Windows 7 Beta

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

I have downloaded the beta of Windows 7. Would it be better to set up a separate partition with Partition Magic or put it on a separate hard drive?

Also will two active partitions work on the same hard drive?

drc

The Franchise · Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 460 Location: Arkansas

I have the beta on a different HD. That would be the safest way.
Jimmy

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

OK. How do you work it when you want to boot from the drive with Windows 7 on it?
Do you have to change the bios each time?

drc

The Franchise · Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 460 Location: Arkansas

donrc,
I have the beta on an old HD and when I want to use the beta I unhook my primary HD and connect the HD with the beta on it.
Jimmy

PhotoCarp · Joined: Sep 06, 2007 Posts: 109

A separate HDD is probably the safest method but the easiest is to put it on a virtual machine. That way you can run it in what is basically a sealed environment and switch back to your current OS quickly.

Two options are Microsoft's VirtualPC and Sun Microsystem's Virtual Box. Google either one for more info.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Unless your bios is really LAME, you most likely have a boot menu.

On both of my computers, one that's 8 years old and one that's just three years old,
from different manufacturers, pressing F11 at boot gives me the boot menu.

It lists every drive in my system and all I have to do is cursor down to the drive I want to boot from and press ENTER.

I have four OS's on my system and they are in three different HD's.
Now that's SAFE.
Never in my wildest dreams (nightmares) would I ever put two OS's on the same drive. Lose the drive and you've lost TWO OS's.....not just one.

Well, that's just my suggestion.
Suit yourself!

Doc Cool

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

Cool! Gives me an excuse to buy a new larger sata drive. Laughing

Thanks guys! I'll think about it. Cool

drc

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

For the price of what many spend on smokes, bottled water or other unnecessary items, in just one month, they could have a new hard drive.

I've bought SATA2 drives for as low as $59, on sale at local retail stores.
You just have to watch for the sales.

If your monitor is slow to warm up and present a picture, you might miss the options to Press F2 for setup, Press F11 for boot menu, etc.
Each bios type, will present different options.
Check out all the options for your own bios.
Some name brand PC's won't have very many options at all.
That's why I love my MSI mobo.....it's feature RICH!

But, using a boot menu is really the simplest way to boot to different HD's.
I can even select to boot to a flash drive or bootable SD Memory Card.
My own boot menu looks something like this:

Error: image could not be loaded. Image is not available from server

Image URL: http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g90/DrWho1943/BootScreenF11.jpg

A friend of mine, also a tech, has set up switches on a customers PC, so he can boot to different HD's while excluding the non-boot drives.

A simple little DPDT toggle switch can direct power to one drive or the other, but never both.

Plugging and unplugging SATA connectors adds a LOT of wear and tear to the connectors and can cause premature failures.
I'd not be doing that any more than absolutely necessary.

Good Luck,
The Doctor Cool

goretsky · Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 2:09 am Post subject:

Hello,

I would recommend installing it to a separate hard disk drive. If you plan on experimenting with different operating systems (or configurations) then you might want to consider installing a removable drive tray frame for mounting removable drive tray carriers in, and then some spare carriers to install hard disk drives in as you go about testing.

The advantage to using a dedicated hard disk drive like this is that you do not end up with situations where multiple boot loaders are installed to the master boot record the drive or the boot sectors of the disk volumes. Sometimes they do not work too well with each other, have to be installed in a certain order or, if they are beta code, have bugs that prevent you from accessing the other disk volumes.. Using removable hard disk drives is a nice way to get around that particular problem.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

wheelhorse42 · Joined: Feb 27, 2003 Posts: 1171

Best bet is to just get another harddrive and install it on the new drive. I just got a W.D 500G for $65.00 plus free shiping.

SolarisDude · Joined: Feb 28, 2009 Posts: 1

Try either the free VMWare or Sun's VirtualBox. Either will create a mini working partition for Windows 7. I use VirtualBox and run Windows 7 in there with no problems.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Anyone, wanting to play around with different OS's, especially Beta's, will soon find the benefit of having multiple hard drives.

I have four HD's in my own system and yes, I run XP as my main OS and am testing both Vista Ultimate 64 and Windows 7, 64 bit.

For whatever it's worth.....Windows 7, 64 bit, runs the fastest on my system, taking full advantage of my dual core AMD X2-64 5200+ CPU and my six gigs of DDR2 800mhz RAM.

Finally, I have nothing but SATA2 drives in my PC.
That greatly improves performance.
Even at SATA2 speeds, the HD is still the biggest bottleneck in the system.

I'll be glad to see what the next generation of HD's, brings in the way of improved performance.
Just getting the Windows Kernel up off of the slow HD and into fast RAM, during boot up, greatly improves system performance.
There's a simple registry tweak for that.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor Cool

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

Doctor,
And what,pray tell, does that tweak consist of? Rolling Eyes

drc

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Hmmmm! That gets dicey if you're not comfortable editing the registry.

But, here's the registry tweaks I use on Vista.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]
"WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="1000"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"="1"
"LargeSystemCache"="1"

The lines in Blue can be copied and then pasted into a "Notepad" document, and then saved with the name VistaTweaks.reg

Then to tweak any Vista install, you just need to run the script ONE time.

The first line shortens the shutdown delay time to just one second.
The next line puts the Windows Kernel in RAM where it can run many times faster than when it's running from the HD.

I've used these tweaks more times than I can count, with never any problems and a noticeable improvement in overall system performance.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor Cool

goretsky · Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 3:28 am Post subject:

Hello,

I believe the WaitToKillServiceTimeout tells the operating system how long to wait in milliseconds between sending the request to a service to stop and terminating it. The default value is 30000 (30 seconds), which I am guessing represents a safe value determined by Microsoft and used by programmers who write services and expect that their program will have about 30 seconds to finish up whatever tasks it needs to, safely close any files or handles it might have open and exit gracefully. While it may be possible to reduce that somewhat, the actual amount is going to vary based on the amount of software running on the system when the shutdown request occurs, the speed of the hardware being used and so forth.

It might be safer to reduce the value by a few seconds (say five seconds at a time), use the system for several days with the shortened value, check the event logs for errors relating to the previous shutdown when the system boots up and repeat until happy with the shut-down speed, or non-recoverable errors occur as a result of services being prematurely killed at shutdown.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

It's all the SAFE defaults built into Windows that makes it run like an OLD dog, with three legs. Laughing

I repeat..... I've executed these tweaks on literally hundreds of PC's now with never any problem. I did it on all my own PC's for several months before ever trying it out on a customers PC. Wink

I first experienced built in redundancy, many years ago, in the Commodore 64 computer.
It seemed to take forever to just load a program.
So, I re-wrote the Kernel (the OS) to reduce or eliminate the redundancy and wound up with the fastest C-64 in the country.

MS has built a lot of redundancy into its OS's and that's suppose to make it safer.
But in reality, it only serves to make a PC run slower.
That may have been necessary during the in-house development period, but out here in the working world, speed is everything.

Try it or don't try it, but if you DO try it, I think you'll like it.
For safety and your own piece of mind, make a backup of your registry before you make any changes to your registry.

Similarly, I fly in the face of all the Nay-Sayers by shutting down all the "Services" that I don't need. That's about 20 services in XP and nearly 40 in Vista.

I got my "Services to Safely shut down" info from Black Viper's web site.
Just for ease of application, I put them into batch files for Quick application.

Again, this was well tested before I ever applied this tweak to a customer's PC.

See you in the funny papers!

Doc Cool

goretsky · Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:01 am Post subject:

Hello,

I am sure the change works well on your computers as well as those you have configured for your clients. What I would be concerned about is someone who has not performed all your other optimizations adding this entry to their registry and having something like a scheduled backup service end prematurely.

Regards,

Aryeh Lɾ"*",8,1 Goretsky

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

OK Guys, and should this tweak also work on Windows 7?

drc

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Windows 7 is just Vista with a boob-job, tummy tuck and botox. Laughing

So all my Vista tweaks work equally well on Win-7.

I've had to incorporate a couple of new tweaks for Win-7, since they (M$) have made it harder for a user or tech to make needed changes to the OS either during or after install.

For the working tech, MS is making the job harder with each new version of windows. I pity the hard-working IT specialists that have to keep up with all the changes.

I'm currently running Win-7, build 7077 on a new HD and it's running very well indeed on my system. (actually, much faster than XP or even Vista)

A fast CPU and lots of ram are a must, for any kind of performance.
A SATA2 HD doesn't hurt anything either. Wink

In this forum, we need a Windows 7 section.
Most other forums have already done that.
The Windows Vista forum has split off a Sub-Forum, just for Win-7:
http://www.sevenforums.com/

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor Cool

goretsky · Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2009 8:07 pm Post subject:

Hello,

Yes and no.... In some sense, every version of Microsoft Windows builds on the previous version, as Windows 98 did for Windows 95 and Windows XP did for Windows 2000, but the changes to Microsoft Windows 7 go beyond cosmetic skin-deep changes like improvements to the Desktop and Taskbar, boot-time performance improvements and tweaks to the security model. The Engineering Windows 7 blog is a good stepping stone, however, I would suggest watching Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich's video Inside Windows 7 for a discussion of what has changed in the new kernel for the operating system, it is part of the Going Deep series videos discussing core Microsoft technologies, which are very interesting to learn about.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky