The Adventures of a Systems Engineer

It seems Windows has learned a lot since the horrifically terrible release of Vista. I have been running Windows 7 Professional for the last two weeks and will attempt to sum up the 5 reasons why Windows 7 Rocks! It no only installs quickly, it also runs like a dream … so far anyway.

1. The Task Bar- Windows 7 features a totally redsigned task bar. It like grouped icons on steroids. The task bar now only has a handfull of icons- one for each running application.


Multiple instances of a running program are grouped together and you can preview the window by hovering the mouse over the task bar icon. This features is great when web-browsing. IE and Firefox both support the preview of each open tab.



2. Media Center- Media Center seems to get better and better with each release. The UI is more smooth and usable then in XP and Vista. Amazingly Media Center is included in the Professional Edition of Windows 7!
3. Driver Support- I have installed Windows 7 on my MSI Wind u100 netbook and desktop, both of which are newer systems (less than a year old). An interesting thing happened after the install- All of the drivers were detected. I can truly say that this is a first. The driver support in Windows 7 is rock solid. I plugged my phone in and Windows automatically found and downloaded a driver from Windows Update (granted it was a Windows Mobile phone).
4. Speed- Windows 7 run much smoother then Vista. I saw a great improvement in usability on my netbook and my desktop was much more stable. Windows 7 requires less memory which frees up resources for your applications.
5. Battery Life – I have not done extensive tests, but am seeing a much better battery life on my netbook. So far I have seen around a 15%-20% longer battery life.

In short Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista. That said there are still some caveats. The most major one being the price. Yeah its nice, but $200 nice – in this economy probably not. I have also found a few applications that worked well under Vista that refuse to run in Windows 7.

Google has had sync available for quite some time, but up until recently it has only allowed for contacts and calendars to be synchronized between your phone and Google.The feature has been a great and allowed users to easily back their data up to the “cloud” where it will forever reside. Recently this feature got even better with the addition of the ability to sync mail and the addition of push. Now your phone can maintain a connection with Google allowing new emails, contact updates, and calendar updates to be automatically pushed to your phone. So far the service has been great (flaky at times though). The only down side- watching your cellphone battery die much faster.

I recently order an MSi Wind 10″ Netbook. I will be traveling to Europe in a week and wanted something small and portable that will let me surf the web and do some on-the-road web development. After hours of searching the MSi U100-451US seemed like the best choice. I picked one up for $279.99 at eWiz.com.

Specs

Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz (with hyperthreading)

RAM: 1 GB DDR (PC5300 (upgraded to 2GB)

Included Peripherals: On board mic, 0.3 MP digital camera, wireless, 10/100 Ethernet,  bluetooth

Adding a 1GB RAM Stick

A great how to on installing RAM in the Wind is available here: http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/msi-wind-ram.aspx. One thing that is not mentioned on the webpage is that some models of the Wind have a “warranty void if removed” sticker covering one of the screws on the bottom of the netbook.  It took me far longer then it should have to realize that there was a screw under the sticker that was preventing me from removing the bottom.

A word to the wise, do not go with really cheap RAM. I bough a cheap RAM stick from ebay for $12 and it did not work. I ended up going to the local computer store and getting a Crucial 1GB PC 5300 RAM stick for around $40.

Installing Vista

One of my first orders of business was to install Vista Ultimate on my new netbook. At this point you are probably laughing “haha Vista on a netbook, what an idiot.” I was a little apprehensive about installing Vista on such an underpowered machine (my main pc running Vista has 8 GB of RAM with a Quad core processor). I was inspired by this article: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4505 which actually says they saw an important in running Vista over XP in terms of both performance and battery life. Low and behold Vista runs like a dream, even with the sidebar running and the Aero theme running. In fact the thing that really hurt my “User Experience Rating” the most was the GPU, which actually scored respectably for a netbook. Aside from the GPU, the CPU scored the next worse which again is not surprising from the atom chip, but this is still respectable for a netbook.

These results were after I downloaded all of the drivers and MSi utilities from the MSi website. Surprisingly all of the Vista drivers are available from the support site. The version says Windows XP 32bit oallthe downloads, but they contain Vista drivers as well.

Adobe CS4

After installing Vista and downloading serveral hundred megabytes of updates I loaded up Adobe CS4. Again you are probablly saying something to the effect “Photoshop won’t run on a netbook”. That was my exact initial response, but I figured I would give it a try anyway. I was pleasently suprised. Photoshop actually ran very smoothly and the layout changed to take advantage of the netbook’s quirky resolution. Now I’m not saying that I have an amazing editing machine, but I can open and edit psd files on the go as well  as fire up dreamweaver to do some web developement.

Conclusion

The MSi Wind is a solid mobile computing solution. I find myself using my netbook more and more. Its ultraportable and ultralight design make it perfect for a college student who wants to take notes in class or those that want to be able to use the internet on the go without havng the carry around a heavy full-sized laptop. It also can run some fairly intense applications like Photoshop with only a slight delay.

I recently worked with Jim Kukunas on implementing a parallel GPGPU merge sort algorithm that utilized the NVIDIA CUDA architecture. The project and source code can be seen at: http://jamesdevine.info/index.php/projects/cuda-parallel-merge-sort.

As part of a project I am working on for my internship with MITRE I was tasked with building a Domain containing a Server 2003 Domain Controller, exchange 2007 Server, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS) 2007 Server, and SQL Server 2005. Each service was installed in a server 2003 virtual machine and configured several months ago. The Domain Controller virtual machine was having some issues yesterday so it was wiped and a new Domain Controller was set up. All of the virtual machines were able to rejoin the domain without problem. However when the Exchange server had a number of quirks. The virtual machine hung for about 20 minutes on “applying security policy” during start up and was having a host of authentication issues that prevented outlook web access (owa) from working properly. Since the exchange server was part of a testbed environment the easiest solution was to build a new exchange virtual machine. The moral of the story is that exchange is extremely reliant on the domain controller and very sensitive to its configuration. Since the environment is entirely virtual there should have been more backup copies and snapshots of the virtual machines to revert to, both are good practices that will be applied in the future.

I am home for Spring Break this week and one of the first thing I had to do was play computer doctor for nearly all of my family’s computers. My sister got a virus on her laptop and my dad ended up with a virus on both of his computers. I do a lot of virus removal so I decided I share some very good free programs. The following are the top three programs I have found.

SUPERAntiSpyware

Malwarebytes

Spybot Search and Destroy

These programs will work wonders provided one thing, the virus/spyware/tojan that is infecting your computer lets them run. The newest breed of malicious viruses will prevent these programs from running and some will even stop you from visiting any antivirus websites. In the case that you do not have one of the very evil kind of viruses you can use the following free online scans.

Windows Live OneCare

Trend House Call

Back in September 2008 (before the severe economic downturn)  it become clear that my 2 year old laptop was no longer powerful enough to handle the average work load, let along gaming. After months of searching and price hunting I put together the rig outlined in this post. Without cutting corners I was able to build a quite powerful machine without breaking the bank (well not too much anyway).

Parts

CPU: Intel Quad Core Q6700 2.66 GHz -$215.70

CPU Fan: Thermaltake Silent 775D -$18.96 (after $10 mail in rebate)

Motherboard: XFX nForce 680i LT -$83.01 (after $20 mail in rebate)

RAM: 8GB OCZ SLI PC6400 DDR2 800MHz (4x2048MB) -$80 (after $40 rebate on each 4 GB kit)

GPU: XFX GeForce 8800 GT -$105 (after $20 rebate)

PSU: Antec BP550 Plus 550W ATX12V -$59.99

Hard Drive: 1 TB SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ -$96.99

Optical Drive:SAMSUNG 22X DVD Burner -$25.99

Case: Briza 8-Bay ATX -44.99

Total: $ 730.63

All of the links above are to the actual places that I bought the parts from. There was a lot of rebates to deal with but I had shopped around for months and was convinced that the sales were good enough to warrant building my new PC. Notice that all the parts did not come from one site. I meticulously shopped each part so I could get the most out of my money.

Building the PC

I stated with the motherboard, 4 GB of RAM, the CPU, and the GPU. The case arrived a few days later. I had an old 500 GB SATAII hard drive lying around that I initially salvaged for the build.

It became clear very quickly that the 400 watt power supply that came with the case would be less then ideal. I also realized that if I wanted to get an OS onto the new PC an optical drive would be a nice thing to have. A quick order at NewEgg had the missing parts within 3 business days ( free 3 day shipping rock!).

Blood Sweat and Tears

After I had assembled the system I noticed something very odd. The system would not POST with both 2 GB RAM modules installed. Hours on the phone with OCZ (their support staff is amazing) lead to the recommendation that I send one of the RAM modules back. After receiving the new RAM I still had the same issue and the system was very unstable with just the one module.

Another hour on the phone, this time with XFX, yielded the suggestion that I return the motherboard to TigerDirect for a replacement. A quick call to tiger and they emailed me a label to ship out the motherboard for free. It turns out tiger has an awesome RMA system.

A few days later I got the replacement motherboard. I slipped in both 2 GB RAM modules and the system booted up. The increase of speed from 2 to 4 GB of memory convinced me that adding another 4 more GB for $40 (after rebates of course) was well worth the money.

A few months later I decided it was time for another upgrade. The hard drive that I salvaged for the original build was very loud. I had been shopping for a 1TB for a long time and finally gave into buying one. I found a Samsung SpinPoint for $100 with free shipping from ZipZoomFly and went for it.

Choosing an OS

Due to the fact that I have a processor that supports 64-bit Operating Systems it seemed like the best idea to go 64-bit. I installed an OEM version Windows Vista Ultimate. The decision to go with Vista was based on the desire to take advantage of the eye-candy offered by the Aero theme and Direct X 10.

Results of the Build

The PC is stable and super fast. No overclocking was done because it was not justified. A screen shot of the Windows Experience Index is included below. The only thing that the system falls a bit short on is RAM. I could have easily spent a lot more money on super high quality ram, but the OCZ SLI Ready modules that I got deliver more then sufficient performance.