Installing Windows7

My last post was about my personal cloud. I am still working on it – there are many rules that needs to be fixed first, I already found few bugs, however I am progressing pretty quickly.

Once I will finish my design (and implementation), I wanted to make final test – reinstall one of my production computers, join it to cloud and see how much work it takes before I’ll be able to make it productive again.

Suddenly, I need to make that test now – HDD on my laptop crashed and luckily that laptop was part of my cloud, so everything is backed up :)

At this moment I am installing Windows 7 – one of reasons is that I am also MS moderator for Win7 and I want to use that system on daily basis in order to give reliable answers to people (and not read them from some Win7 cookbook). Originally I wanted to install Windows 7 to my desktop PC – but ouch, I got rid of original mouse & keyboard and now I am left with my wireless combo (HINT: Doesn’t work with BIOS ;)).

I will write this post during installation. Because I am too lazy to burn installation DVD, I decided I will rather install it using USB drive.

Preparing USB drive

I got 3 drives at home – 1 static (1 TB) for music and video, one dedicated to work that is part of my cloud (200 GB) and one for rest (120 GB, I don’t use it too much anymore).

I decided I will use my DevHDD (used for work). First I need to create partition (+-10GB) – instead of backing up all data and re-formating I will rather use shrink functionality build into Vista:

1.) Right-click on HDD and select Shrink Volume:

2.) Specify amount of space in MBs. I will use 10GB:

3.) Click Shrink button. Interesting is that drive is available all the time – during my shrink I tried to copy 10GB file to this drive just to see if it will work – it did :) You should now see shrinked volume as unallocated:

4.) Select New simple volume:

5.) Format with FAT32 filesystem:

6.) Mark partition as Active:

7.) Mount Windows7 ISO in your favorite virtual drives software. I know almost everyone uses Daemon Tools, I prefer to use Gizmo (TODO: write blog post about Gizmo ;)):

8.) Copy content of installation DVD to your new partition:

9.) Once finish, just attach USB drive to your PC and reboot\startup. Go to boot menu (my Dell – F12, my HP – ESC, you all know this stuff) and select USB Storage Device as boot option – and voila – Windows 7 installation will start :)

10.) Ehm, INSTALL Windows 7 :) My installation (from first boot till desktop) took 25 minutes (including manual typing of user name, computer name, product key etc etc), which is perfect :) I was also surprised that during installation I was asked if I want to join a wireless network – it showed me list of all networks in range, really nice feature.

11.) Joined my cloud – this is secret part and is going to be covered in future posts :) As mentioned before, my cloud needs a LOT of improvements to be fully automated and easy to use, so we can skip this step now.

12.) Once installation is finished, we can delete volume we created for installation:

13.) Next step – lets extend partition to original size:

14.) On following screen you select how much unallocated space you want to use. WARNING: there is one gotcha, predefined amount of space is (MaximumAvailable + 1), so Next button is by default grayed out. Just decrease it by one and Next button is enabled again:

Finished – my laptop is reinstalled with Windows 7 :)

Personal cloud - Introduction

Hi all,

maybe you noticed I got huge problem – don’t have enough time to write articles :( This is mostly to my new project, I need to travel almost every week and I don’t want to touch computer during weekends.

However my new situation got also bright moments – and one of them is that I had to create my “cloud” – my fully automated synchronization of programs, contacts, mails etc between multiple devices and with limited internet connectivity. In following series of posts I want to share with you all technologies I used and procedures.

Devices

First of all, let me tell you about my starting situation. At home I got development desktop – two screens, 4GB ram, I really prefer to use it instead of laptop.

However on road I must use laptop – and as I mentioned before, I travel a lot.

Even though I really love Vista’s sleep functionality, I don’t want to always open laptop whenever I need information like meeting room or mail address, so third device I am using is Windows Mobile E-Ten M800.

And, last but not least, you know that it can happen that you need to access your data using internet only.

To summarize it, I got 2 computers (using them 50:50), one mobile phone and I want to have online access to all my data.

Data

Ok, personal cloud, what are we talking about exactly?

• emails
• contacts
• calendar
• passwords
• utilities
• installation sources
• configuration
• favorites
• documents
• .NET\PowerShell projects

Other requirements

I am lazy. I am VERY lazy. That is why I am specialized on scripting frameworks and automation in general – I am too lazy to do it manually, so I rather automate it.

For that reason I don’t want any solution that would require me to solve conflicts, specify when to sync, I want completely seamless solution that won’t require any interaction from my side.

Also for sources, I am sure all of you know situation when you reinstalled your computer and spend hours and hours downloading small applications like .NET framework, Daemon tools, Live Messenger… And I am sure you are running at least (being optimistical) one application, that is already out-of-date (there is newer version available), so I also wanted to automate process of getting latest available sources.

What I want to achieve is that if I will reinstall my computer, all I need to do is connect to my cloud, do little bit of configuration (ideally just run Connect-Cloud.ps1 :)) and get back my work space.

Current situation

At this moment I am fixing minor bugs and issues, however I am already running solution that (almost) fits all my requirements. I want to write series of articles describing each category I store in my cloud – so if you are missing something that is important for you, let me know.

Of course this solution is not based on one ultimate product – it is combination of few (5-6?) separate tools.

End of year

Hello everyone,

end of year is here – so merry Christmas to all of you :)

For next year I want to promise you something – I will write at least one post per week. What can you expect?

I think that Windows 7 will be very important OS release – as I mentioned few times in my posts, Windows Vista can be seen as Windows 2000 – new features, changes in MS approach etc, however still many annoyances and missing features. Windows 7 will be more like Windows XP – take already existing major release (Windows 2000), add new features and change some settings.

I really, really like Windows Vista – there are many features that I really love and are NOT obvious to normal users (MIC or I/O priorities) and I think that Windows 7 will make use of all these features.

As I am one of official MVP moderators for Windows 7, I want to share my thoughts with you and hope I’ll be able to make Windows 7 next-gen Windows XP – OS that we will happily use for years :)

You can also expect lot of posts about project I was working on called S4Matic. S4Matic is workflow framework based on PowerShell that allows you to easily automate processes. Consider scenario when new employee will come and all you need to do is to specify his name – his AD account is automatically generated, he is added to all required groups, his mailbox is generated and few emails are automatically sent (to create new badge for him for example or request for new mobile phone). This is quite simple scenario – consider more complex scenarios, for example if you have hundreds of Citrix servers and you want to reboot them during weekend without any downtime (I already implemented this). Or even better – you want to rebuild all servers during weekend without affecting any users. Sounds cool? You will see what S4Matic can do :)

Of course I want to continue with my Powershell blogging activities, I don’t like to post cool functions (there are many better bloggers for this), I prefer to write about general principles and how thinks works (or even better, what doesn’t work and why).

This blog is not only about technical stuff, so you can also expect some productivity posts – for example how versioning can improve your daily work or how to organize your drives.

And hopefully I will post some small programs and utilities :) And many many tips & tricks :)

What's The Difference Between Size And Size On Disk In Folder Properties

Many people don’t understand the difference between these two values:

 

Today I run into small blog post that describe these two values. However there is something I am still missing in Windows. We should be able to see 3 values:

Size

Size on disk

Virtual size on disk

Why is that? Because especially with Windows Vista\2008\7, softlinks and hardlinks are playing much more important role.

For example take folder WinSxS in Windows directory. If you check it’s size, you will be probably surprised that it is really big, in my case it is 10GB. Surprisingly this folder is NOT that big, because most files (or many of them) are in fact only hardlinks to existing files.

Confusing? Yes

Do you know real size of that folder? No

Same applies to my “loopback” symlink. I tried to use utility (Gladinet) that allows you to share some folders between computers. However I didn’t wanted to share only folder, I wanted to share whole C: drive (which is as far as I know not supported by that utility). So I used simple trick and created C:\Links\Loopbacks\C folder that is symlink to C:\. Worked great :) But as you can see below, that folder is really big (even though it DOESN’T occupy 75GB on my disk):

I think this can be pretty confusing\annoying in some situations – in my case if I would calculate size per folder, it would be at least 150GB (on my 110GB HDD) :)

Google Zeitgeist

What I really like about internet is the fact that you can get access to real-life data sometimes. For example what is best method for identifying most popular songs of last year?

For some it can be charts - but charts are always depending on radio listeners or radio genre. Another approach can be number of sold records, however that doesn't say anything about number of listeners, for example if song is really great, however album is really bad, people won't buy album and will download MP3 instead. Not talking about fact that most people don't buy CDs anymore (IMHO) and are buying\downloading MP3s only (and I think that number of downloads is much higher than number of purchases).

So for me best method to identify hits of last year is to review numbers from Last.FM (that have millions of listeners and is not focused on single genre).

Want to know more? Have a look at Last.FM Best of 2008.

Don't interested in movies? What would be best method to see changes worldwide or in your country?

Great idea would be to base it upon search queries - especially in case of big player such as Google (that is used by different people all around the world). I blogged about Google Trends already and when I tried to play with some trends of year 2008, I discovered very interesting press page called Google Zeitgeist that already did this job. Very interesting with details about each country :)

LastPass - Free password manager

First of all - I was very busy with few projects, that is why I didn't post anything on this blog for long time. Situation is now better and from beginning of next year I would like to blog every week again, so keep tuned :)

Maybe you remember that I wrote about tools and utilities I am using and what am I missing. One of them was password manager and I finally found one I really like.

My requirements:

• Online synchronization because I am using more computers
• Support for multiple accounts for one site (typically Live ID or Gmail account)
• Support for one account to multiple sites (again Live ID\Open ID\Gmail account)
• Ability to have online access to accounts\passwords

2 months ago I found tool called LastPass. Major features they are promoting are online synchronization and fact that it is available for free.

From security perspective, central site DOESN'T store you password, it stores encrypted data by your master password.

There are many cool features I really like about LastPass... Because it have online synchronization, I finally started using autogenerated passwords (before I was scared what would I do in case of data loss)... You can even share sites with your friends.

So in case you are interested, head directly to LastPass homepage

ZoneAlarm Pro for free

You can get ZoneAlarm Pro for free today - however be careful, it is NOT full security suit as many sites are reporting, it is "only" firewall & antispyware suit (which I have no use for - both are already included in Vista by default)...

Anyway, if you find this information useful, so grab a copy while it is available ;)