A quarter of new US PCs are 64-bit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Futures, Hardware, Windows, Microsoft on
When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.
We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.
This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.
–Mary
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Wubi Tuesday
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows Vista, ubuntu, linux on
“The time has come,” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry may have come straight from the shores of North East England, but it’s inspired much of the language -and grammar - of IT. There’s nothing more through the looking glass than writing complex pattern recognition statements in awk. There’s also nothing quite as much fun as rolling your own Linux distribution from scratch.
It used to be that you’d have to tweak your kernel for your hardware, recompiling and reloading just to make sure everything worked just fine. Then there was scripting the bootloader, making sure that all your OSes worked together.Perhaps you needed to hack together an appropriate driver for some obscure piece of hardware, before shutting down and rebooting all over again. It was a detective novel and a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle all rolled into one.
I have a sneaking feeling that after having done all that back in the days of the 0.8 kernel and with more than a handful of Gentoo installs, I really should I be feeling a little guilty as to just how easy it was to get a dual-boot Linux install working on my main desktop PC.
I’d decided quite early on that I’d go the way of the mainstream, and try out Canonical’s Ubuntu. It’s become one of the most popular Linuxes out there, and I figured it would make a change from my usual SUSE or Fedora installs. The latest version has received plenty of good reviews, and it’s also become one of the more talked about OSes amongst my open source friends.
In the past I’d have downloaded an ISO image, burning it to CD, and booting from the resulting disk. This time, however, I decided to try out Wubi, an installer that promised to let me run Ubuntu without having to re-partition my hard drive.
The Wubi download is quick and easy, and once it’s down and installed, all you have to do is run the Wubi Windows application. It then goes off and downloads an Ubuntu install, and builds a virtual file system on top of your existing Windows partition, before adding a boot link in the Windows bootloader - and it’ll cope happily with the newer format introduced with Vista. The whole process took less than an hour, including the download!
Once it’s in place, all you need to do is reboot, choose Ubuntu from the list displayed at start-up, and you’re ready to run. There are a couple of caveats - as it’s running from a virtual disk on another file system you can’t hibernate, and if you have a power outage you stand a higher chance of getting corruption. Even so, it’s still a great way of getting started with a non-Windows OS with out the performance hit of virtualisation - and it’s easy to migrate your new install to its own real file system.
Well worth a look, if you’re curious to see just what Linux can offer you.
–Simon
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From new server, to new desktop
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Microsoft on
Mary looked over at my desk the other day, and said, “Is the new server going to be that loud all the time?”
I looked at her in surpise. “What do you mean? It’s virtually silent.”
“So what are all those fans?”
“That’s my desktop…”
That was when I realised it was time to change the machine I used every day. Bought over five years ago, it was starting to struggle with the processing and graphics requirements of today’s desktop applications. I’d got used to the roar of the fans - but throwing more and more cooling at yesterday’s technology really wasn’t the answer. After all, it would just make the office noisier!
A little web research,and I’d found that my usual hardware component supplier was selling very nice looking PCs - with most of what I needed. I decided to be as future proof as possible, and ordered a quad-core Intel box, with plenty of USB ports, 750GB of hard disk, and 4GB of RAM. I picked up a hefty graphics card as well, all for a third of what I’d spent five years ago.
Setting up the machine was easy enough. It had come with XP Home, but I blew that away and went with a Vista Ultimate install. It wasn’t very long before I had the new box online, and hooked up to our office domain. All-in-all it was relatively painless, though I still miss the option of having an extended desktop rather than the traditional dual monitor approach.
It took me a couple of days to install all the applications I needed - with a couople of caveats. It’s important to make sure that you deactivate applications like Adobe’s CS3 or Apple’s iTunes (and that you’re careful to make sure you import all iPhone applications before doing a first sync on a new PC).
So what are my key applications? I keep a list in OneNote, so I don’t forget anything - and here a few key applications:
- Microsoft Office 2007 - I live in Outlook, OneNote and Word
- Visual Studio 2008 - My usual development tool
- Firefox 3 - What else for the web?
- Xobni - Simplifying my inbox and my correspondence
- Clipmate - Managing the Windows clipboard
- Paint.Net - Image editing for free
- Cardscan - I get a lot of business cards, and this gets them into theOutlook address book easily
- Avast! AV - One of the best free AV tools around, and my recommendation
- Adobe CS3 Web - Web design and image manipulation
- Alzip - A good, fast, free archive management tool
- Filezilla - The best free FTP tool around
- Multiplicity Pro - Controlling my laptop from my desktop keyboard and mouse
- Feed Demon - RSS reader
- Aptana Studio - A powerful (and free) JavaScript and AJAX development tool
Of course there’s more - there are clients for social media networks, and tools to manage files between desktop and server.
My files moved across quickly, and I’ve been using the new machine since Monday - and I turned the old desktop off at the end of Monday, and it’s not been on since. Four cores and a 512MB NVidia 9600GT are an ideal Vista platform, and the OS is running smoothly - and extremely fast.
One thing I’ve done, to make sure I use one of Vista’s best features, is turn off the Quick Launch tool bar. It’s making me use the search word wheel on the start menu a lot more - and that’s good.
The office? A lot quieter. I can now hear the fans on the NAS across the room.
–Simon
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The case of the disappearing disk space
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Storage, Laptop, HP, Microsoft on
Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been kicking along with only a few gigabytes of my 84GB disk free. Simon, who has the same laptop and takes just as many photos, had already removed the recovery partition to get 8GB back. And last week at TechEd I got down to just 1GB free,. I grabbed the biggest USB stick I have, which at 32GB is a sizable proportion of my hard drive space, and started looking for files to move, using the excellent WinDirStat to see a treemap and size-sorted folder list. Recordings and photos were the obvious place to start and after I transferred a few gigabytes of those I had enough room to download more PowerPoints and worry later. The figures didn’t seem quite right, but I was spending more time thinking about how soon we could move the server to Windows Server 2008 to get faster network file copying with SMB 2: I want to know if the 30-40x Microsoft is claiming will work for us.
Yesterday I sat down to copy the photos and recordings still on my tablet PC onto the server and after removing 3GB of recordings I had - about the same space I’d started with. I’d get up to 2.2GB and then go back down to 1.9GB or right back to 800MB free. I ran disk cleanup and deleted two 500MB files of crash reports that were hanging around waiting to upload, and felt I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I ran WinDirStat and wondered why Windows needs 13GB of disk space, 6GB of which is in the WinSxS directory - ’side by side’ versions of files to avoid DLL hell. I kept coming back to the 8GB of photos that I wanted to keep on my notebook, the 11GB I use for OneNote and Outlook caches (recordings and attachments again), the fact that the conference files I was worrying about where only 2GB because the XML PowerPoint format is so compact… and finally I looked at the summary at the top of WinDirStat that was telling me I only had 46GB of files on my hard drive.
Oh no, I thought; finally an application I care about that doesn’t run properly under Vista. Maybe every folder is just bigger. WinDirStat says it’s 20.9GB for the Users folder tree but Explorer says- well Explorer said 20.9GB as well. It’s not the swap and hibernation files; I can see 3GB for each of them in WinDirStat and besides, 84.2GB-46.5GB is some 32GB of disk space that’s missing. I cleared everything except the last system restore point: no difference. If I had 32GB of bad sectors, the hard drive ought to have raised the white flag in surrender by now. Where else would Vista be hiding disk space?
There’s a great new feature that Apple put into the Leopard release of Mac OS X called Time Machine, that takes a copy of all your files as you edit them, creating continuous backup so you can find files you’ve deleted and undo changes you made long after you’ve saved a document and moved on. Apart from the starry backdrop and the timeline scrollbar this is exactly the same as the Volume Shadow copy that Microsoft put into Windows Server 2003, which powers the Previous Versions feature in Vista, as well as System Restore. Shadow because you have to copy the ’shadow’ a file casts if it’s open or you can’t copy it at all, volume because it can get any or all files on that drive and Volume Shadow because, let’s face it, Microsoft has no clue about good product and feature names.
The interface is much less sexy too; you right-click on a file or folder and choose Restore previous versions. And how do you see how much space this really useful feature is using?
First you have to open a command prompt as an administrator; I run as a standard user because I don’t mind clicking on a dialog that confirms it’s me and not a virus mucking with the internals of Windows, so I hit the Start button, type CMD and right-click on the Command Prompt icon that appears to choose Run as Admin. The command for working with Volume Shadow Services is VSSAdmin and the command to find out how much space it has its shadowy fingers on is:
VSSAdmin List ShadowStorage
By default, Vista gives 15% of total disk space or 30% of free disk space to System Restore and Volume Shadow Services, whichever is smaller. There’s no slider to adjust as there was in XP and the space doesn’t change unless you turn System Restore on and off - which deletes all the previous versions and restore points, so while it’s easy it’s not really a good idea. But you’re going to want to check and probably change the setting because a lot of PCs seem to think 15% isn’t enough and set the upper limit to - well, all the free disk space you have. In my case Vista had used 15GB of space for previous versions, it had allocated itself 16GB of space and the maximum space was UNBOUNDED. Yes, all my free disk space. I could have gone back to the day I turned on the notebook and got the files I was editing - but that’s not much use if I can’t create any new files.
Put some limits on VSS by typing:
VSSAdmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=15GB
I was feeling parsimonious, and I keep most of the files on the SBS 2003 server which also runs VSS, so I gave it 5GB to play with. It allocated just over 2GB and filled 700MB immediately, so I suspect I get the changes on my files yesterday and nothing more. But I also get 39GB of free disk space, so I’m not complaining.
I’m not sure if my notebook came from HP with VSS set to UNBOUNDED in first place or if SP1 might have changed this, so I don’t know who to name and shame. I have seen a lot of Vista users reporting that they’ve been losing disk space the same way, with UNBOUNDED set on machines from Dell, Lenovo and other big-name PC companies. But Microsoft gets a share of the blame, for adding a great feature with no way to control it except from the command line. Worried users will make the VSS space too small? Don’t take the slider away all together; just don’t let it go down below, say, 5GB. I can stop certain file types from getting shadowed by adding them to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot registry key. Temporary files are there by default; I’ll probably add MP3 files as I tend not to be editing these… but I’d rather do it without delving into the registry.
And if you’re running Vista Basic or Home Premium, VSS is running for System Restore and backing up your documents, but you can’t right-click to see and retrieve previous versions of a file even though they’re taking up space. Get a copy of ShadowExplorer (only at version 0.2 but also free) from www.shadowexplorer.com and you can make the most of the disk space you agree to give up.
-Mary
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