Although I have a Core 2 Duo notebook and Dual-Dual Core (4 processors) Xeon and Opteron servers at work, I don’t have any dual core Windows PCs at home. So, I found the HP Pavilion a6120n with Core 2 Duo pretty interesting at $400. However, I noticed it used an unfamiliar processor model: E4400. So, I headed over to the Intel Processor Number summary web page to check out the specs for various Core 2 Duo chips. I learned there that the entire 4000 model family does NOT have the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) feature. I also learned that with the exception of the T5600, the entire 5000 Core 2 Duo model line also lacks VT. Since I run Microsoft Virtual PC and VMware Workstation at home, it is pretty important to have a VT enabled processor. The lesson here is that if virtualization is something you use, check the processor model before buying a new PC or notebook. I know I’m glad that I did before clicking the buy button.
Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
Intel Core 2 Duos WITHOUT Virtualization Technology
Thursday, December 27th, 2007Humor: Upgrading From Vista to Windows XP
Sunday, December 16th, 2007Head over to read this blog entry…
…by a blogger who comments on his experience upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP. If it weren’t so true, it would be funny. But, hmm, actually it is funny 
Can Vista Windows Update Actually Be More Annoying?
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007Vista’s Windows Update didn’t see any updates when I fired it up this morning. So, I clicked on the option to manually check for updates. It saw the Patch Tuesday Vista patches after that action. Why didn’t it seem them as soon as it fired up? Then, of course, Vista wanted to be rebooted to actually finish installing the patches. Ugh. Vista takes a look time to shutdown and then reboot. Good thing I have multiple computers to work on.
After the reboot Word 2007 decided it wasn’t to open a small DOCX file I had been working on. Now what? After futzing a bit, I checked the net and found that there is an Office 2007 SP1 update. I ran Windows Update again and, again, had it manually check for updates. Now, it sees the Office 2007 SP1 update. Why wasn’t this detected earlier. To make matters worse, the Office 2007 SP1 update was 251MB large and took a while to download. And, of course, it too required a reboot after installing itself. Why in the world with an application need a reboot to install itself. The only two things I can think of that requires a Linux box to reboot are kernel or driver updates.
This is a broken and time-wasting scenario.
Vista Windows Experience Index Score Weirdness
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
The Windows Vista Windwos Experience Index Score never made much sense to me. It grades a PC on 5 factors and then chooses the lowest score as the index. No weighting, no average, just what looks like a poorly thought out implementation of some kind of over simplified Fuzzy Logic. Since the graphics subsystem is generally the weakest component (unless you are a serious gamer), it generally defines the score for the entire system.
I finally got around to upgrading my old Athlon 64-bit 3400+ based PC from 1GB to 2GB RAM. This PC doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, but the integrated chipset is the Nvidia GeForce 6100 which isn’t too shabby as built-in graphics goes. It uses shared RAM and Vista decided that it had 831MB of available graphics RAM after the upgrade. This was enough to boost the Graphics index from 2.0 to 3.0 and thus raise the entire index score from 2 to 3 as well.
The interesting thing is that the Dell Latitude D620 notebook PC (running Windows Vista Business Edition) with its Core 2 Duo and a dedicated graphics adapter with dedicated graphics score in reduced performance battery saving mode less than this old single core PC of mine because of Microsoft’s scoring quirk. In this case the CPU performance in battery saving mode becomes the weakest component in the score (less than the graphics adapter). The end result is that an aging single core CPU based PC score higher than a Core 2 Duo based one. That just doesn’t sit will with me. And, I don’t think the actual end-user experience matches the scores either.
Microsoft Virtual Server Clock Issue: Clock Skew Detected (Linux VM)
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I ran into a weird little issue today on a CentOS 4.5 virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. I had configured and compiled Ruby 1.8.6 Patchlevel 110 and su-ed to root to perform a make install. However, I kept getting a make: warning: Clock skew detected. Your build may be incomplete message after a couple of tries. A bit of searching indicated that the clock skew message was what it sound like: A processor related timing issue. Linux VMs tend to have issues with clocks running slow. So, I brought up system-config-time to have it force the clock to sync with an external source. Performing a make install after that resulted in an error free installation.
VSPlus for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007Microsoft still doesn’t quite have quite caught the command line religion bug yet. It still takes a lot of code to perform simple tasks outside of the Virtual Server management web page. In the case of PowerShell, you even have to compile to C# code to create a custom DLL to use (um, ouch!). Fortunately, this freeware utility written by Jin Mao can fill part of this void for a lot of us too lazy to write a lot of code to do simple things (like pause and unpause a virtual machine).
If Your XP PC Died, Would You Move to Vista or Stay With XP?
Monday, October 29th, 2007
Although I have a slightly newer (Athlon 64-bit) PC running Windows Vista, my main PC is a 3 year old Athlon 32-bit based PC running Windows XP Media Edition. Last week this main PC started acting funny. It started taking longer and longer to boot up. Finally on Thursday evening, it failed to boot.
My first though was that this might be a good excuse to buy a Core 2 Duo PC :-). But, I surprised myself by thinking I did not want my main PC to run Windows Vista. I preferred XP for this PC because it syncs with my Windows Mobile smartphone (not sure I trust WMDC on Vista) and it is where my family photos reside (UAC makes even copying files to an external USB hard drive for backups an exercise in frustration). So, although I actually like Windows Vista enough to run it on my main PC at work (a Core 2 Duo notebook), I’m not willing to run it on my main home PC. This surprised me quite a bit. Has anyone else been faced with this issue? What did you decide? Stay with XP or move on to Vista?
BTW: Listening carefully, I noted three long beeps. Though I couldn’t find any boot sound diagnostic info for this particular PC (an eMachines PC), I guessed that it might indicate a RAM problem. So, I pulled the DIMM from the second socket and, yep, the PC booted with just 512MB in DIMM socket 0. I pulled a 512MB DIMM from my Linux box (rarely used these days since I usually run Linux as virtual machine using either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) and put it in my main PC. I also decided to upgrade my Vista box from 1GB to 2GB and have a pair of DIMMs on order from Crucial. I’m sure Virtual PC and VMware Workstation will be happier with more RAM.
BTW: The photo above is my collection of dead RAM from the last couple of years.
Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions 2.0
Thursday, October 25th, 2007Microsoft released…
…for Microsoft Virtual Server. You can also use it with Virtual PC, btw. I ran into glitches when attempting to use it with CentOS 4 (the community distro version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 which is in the supported list). The kernel additions did not fire according to the message seen during the rebooting process. And, the X11 addition did not install due to a conflict with existing Xorg files. A comment on…
…blog mentions that tweaking files in /etc/init.d might fix some issues. So, I’m planning to take a look at the startup files in that directory later.
Vista Windows Photo Gallery Shows Video Too
Monday, October 22nd, 2007
This is probably old news to most people. But, I only noticed this evening that the Vista Windows Photo Gallery displays videos as well as still images. Yeah, doh. I usually work on my family photos on a old Windows XP PC because XP on the old PC seems to run faster than Vista on a newer PC. In fact, even simple things like list files in Windows Explorer seems much faster on XP than Vista.
I have an old Celeron based XP PC with 1GB RAM in my office as well as a relatively new(ish) Core 2 Duo notebook running Vista with 2GB RAM. Vista seems to take forever just bringing up a list of files while XP (on a Celeron) is pretty fast. At home it is an ancient Athlon 32-bit box running XP and a slightly less ancient Athlon 64-bit box running Vista (32-bit).
In any case, if you are running Windows Vista and have a mix of still photos and videos in a folder (I keep all files from my digital camera, still and video by month to ease backups to DVD+R discs), double click on a still image near a video file (AVI in my case) to bring up Windows Photo Gallery. Then, press the forward button to move from file to file. The video should start playing right in Photo Gallery after a few seconds delay.
Microsoft Virtual Server Disk Compactor INCREASED VHD File Size
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007I’ve long wondered about why Microsoft included a virtual hard drive (VHD) compacting option in its Virtual Server Disk Inspector since it never seems to compact anything when I tried it. So I read the highlighted section on pages 24 and 25 of the book…
Professional Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
…titled Compacting a Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disk with great interest. Ben Armstrong (a Microsoft Virtual Machine Product Manager) has provided a lot of good information about Virtual PC and Virtual Server in his Virtual PC Guy blog. So, his writing is heavily weighted in the valid column when I read what he has to say. However, in this case, I’m still mystified by VHD compacting even after reading this section and especially the Linux related aspects of this section.
Ben recommends zeroing out the Linux VHD free space by creating a file using cat /dev/zero > zero.dat. This creates a file that fills out the unused portion of the VHD. This fills up the hard drive. The next part of the scripts syncs the buffer and then removes the zero.dat file. This means if you have your dynamic VHD set to, say 127GB, you need at least 127GB and maybe 127GB x 2 (double). My test VHD was set to max out at 16GB. So, I didn’t have this problem. I had a lot of free server host hard disk space. I then shutdown the Linux Guest OS before heading over to the web-based Virtual Server management window to start the disk compacting. Here’s the odd result I found.
Size Linux reports used inside the Guest OS: 4.6 GB
Size Virtual Server reports VHD occupies on the host: 9.7 GB
Size of VHD with zero.dat file completely filled: 12.3 GB
The Virtual Hard Disk was a bit over twice the size of the file space Linux reported using. This is normal since this particular virtual machine sees moderate use as a test box. Files get installed and deleted frequently. The size of the VHD completely filled also makes sense although I thought it would get closer to 16GB. Here’s the surprise though. After completing the VHD compacting, the VHD file was 10.8 GB. Yep, compacting the VHD actually INCREASED its file size by 1.1 GB compared to where it was before starting the process of creating the zero.dat file.