Windows 7 First Impressions

Just managed to pull up Windows 7 RC1 from microsoft website. I immediately managed to installed it to my laptop ( I had to kill my Fedora 10 install in favour of Windows 7 , But I do have a copy of turnkey linux installed in my Vista under virtual box ). I have kept my vista Intact. Coming from Vista, here are my initial impressions (Approx 4 hours of usage). BTW, I have a Vaio CR35G/R  ( Core2 Duo T8100 2.10 Ghz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, Intel 965 Mother Board, ATI Radeon X2300 Card with 128MB on board).

• Installation was pretty fast. I have my copy running in about 35 minutes (Including 2 restarts and my retarded slow DVD drive).
• The new windows 7 taskbar…err… superbar is pretty good, but it will take some time for me to get used to. Plus I don’t like the amount real estate it takes up on the screen (it can be reduced though).
• Windows 7 art work is very very good. Kudos to Microsoft for coming up with fresh art work. Not quite in the apple league, but getting there, fast.
• Unlike Vista, Windows 7 does not thrash Hard disk ( Vista has the nasty habit of keeping your hard disk busy for no apparent reason).
• Bootup, Hibernate – resume, Standby – resume times are a lot faster than Vista.
• Laptop feels a lot more snappier with Windows 7 than with Vista.
• The new Windows media player (Windows Media Player 12)  is a lot more polished and a lot better than Vista’s. However, I was not able to get ffdshow running with it though.
• Changing wallpaper desktop themes are pretty cool. Windows 7 supports wallpaper cycling.
• Reduced foot print. Windows 7 at bootup takes up about 30% of RAM as compared ~50% on Vista.
• Builtin monitor colour calibration tool ( I don’t thing Vista had one).
• I dont know why, but since yesterday night till today morning, I have received at least some 4 updates to my Windows 7. Cant you guys club em and do ONE BIG update? (Pretty annoying, but I guess since this is a RC, they will be fixing up a lot small stuff. I hope they have a better policy for updation cycle in the final release).

All in all Microsoft seems to have go it right this time around. I will seriously consider purchasing this once it comes out. ( And no, Microsoft is not paying me to say this :p, though if they sponsor me a desktop with Nvidia GTX 250 or ATI HD 4750, I can say how well Windows 7 will do on gaming front.   ).

If you have anything to add (Good/bad/ugly things about windows 7), feel free to post em in the comments section.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows 7,First Impressions

Vista Native vs Windows 7 in Virtualbox

Just out of curiosity I ran Windows assessment of Windows 7 running in virtualbox (with VT-x enabled) and Vista. Here is a screen shot of the comparison.

 

What was amazing is the Hard disk Score, Virtualbox HDD is faster than the native disk !! Processor score is not too shabby, but I expected more with VT-x turned on. So how much does VT-x have influence on the Virtualbox performance? I tried to do the same score with VT-x turned “OFF”.

To my surprise, I got the same score! Perhaps, the windows assessment tool does not run any ring-0 code ( as far as I know, VT-x helps better management of ring-0 code).

Anyhow I’m posting the screen shot of the windows 7 on virtualbox with VT-x turned off.

If Anybody has a better idea as to why VT-x failed to change the scores in windows 7 assessment, please feel free to comment

Technorati Tags: Sun,Virtualbox,Vista,Seven,7,Microsoft,Windows,Assessment,Performance
VT-x,Virtualization,Hardware Virtualization

Microsoft Surface Spoof

I was browsing through wordpress blogs and I came across a post that posted this youtube video. I liked the comment on the part where he is routing to go somewhere on surface.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,surface,spoof,funny,youtube,apple

Due credit goes to : http://burnsar.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/microsoft-surface-video-spoof/ ( I saw this video there first   )

Vista BSOD!

Never thought I will have to see the Blue Screen of Dread…err death on my vista. But thats exactly what I got today morning..

Untimley Death of Vista x(

15 Minutes guide to VirtualBox+Turnkey Appliance Linux (aka Linux on Windows)

Having posted 15 Minutes guide to Mediawiki a while back, I was looking for something simpler. I wanted to run an entire Apache MySQL PHP (AMP) in a sandbox. Something that is isolated from Vista on my laptop. So I thought I will setup Virtualbox.  

Now, I’m sure almost everyone has heard of Virtualization. In case you have been living under a rock for past couple of years, Virtualization, in a nut shell is nothing but ability to run another Operating System within your existing OS.

So I decided upon Sun’s Virtualbox as the virtualization platform of choice. Now I need to find an OS to host the AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  Linux was the OS of choice as it can run on a wide variety of hardware configuration. So I started hunting for a Linux Distribution with very low footprint, something that can run on, say 128 MB or 256MB of RAM and require very small hard disk. I just needed the essentials.

After, hours of googling, I came across this great “Appliance Linux” distribution known as turnKey. So what is turnkey? In a nutshell it is a pre-configured environment to perform a particular task. For example TurnKey LAMP will contain Apache , MySQL and Php along with a barebones Linux kernel built from the Ubuntu distro. The advantage of such a setup is that the whole thing needs just 128 MB of RAM.

So how do we go about it?

• Go to www.virtualbox.org and download their installer.(and Install, Duh!)
• Go to www.turnkeylinux.org and download LAMPP appliance (Direct link to the LAMP Appliance page).
• Once you are done with it, follow the err… following steps to bring up the Virtual Machine.
• Start the VirtualBox (DuH!!)

 

• Hit New, and give the options mentioned in the screenshot.

• Hit Next, and set the Memory to 256MB. This is the amount of RAM your Virtual Machine will have.

• Hit Next, and Click on ‘New Disk’

• Set the allocation to “Dynamic”. This means that the virtual Hard disk of the client will expand when necessary.

• In the next window, set the Storage HDD file location and Max Size (Recommended max size 2 – 4 GB).

• Now just Hit Finish in the last window and you should drop back to the main wizard.
• Hit finish on that too.
• Congratulations, You have created your first Virtual Machine (VM). Don’t pat yourself on your back yet. There are a few more steps ( Simple ones sweetheart, don’t fret   ).
• Now we need to mount the Turnkey Linux’s ISO image file on the Virtual Machine. So next step will be to click on CD/DVD-ROM.
• Follow the instructions in the image below to Mount the ISO to the VM.

• Ok, now you are all set! Time to power on this baby… Err.. Wait, One more step. We need to setup Network for the VM, otherwise how will you be able to talk to your host machine? Follow the pictorial to set up network. Note: I assume that your system is a part of network and you have a DHCP server on your LAN.

• If you are not on a network, then you need to select “Internal Network” from the “Attached to” Dropdown.
• Click OK, and now are all set to go, Just hit the “Start (->)” button. You should see your brand new Virtual Machine boot up. It should boot from the CD-ROM.
• At this juncture, you are presented with 2 interesting choices. a). Boot from CD and b). Install to Hard Disk.
• Select “Install to Hard Disk” and then proceed with the installation. Make sure you select the entire HDD for installation. (Its the virtual Harddisk, so no, you wont lose anything from your REAL hard disk   ).
• Once the installation is done, Turkey will reboot the VM and you should get straight to the configuration page.

 

If you need a static IP for your Turnkey, go to Advanced Menu -> Netowork -> Static IP.

• Once everything is done, You should be good to go. Try logging into the Turnkey by pointing to http://<ip of turnkey>:12321
• Login with password you had set earlier and you are good to go!

 

Have Fun Should you need any help, feel free to comment, And I will try to help you out.

Technorati Tags: Virtualization,Linux,Turnkey,Linux on windows,Virtualbox,turnkey,Appliance Linux

The Mojave Experiment

As I was skimming thru my daily dose of updates, I found this interesting article by daily tech.
So , what is Mojave Experiment about ?
Well, we all know how much of dirt is being thrown at vista by people. There are a lot of people who hate vista and a lot of negativity around it.
While I’am not claiming that it is not unfounded. A lot of it stems from ignorance. So guys at microsoft came up with this lil experiment to show you just that.
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

In fact, I have been Mojave’ed at one point. I too was under the opinion that vista sucked ( because the experts on the net thought so.. ). But when I saw vista first hand on my buddie’s laptop, I actually found it to be good.
So when I got my Vaio, with vista, I did not downgrade to XP.
So let me dispell some myths.

* UAC is NOT a useless feature, sure it annoys power users (like me). But I can see someone like my dad or sis benefit from it. Look, one of the stupidest ways a system can get infected it by u deliberately clicking on an executable. When u see a UAC confirmation for something like a joke program, YOU KNOW that something is not right…. Besides how do you call yourself a “Power User” if u cant figure out something trivial as turning UAC off ?

* While VISTA does need more RAM, I found its usage to be much more efficient than XP. I really liked superfetch feature. Thanks to that, Firefox starts up in under 5 seconds, and Windows media player and winamp in under 3 seconds. So Vista is actually faster from the end user perspective.
Yeah, I/O is a lil slower than XP. But end user experience is miles ahead!

* One feature, that nobody really talked (dont know why!) is the fact that Vista has I/O prioritization! So? you might ask…. Well, you know what happens when Virus scanner starts when you were doing something heavy on XP, right? Well, that doesnt happen in Vista. Stuff like virus scan and indexing happens at lower I/O priority. So your applications dont have to fight for the Disk I/O’s (Means, overall responsiveness of the application increases).

* One more really neat feature, Thread Priority boosting. Simply put, if you are running windows media player and some “heavy” application, in order for you to have an uninterrupted media playback, Media player will boost its thread priority. Does it work ? Yes, as far as I know because, I never got any stuttering issues if Im doing some installation or virus scan in while watching movies.

And for all the people cribbing about higher RAM requirements, why dont you take a look at RAM cost these days? As we progress, the hardware requirements of the OS will go up, remember 98 used to be happy with 64 or 128 MB, try running XP on that…

No Active Desktop in Vista!

Ok, how many of you remember this lil feature that was introduced in Windows 98 ? It was a nice idea, Just set any HTML page you fancy as your wallpaper. It was called active desktop.

The trouble was, with paltry amount of RAM and limited CPU horse power, Active desktop used to murder the system resources. It was carried over to XP. But still hardware had not kept pace with Software. Now with Vista and its God like requirements, I assumed that the feature was still around. To my disappointment they have removed this feature…

I have a nice laptop with 2.1 Ghz Penrynn processor and good 2 Gigs of RAM (additional 512MB as readyboost cache), When I have enough processing grunt and room in memory to accommodate this feature, they have removed it….

I was planning on putting http://www.twittervision.com as my wallpaper. Too bad, now I cant…

The reason why they did this? Ppl on the net seems to think that its coz of the security threat and memory leak issues. Hmmmm…. Too bad, when we FINALLY have the computing power to have this on the desk, they had to kill it off…

Windows Live Writer

So with new blogs getting some decent traffic in past couple of days, I guess I should give the tools I used, the due credit…

Initially when I started blogging (That was a couple of years back), the only way to make a post was to login into the blogging site, and then manually update the blogs by posting a new entry. The tools available were quite crude with few formatting options.

Fast forward to today, and we have a number of ways to blog. Take my phone for example, I have Sony Ericsson K790i Phone, it has an option for taking a snap and then blogging it right into http://blogger.com. This was great, I even used it to blog real silly stuff (Check them out at http://allajunaki.blogspot.com ). But even they lacked something. The brave and the determined continued to blog with these tools. But somehow, for some reason, the not so determined people like me just didn’t like the idea of not being able to edit the document and write one offline. The post like “My First Serious Crush” took a good 4 hours to write, over a period of 2 days. I couldn’t be bothered to open an online edit screen and keep editing such lengthy stuff.

So how did I do it. Ladies, and Gentlemen and the rats of the Internet. Please welcome my favourite blogging tool. Windows Live Writer

Here are a few things I liked about Live Writer.

• Its Good! (duh!)
• Its free (Really, its free and its from Micro$oft !!!)
• It has option of pulling up the style of your blog into editor screen, so that you can see how colours and layout comes offline.
• It has a spell check.
• It as good formatting capability (Which I don’t use, as U can clearly see, but its nice to know that I can, if I wanted to).
• Functionality can be extended with plugins.
• It takes about ~50 MB running (Trivial, on my 2 GB system)

 

Bets of all is the web preview feature, which lets me see exactly how it would look in my blog, with all the other elements in the page!

 

The above screenshot gives me an idea how the page will look in before I publish it. Not how it shows the side columns and all, though the columns are not updated live (in the screenshot the RSS feed on the left is bit old).

So I would urge anybody who is into blogging or planning to blog to take a look at the windows live writer (http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/) a serious look, it may improve the productivity!!

Happy Blogging

The 15 Minute guide to setup mediaWiki (Windows)

Believe me or not, thats all it takes from an empty system with all the right software downloaded to a system running on Wiki.

So what do you need ?

• xampp -> http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampp-win32-1.6.6a.zip
• mediawiki -> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

So now that you have these, first step is to get xampp up and running…

Extract xampp to your favourite location.

Run ’setup_xampp’.

Run ‘XAMPP Control Panel’.

Ensure that under Modules, ‘Apache’ and ‘MySql’ is clicked.This ensures that the apache and MySql is installed as service.

Now, click on “Service” button next “SCM”.

Tick Apache and MySql and clikc OK.

Now head straight to

http://localhost/security/index.php

to see the security status.

First step in this will be to lock down mysql. Head to http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php and enter a password for root user for mysql.

Ok now we are almost done with xampp. Now next step is prepare mysql for mediawiki.

Head to http://localhost/phpmyadmin , login with the newly set root password.

Once in, hit the link titled ‘Privileges’. Now click on “Add User” with the logo ->

user name : wikiuser

Host : localhost

password : password

Leave everything else as default, and hit go at the bottom.

SO now we have added the user. We are almost there for getting the mediawiki ready.

Now click on icon which is on left pane just below ‘phpMyAdmin’.

This should cause a sql query window to popup.

Now copy paste this code, (change the password ofc)

CREATE DATABASE wikidb;

GRANT ALL ON wikidb.* to wikiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

SET PASSWORD FOR wikiuser@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD(‘password’);

And hit go

you shouldnt see any errors here…

Now you are ready for putting mediawiki.

Extract the mediawiki.tar.gz to <xampp root>htdocs

So now you should have <xampp>htdocsmediawiki-1.19 (or some other version number)

Rename the <xampp>htdocsmediawiki-1.19 to <xampp>htdocsmediawiki     ( Remove the version number)

Now fireup the browser and goto http://localhost/mediawiki

SO you should see a link asking you to setup mediawiki, click it.

These values need to be changed

Database name:   <leave it as it is, unless you gave a different db name during ‘CREATE DATABASE wikidb’

DB username: <leave it as it is>

DB password: Must not be blank : password

DB password confirm   : password

Tick the ‘Superuser Account’, and enter the password for root. This is the same password you set in xampp security page for mysql.

Leave everything as it is and hit “Install Mediawiki” and watch the fun.

Once this is successful. from windows explorer navigate to <xampp>/htdocs/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php to htdocs/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

Now fire up the browser, and head to http://localhost/mediawiki . Tada! you should be looking at your own wiki.

Done, just one last step.

Noticed whenever you type http://localhost you are redirected to http://localhost/xampp, Let me show you how to make it to http://localhost/mediawiki .

First head to htdocs folder. Edit the index.php.

replace the line

header(‘Location: ‘.$uri.’/xampp/’);

with
header(‘Location: ‘.$uri.’/mediawiki/’);

So there you go, your own Wiki.

A few things worth noting.

• Not the most secure setup.
• you maynot want to use “password” as the password for wikiuser.
• Always protect the MySql with root password.
• Dont forget to have fun

Detailed instructions for mediawiki –> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation

Drop in a word, if you need any clarifiaction Will try my best to help you out