Getting physical with Windows 7 – rather unexpectedly

Sunday 23 August 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

When I said “as a corporate customer of Microsoft products, the probability of me installing Windows 7 on a physical machine any time soon is infinitesimally small” less than a week ago, I spoke too soon. That’s because, err, I am now running Windows 7 on my ThinkPad T61 laptop at work. This is my third Windows 7 installation (the previous two installations were virtual machines dating back to the Release Candidate days) and I can now call myself an early adopter of Windows 7.

I think I’ll have to begin with a bit of a preamble here. Because the things is, I had never planned a switch to Windows 7 this early, particularly when the official product launch is still two months away. Nevertheless, my little saga began with a few well-meaning keystrokes on a late Friday afternoon. Ever since a good friend of mine reminded me to ponder “what would Jesus do?”, I have been looking for a simple, effective, affordable solution to “save” my stuff. A few months ago, I wrote a simple DOS-command script that synchronises certain folders from one portable hard drive to another and vice-versa. It contained a sequence of del and xcopy commands, and it worked particularly well for me because I frequently share all kinds of files between Macs and PCs. The long story of Mac-PC harmony can be found here, which also explains the reason for the del command.

Anyway, that was my little trustworthy, free (as in beer), personal backup solution capable of keeping the contents of my two main portable hard drives in sync AND free of clutter. It’s that free-of-clutter part that betrayed me when I casually ran the script not realising that I had only one of the two hard drives plugged in. The script could not locate the source drive, got confused, and instead of aborting with the help of some artificial intelligence – which I wish I had embedded – it erroneously went on to delete the critical hidden system files that live in the all-important C drive. My data was intact, but with no way of recovering the deleted system files, my Windows installation was instantly nuked beyond repair. That’s right, my backup solution turned rogue and nuked my machine. It’s the most creative thing I have ever done at 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon. I was now faced with the task of recreating a Windows installation in order to be able to work on Monday.

Luckily, I did have a Norton Ghost backup image of the initial state of the Windows XP installation. Restoring that would have been the natural course of action, but a colleague of mine with a great sense of humour suggested that I took this opportunity to try Windows 7. That got me thinking and I quickly asked myself, where’s the fun in going back to a nine-year-old eight-year-old operating system? So, in the spirit of getting the most value out of the MSDN subscription we pay for, I made an executive decision to try 32-bit Windows 7 on a physical machine for the first time. Besides, I was dying to see Windows 7 Aero, which I couldn’t experience in my Windows 7 virtual machines. Therefore, my cunning plan was: install Windows 7, and if the NVidia Quadro FX 570M (or was it the NVS 140M?) on my T61 can do Aero and if I get all the hardware drivers configured perfectly, then keep it; otherwise, silently and begrudgingly go back to Windows XP.

Give me Aero and I’ll keep Seven

So, here’s where the real review of Windows 7 begins. The installation process itself was as quick and painless as how it was with virtual machines. This time, though, the first challenge came with hardware device drivers. Windows 7 recognised all devices except the display, the fingerprint reader, and an “unknown” device. Needless to say, there was no Aero either. But first things first – I turned off System Restore and User Account Control (UAC) before I did anything else. Then I downloaded the latest Windows 7 Quadro display driver from NVidia and the fingerprint reader driver for Windows 7. While the fingerprint reader driver installed without problems, I did not have much success with the display driver. After downloading numerous alternative driver packages and even trying some of the modified .inf files, I found a simple solution: just launch the NVidia driver installer in Windows Vista compatibility mode. Right-click on the executable and follow the “compatibility troubleshooting” instructions.

Then Windows 7 gave me Aero. While I was certainly excited, there was one more obstacle to overcome. After some research, I began to suspect that the remaining mystery unknown device was related to ACPI Power Management. Got the driver from the Lenovo Web site, and it worked like a charm. A fully-functioning physical Windows 7 installation at last. I’m keepin’ it. Mission accomplished.

One thing I noticed in Windows 7′s Windows Explorer is that as I click on the names of folders in the right hand-side pane to drill down to a certain location, the tree view on the left hand-side stays collapsed. To me, that feels a bit inconvenient and counter-intuitive. I’m not sure if there is a way to tweak that behaviour.

Analyse. Defragment. Consolidate.

After installing the must-have Office 2007 applications as well as all available Microsoft updates and patches (about 30 of them in total, mostly related to Office 2007), I started looking at the maintenance side of things. Windows 7 requires the same common tasks such as running disk cleanup from Windows Explorer, clearing the %temp% directory and the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download directory regularly. I was, however, impressed with the new defrag utility in Windows 7. It goes through the three stages of analysing, defragmenting, and consolidating the contents of a drive while clearly showing the progress. The process is then repeated three times, resulting in a total of four passes of analysis-defragmentation-consolidation. Gone are the Windows XP days when I had to manually run defrag three or four times continuously against the same drive just to make sure things were nicely consolidated in the end. Less mouse clicks is always good.

Remember the smell of a fresh installation

Physical installations of Windows don’t have the luxury of being able to take complete snapshots at the click of a button. And I prefer not to use the incremental System Restore feature which bloats the Windows installation worse than a swollen tummy. And I can’t use Norton Ghost 2003 with Windows 7. But the Ultimate Edition of Windows 7 comes with the ability to make a backup image of the entire system drive. This is not a new feature and I have used “Complete PC Restore” in Windows Vista before. Because I want to be able to return to the good healthy initial state of Windows 7 if need be and because I don’t want to repeat the process of activating software and configuring devices drivers, I ran the built-in system backup utility. I chose to burn the image on DVD as opposed to a hard disk partition because Windows compresses the image on the fly when DVD’s are used. As a result, Windows managed to fit 18GB of C drive content into just two 4.7GB blank DVD’s. It also prompted me to create a separate bootable Windows 7 system repair disk at the end, which I did. The entire process of creating an emergency kit took less than an hour.

The best way to do everyday backup?

While it can be refreshing, I don’t enjoy spending time on recovering from disastrous consequences of user errors, mine included. So what’s going to happen to my DOS-command backup script that has proved to be as dangerous as it is useful? I could delve into Windows PowerShell and spend an indeterminate length of time developing a cleverer solution with layers and layers of safety locks. Or, I could invest in a copy of Second Copy, which at this moment sounds like a very reasonably priced solution for Windows. In the Mac world, there is always free iBackup, which does the job brilliantly.

2009-08-23  »  JK