Indrek

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Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 137 total)
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  • in reply to: Windows Embedded Standard 7 #50859

    Drivers-schmivers. The bigger problem is the CPU architecture – the iPad uses an ARM processor while Windows Embedded 7 is only available for the x86 and x64 architectures. If you really want to run Windows on any iGadget, I think your best bet might be Windows CE.

    in reply to: Why Server 2008 [R2] over Windows Vista/7? #50455

    @halladayrules wrote:

    Try this out Indrek and post your results:
    Download the BootTimer.exe utility and run them under these conditions below:
    Boot Time with Superfetch Service on Automatic (Delayed Start):
    Boot Time with Superfetch Service on Automatic:

    Tried each option 3 times.
    Superfetch set to Automatic: boot time varied from 70 to 124 seconds (average 94 seconds).
    Superfetch set to Delayed Start: boot time varied from 83 to 109 seconds (average 92 seconds).

    Variations within either group were much larger than the difference between the averages, so at least in my case Superfetch doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on boot time.

    in reply to: Why Server 2008 [R2] over Windows Vista/7? #50452

    @halladayrules wrote:

    Try this out Indrek and post your results:
    Download the BootTimer.exe utility and run them under these conditions below:
    Boot Time with Superfetch Service on Automatic (Delayed Start):
    Boot Time with Superfetch Service on Automatic:

    I might try that when I get some free time, but generally I don’t reboot my computer often enough to really care about such minuscule differences in boot time. Saving 4 seconds once a fortnight isn’t worth the effort of messing with services and whatnot.

    in reply to: Why Server 2008 [R2] over Windows Vista/7? #50442

    @halladayrules wrote:

    Now think of all the small chunks of data Superfetch has preloaded into memory on the hard drive. Sure the chunks are small but when you add the contents of the entire game it fills your hard drive.

    Wait, what? Superfetch caches data from hard drive to RAM, not the other way around.

    in reply to: Why Server 2008 [R2] over Windows Vista/7? #50439

    @halladayrules wrote:

    As evidenced by the lack of Superfetch. But my beef with Superfetch is that it relies on the hard drive as a caching medium. So on machines that are running Windows 7 with less than 4GB of RAM (for example my dad’s drive) when the free memory nears 0 and the user wants to call on application that hasn’t been written into the Superfetch database, the hard drive must page out to allow new data in memory, and thrashing occurs.

    I’m no expert, but if the user wants to call a new app and there’s no free RAM, Windows is supposed to use the RAM that’s on standby instead. For instance, my laptop right now has 188 MB of RAM free and 1773 MB on standby. Thus the total amount of RAM immediately available for new programs is 1961 MB. Only when that is exhausted does paging occur.

    On my machine I haven’t noticed any significant hard drive thrashing during normal use. I guess I could try running Visual Studio 2010, Photoshop CS5, a few virtual machines and whatnot at the same time, but that’s a rather contrived situation, in my case at least.

    Having gone from WS2008 R2 to Win7 on the same machine (with a practically identical set of installed programs), I think I prefer Win7 in terms of application startup performance – more of the things I use daily start up faster. At least that’s how I perceive it, I haven’t done any actual measurements. And of course, YMMV.

    @halladayrules wrote:

    I’ve noticed there are quite a few World of Warcraft forums online that recommend disabling Superfetch when playing the game. It makes sense. Think of all the maps in that game that have lots of textures, objects, etc. The game is constantly going to be using a large block of memory and if Superfetch is constantly draining your free memory to 0 disk thrashing will occur and the game might crash a result.

    Textures and such are kept in video RAM, though, and thus don’t clash with Superfetch. Unless of course you have an integrated video card, but in that case you’re unlikely to be playing modern games with high (V)RAM requirements anyway.

    And again, RAM in standby will (or at least should) be released when an application requires more RAM and there’s none free. In the situation you described above, with WoW, as long as the game’s RAM usage remains relatively constant, there’s nothing wrong with Superfetch populating the rest of the RAM rather than letting it sit idle. If WoW suddenly requires more RAM, then some of Superfetch’s cache is cleared and made available to the game. Now if your game required more RAM than you have available (free + standby), then you’d want to look at closing some programs or even buying more RAM (or not playing WoW :P), so as not to force the system to clear RAM that’s in use by other programs (which would have to be paged to hard drive first and would thus cause thrashing).

    I don’t see why Superfetch on its own would cause any paging – all data in its cache came straight from the hard drive, so there’s no need to write it back to the drive, thus the RAM used by the cache can simply be cleared and allocated to another process immediately.

    in reply to: Why Server 2008 [R2] over Windows Vista/7? #50433

    Msconfig doesn’t catch all startup items. Try Sysinternals Autoruns instead:
    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

    Also, the way I see it, your dad’s Win7 machine is making better use of the available RAM, leaving only 1/3 of it idle, compared to 3/4 on your machine.

    in reply to: Security Center #51141

    There’s no Security Center in Windows 7. Do you mean the Action Center? If so, I recall that it exists in R2, though not all aspects of it work correctly.

    in reply to: The Major issue… (for me) #51097

    There was a topic about this issue recently:
    viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1327

    It’s about installers and Windows version checks in general, so maybe something there will help you.

    in reply to: Zune #49597

    Sorry, can’t help you. I don’t use either Zune or R2 anymore.

    Maybe someone else can help you out.

    Man, I sure hope IE9 won’t be copying the UI layout that other browsers seem to be heading towards, with the weird menu button and tabs above the address bar.

    in reply to: Cant install Antivir PE what so ever #51050

    It’s been documented in the Security Software topic, but here’s a quick summary:

    * AntiVir 10 no longer checks the ProductOptions key
    * First install AntiVir 9 using the reg hack method
    * Then upgrade it to Antivir 10 – the installer doesn’t seem to check for the OS version when there’s already an older version of the product installed

    in reply to: Windows 7 Installer Check #51036

    Depends on how exactly it checks for the OS type and version. There’s a couple of workarounds documented here on the forum for various programs (mostly antivirus software), but there’s no guarantee they’ll work for you.

    viewtopic.php?p=4802#p4802
    http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/win2008r2/security-software#comment-193
    viewtopic.php?p=5373#p5373
    viewtopic.php?p=5786#p5786

    If the installer is an .exe wrapper for an .msi, you can try extracting the files and running the .msi manually, which sometimes helps. See here for instructions (Zune-specific, but should be easily adapted to other programs provided the installer works the same way):
    http://blogs.technet.com/b/roblarson/archive/2008/11/21/installing-zune-3-1-on-windows-server-2008-x64.aspx

    in reply to: Do I really need antivirus software #51028

    Disabling autorun on the drive doesn’t give you full protection against malware, it only helps ensure the malware doesn’t run before you get a chance to scan the drive. If you don’t scan at all, though, your system will still be compromised if you manually open an infected file.

    in reply to: Do I really need antivirus software #51025

    Also, if you use a flash drive to transfer files between your computer and another, I’d recommend having an anti-virus available for checking the drive, even if you don’t use it for real-time protection.

    in reply to: Power options greyed out #49839

    Just wanted to say that this is a moot issue for me as I’ve gone back to Windows 7 (shock! gasp! :P). The R2 licence will be used for a small home web/database/file server.
    Thanks for all the help anyway!

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 137 total)