WitwickiTech.com

I decided to try out the new Windows 7 feature of native boot to VHD. With the public drop of the SharePoint 2010 Beta, I decided I wanted to keep my development stuff completely separate from my normal computer usage. The native boot to VHD seemed like a good fit. Somewhere down the line I’ll put together a proper set of virtual images for playing around with SharePoint 2010 but I thought it’d be nice to see how it runs on bare metal.

Anyway, from browsing around, I figured this would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong. I started off with Scott Hanselman’s excellent article. I booted from the Win7 install DVD, followed the bouncing code ball and created a virtual disk. This was the point I first ran into problems. Somehow, I couldn’t figure out how to “exit and go back to the setup window”. I ended up rebooting a few times and learning a bit about DISKPART via the help command. On it’s own, that’s not a bad thing but I was trying to do something else, not learn about command line disk tools. Anyway, I eventually figured out how to get the vdisk attached and recognized by setup but it just wouldn’t work. After a bit of browsing and reading, I found one line in a Windows 7 Hacker article on doing this that stated that trying to do a fresh install to the VHD just won’t work. You’d think I’d have expected this since pretty much every article went from DISKPART to using an existing image (in a variety of ways).

So now I had to come up with an image. As most people know by now, Windows Virtual PC doesn’t support 64-bit guest OSes. I already knew that and had been playing with Sun VirtualBox in preparation for my full farm simulation images. For some reason, VirtualBox disk images have a .vdi extension instead of .vhd. I haven’t had time to research why this is, but I didn’t want to take any chances so I created the vhd using Windows 7 Disk Management, then added it to the VirtualBox media manager and proceeded to install Windows 7. Easy peasy.

Now that I had an image, I needed to add it to the Boot Manager. Since I’d read all those articles on doing this, it was fairly simple. Using the Hanselman article referenced above (I’d printed it out), I followed the steps in an administrator command prompt then rebooted. Voila! I had two choices now and happily chose my new dev image.

BAM! BSOD! Crap…

In my haste to get this working, I hadn’t really thought through what I was doing and forgot to do the sysprep on the image before trying to native boot. Since the hardware was real now and radically different from the virtualized hardware, it just didn’t work. It took me awhile to figure this out though, especially since I couldn’t read the BSOD before reboot. I did manage to get a partial read of it through good timing with my BlackBerry camera but it said something about a virus which didn’t really help.

So, back to the image in VirtualBox and time to do a sysprep. Fire that up and get a fatal error. Google to the rescue again. This time I had to turn off the Windows Media Player Networking Service. Did that, set it running and soon enough I had a sysprepped image. Tried the native boot, and lo and behold it’s working! Yay me…

Unfortunately, this took an entire evening so I didn’t have time to get to the SharePoint 2010 Installation. At any rate, although I blew a lot of time on this, it was mostly my fault for trying to be different. If you’re looking to do this for yourself, there’s only a few things you really need to do:

1. create an image and sysprep it (use VirtualBox, VMWare or the Windows AIK)
2. BCDEDIT the boot menu
3. use it!

I can hardly wait to play with the SharePoint 2010 beta – news on that shortly…

- Dave

I use virtual machines for all my development work. One of the projects I was working on was based around a simple desktop application so I had setup a Windows XP image with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1. I had used the same product key as the host machine since it would be running on the same hardware. When I moved it over to my new machine, the Genuine Advantage thing kicked in and started whining.

Rather than dealing with that, I decided to give Windows 7 XP Mode a try. So far, it seems pretty good. It appears to run faster than a discrete VM, it’s well integrated with the operating system and it automatically recognized all my drives, both internal and external. One thing I found disappointing was the number of updates required. I’ve come to expect to spend a significant amount of time patching the OS when building VMs but I didn’t anticipate doing the same with a newly downloaded VM. All in all though, a very positive experience. If you have native XP software that you need to run, this is definitely the way to go.

- Dave

After more than five years, I’ve finally purchased a new main system. My previous system was based around a P4 3Ghz processor in a custom system that I built myself. Over the years I’ve always assembled my own desktop systems since that has allowed me to make the trade offs necessary to ensure upgradeability. Despite my old system being over five years old, between regular upgrades and my rabid fascination with system optimization, it still ran decently. Sure, it was getting a little slow but it still met most of my needs. The need for a new system was triggered by two things. One, I needed a platform capable of supporting 64-bit processing. The 2010 version of SharePoint is 64-bit only and I wanted to be ready to play when the public beta drops later in November. Two, my kids are both old enough to want to spend time on the computer and having only two computers (I have an older laptop as well) meant they were constantly fighting over who’s turn it was. So, even though my old computer is being replaced for me, it’s getting handed down to one of the kids while the other will now share the laptop with my wife (who so rarely uses the computer, it’s not really sharing).

I began by pricing out what I wanted with a look to assembling it myself again. However, with the release of the new i7-8xx processor family, the prices on pre-built systems were awesome. After pricing out what it would cost to build exactly what I wanted vs buying from Dell, I discovered that I couldn’t build one myself for even close to the price that Dell systems were going for. We’re talking a 30 – 40% difference. With the money I saved, I’m halfway to buying a decent laptop for myself as well.

Dell Studio XPS 8000

I settled on the Studio XPS 8000 line because I wanted an i7-860 processor. Although the i7-9xx line is positioned as being higher performance, the main advantage there is the triple channel memory instead of the dual channel memory on the i7-8×0 line. Conversely, the i7-8×0 line has more aggressive turbo mode technology and even though the i7-860 and the i7-920 have the same price point, the i7-860 outperforms the i7-920 in nearly all benchmarks (the exception being raw memory access). Based on my years of system tweaking, memory has seldom been the bottleneck so I really wasn’t worried about that. For a complete comparison, check one of the many reviews online. I read most of them and they all generally came to the same conclusion.

The last time I put together a system, I used Dell as my baseline for determining whether it was cheaper to buy or build. Last time around, because of the extras you get automatically with the Dell system such as keyboard, mouse, OS, etc. it was cheaper by around 20% for me to build. This time around, I had selected the stuff I wanted and was pricing both locally and through TigerDirect. Locally was consistently 10% more expensive no matter what trade offs I made so that was out. I had a decent system specced and priced and then went to Dell to compare. Well, they didn’t have any i7 systems when I first checked but by customizing the i5 package, I could get what I wanted. I was shocked to see how cheap it was. Anyway, as I normally do, I slept on it and went back the next day to check again and noticed that Dell had added some i7 configurations including one that was exactly what I had customized to. Even better, they dropped the price on that package. So, I ordered it. They’ve since changed the packages around but the one I ordered is still there and still cheap.

Well, my hardware finally arrived and the first thing I noticed was that it was white with a black front. For some reason, I was expecting it to be all black even though the pictures of it are white. Anyway, that aside, it seems to be well built. There’s no bad surprises and I appreciate the “gadget tray” on top with a couple extra USB ports. Setup was easy enough, no problems with plugging everything in. I fired up with the pre-installed OS just to confirm that the hardware was working and all was good.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Even though I’ve had a retail copy of Vista Ultimate that I won at some Microsoft thing sitting around for quite some time, I had held off on installing it as I didn’t see any benefit to putting it on my old system. Luckily for me, I waited long enough that I was able to leapfrog straight to Windows 7. Now, having never really worked with Vista, I wasn’t sure what to expect with Win7. Installation turned out to be alot quicker that I am used to with XP and Win2K3 server.

The first thing that bit me was partitioning the drive. Normally I like to partition into two drives: C for OS and program files and D for data. I tend to keep a pretty flat folder structure on my drives and it’s much easier to find things if you’re not dealing with all the OS stuff. Anyway, it turns out that if you create two partitions, Win7 will install to the second one and it didn’t give me an option to pick. So, after the first installation, I had the OS on the wrong partition and had to reinstall. Luckily, it really is a painless process so no big deal. Otherwise, no real surprises. Using the driver disk included with the computer provided support for everything (of course) except my monitors (which I reused from my old system). I had a bit of trouble finding support for my secondary monitor which is an old Samsung 213T which I like to use in portrait mode. On XP, I used a utility program called Pivot that came with the monitor but it doesn’t work on Win7. Luckily, portrait support is built into the nVidia driver software so, once I figured out where to look, all was good.

I’m still getting everything setup but I’m pretty excited about some of the features that Win7 provides. Probably the biggest thing is native recognition of VHD files. I do all my development work under virtual images and being able to mount drives natively and even boot natively into an image is just plain awesome. I haven’t setup my dev image yet but when I do I’ll likely write about it. I plan to follow Scott Hanselman’s excellent advice so if you’re looking to do that, go check it out.

Overall Impressions

Moving from a relatively slow machine to a new, shiny machine has been interesting. Possibly the biggest thing I noticed is that although its faster, it’s not as different an experience as I expected. There’s no real wow factor, everything just works. Programs respond reasonably and consistently. Everything looks nice but nothing stands out as a game changer. For typical computer use, there’s just not much difference. I’m sure as I get into the nooks and crannies I’ll find things that make me appreciate the advances but either way I’m satisfied.

For reference, here’s the details:

• Dell Studio XPS 8000
  • x7-860 processor (8MB cache, 2.80GHz)
  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
  • 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
  • 1TB – 7200RPM drive, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB cache
  • nVidia GeForce GTX260 video with 1792MB GDDR3
• Samsung 275T 27″ widescreen at 1920 x 1200
• Samsung 213T 21″ in portrait mode at 1200 x 1600
• 5.1 surround sound speakers
• Logitech keyboard of some sort
• Logitech G5 gaming mouse
• assorted desk junk

And here’s some pics (had to take three since I can’t get back far enough to get everything in one pic):

- Dave