's a personal pref that I would think about still, just to clean things up some.

What program was it that messed things up so bad anyway?

[Talk About Bloat...]

jcl

I can see them possibly needing a certain part(s) of the .net setup to properly run the advisor, but you think they'd "compartmentalize" any needed section and offer that to folks who simply want to run the Upgrade Advisor.

Instead of making them go thru the entire, very long, utterly useless for most, complete .Net FrameWork install, offer a smaller self-extracting/installing package that's just enough to get what's needed. They should think of the 42 million or so of users that don't need the .Net setup...ya think eh.

[Talk About Bloat...]

Mac - RC1 "Release Candidate 1" Build 5728, basically not Beta anymore but there will be numerous more "builds" before Vista Final Final commercial release to the General Public. All the additions-subtractions are done, now it's fine tuning, tweaking, and stabilizing....and ALLOT of that to do yet.

jcl - Yah, I started nodding off as it "Built" it's libraries and Framework assemblies.

664 "Temp" keys?? I can see no reason why it would need to build 664 temp registry keys...for ANY reason! Of course, it Added almost 39,000 new keys so those could be ones they misspelled or sumthin eh..

I know .Net Framework was big, but wow...all that just to run the Upgrade Advisor...that's Nuts!

Blimy - well, not really complicated, no more than installing anything these days, I just wanted to catalogue any changes to this old system if I plan on running Vista on it. I figured I'd just run the upgrade advisor and that would be that....but NOOOOoooooo...I needed El-Stupido .Net Framework to run the advisor, and THAT'S where all this crud started.

All for 25+ seconds of Upgrade Adv. run and a 1 page report on stuff I already knew needed upgrading...my Graphics card.

For that, I installed 858 new files, 38,857 new registry keys, updated 90 items and deleted 665 more....

What an absolute WASTE of my time...

[Talk About Bloat...]

Hey Folks

I've never seen so much bloat for a simple run of an upgrade advisor in my LIFE!!

I finally broke down and d'loaded Vista RC1 to test and just get a feel for, so after the 2.35G Vista d'load (in only 42 minutes ) I decided to run the Vista Upgrade Advisor just to make sure of what software I could run or any other little h'ware issues like scanner etc.

Well, to run the upgrade advisor it requires MS .Net Framework installed....sigh...ok. D'load dotnetfx.exe and as usual I start my InstallWatch Pro just to make sure I capture all system changes in case I want to delete it entirely.

So, start the .Net install.....wait.....wait....wait.....wiat......wtia....(drift off to sleepy-by-land)twia....wiat....wtai....wait....wait some more...33 MINUTES LATER...the install completes!!

K....WTHeck is up with that!!

Well...THIS is WTHeck is up with that....

The installation performed the following activity:

858 files added

1 file deleted

45 files updated

38857 registry entries added

664 registry entries deleted

45 registry entries updated

Can you believe that????

Just so I could run the Vista Upgrade Advisor????

Almost 39,000 Registry keys added????

Almost 860 new Files????

And what's up with DELETING 664 Registry entries???????

I've heard of some pretty nonsensical things in my day, but to have to go thru ALL THAT just to run the Vista Upgrade Advisor...which took a whole 25 seconds to run and do it's thing BTW...is almost Beyond Belief!!!

No WONDER MS takes flak for it's bloat....lord almighty!

[Jet Fuel]

WHOA!!!!!!!!!!

5 ALARM FIRE in Comedy Club!!

Why didn't you guys Call me...

Holy cow...the smell in here is atrocious, my eyes are burnin.

[Cannibal Jokes]

Too harsh actually...sorry, gotta go I think.

[Upgrading]

Umm, I think deaf_girl's response was incorrect tho, you CAN Upgrade to Husband 1.0 but it's an expensive upgrade and all you really get is Boyfriend 1.0 that doesn't come with an uninstaller...and the HardSxDrive seems to fail after awhile. That leads to another costly "soft"ware upgrade called "E-D_pills" 4.2

[Bad Day At Hallmark Cards]

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!

I Love those!

I know I could've used one or 2 of those myself sometime, and I think most of us could say that!

[Old Girlfriend]

LOL!!

I KNOW how that feels too...I've been celebrating my "Free" and much less stressful life for almost 10 years now and couldn't be happier

[Router Problem]

Sorry Liz, been very very busy with spammers hitting us and trying to filter known spam domains from the site...yuck.

So the router has good conectivity but it's still dropping out after a few minutes?

Does it do this for all web browsing or just when you watch videos?

When watching a vid and it drops, do you lose net connection totally or just drop the vid but stay connected to the site?

In normal browsing, does it lose connection or just start to slow down?

[Send To This Board]

If the image is in a PowerPoint presentation, you'll need PowerPoint to extract it, not just a PowerPoint viewer either Marty.

If you have Powerpoiint (the application) open it, then click "file - open" and point it to where the presentation is stored. I don't know if you know where your email client stores it's data, or what client you use, but many times if you mouse-over the PPoint icon in the mail it will show where it's located in the bottom address bar, so you can find it that way.

In any case, you need the application to extract any single image from a presentation, which then can be moved to your My Pictures folder or somewhere else you want, and uploaded to a post here.

[Trying To Fix Someone's Pc But Hit A Snag]

Yes, unrecognized ROM drives on power-on are always BIOS related, that's where they're controlled at that stage, generic Oak drivers in the BIOS hard code.

As long as the drive works at all that is.

[Usb Port]

Most definately, anything you do to try to repair that port if the machine is still under warranty, will probably VOID the entire warranty so take the rest of this post with that firmly planted in your memory.

That connector cover is supposed to be attached solidly, so I would say that it will need to be Replaced rather than repaired.

Is it part of a USB hub? (more than 1 port side by side) If so you can easily change the entire hub for pretty cheap, you can buy interior USB port hubs at most electronic stores.

I do know of someone who fixed an exact problem like this, using an epoxy glue (sparingly at strategic points) and carefully placed bends in the contacts to provide some friction. Here, actually is the post with pictures on how he did it, but personally I would replace it myself, if you're at all slightly mechanically inclined.

[Mothers And Wisdom]

LOL!

Yes, I have that cartoon in my email archives as well, so I know EXACTLY what the kid says JDoors! (not like it takes any huge imagination to figure out what's "bleeped out" there..)