Windows Phone 7 Series - First impressions

Times have changed, the advent of smart-phones has meant that where in the past people would go out and choose a new phone for it's size, or later the megapixel count of its camera, the phone is now seen as a "computer in my pocket".

A side effect of which is that even the most unlikely of people are now asking me "what phone should I buy".

I think it's significant that these were once the people who would ask me for advice before going out and purchasing a new PC or (more usually these days) laptop. These days they will happily do this without seeking any advice from me, which is surely a good move on their part ;-)

To my mind this goes to show there is more competition in the phone market than the traditional computer market. In the computer world you either buy Microsoft, or if you've encountered one, an Apple machine (I personally don't know many people outside geekdom that have even heard of Linux, let alone care about it) .

When people ask me what phone I would recommend, as I mentioned in a much earlier posting, I either recommend an iPhone or something running Android (It's interesting how I'm avoiding Symbian, the biggest smart phone OS out there, or any of the other Nokia/Intel variants. For me the once great Symbian is suffering in the same way as the once great Windows Mobile, but hopefully Nokia have that in hand). 

However, as I've stated before, I love Windows Mobile for myself, and I put this down to the the fact that I've been using it for years and really don't mind resorting to a stylus once I've moved away from the basic phone functionality, although I'm aware that puts me in the minority, which is just one of the reasons why I don't tend to recommend Windows Mobile to others.

Now Windows Phone Series 7 has been announced I'm quite interested. If the rumours are true then the apps I already have will be useless on the new OS, but I don't care too much, it’s a break they (arguably) need to make, and something they should probably do for Windows (I’ll discuss that soon). What worries me more is ending up with a neutered device in terms of functionality, for the sake of consumer usability. Windows mobile is great because it has real tools written for hardcore developers and sysadmins.

I guess Microsoft can't please all the people. Still, as long as the multitasking remains in place, and if it's build on Siverlight and .Net, then we could end up with a nice OS, and possibly one I'll even be recommending to my friends.

That would be nice. The jury is out...

For a nice article on Windows Mobile 7 see http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/17/windows-phone-7-series-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know/

VHD Trickery

I'm not 100% certain on this, as it's something I've just stumbled upon, but if I'm correct, Microsoft are actually standardising on their VHD (Virtual Hard Disc) file format by putting it to good use. Allow me to explain how I got here:

Those of you who read my Twitter posts (@imorital) will know that I recently managed to kill my work Windows XP installation after installing a new graphics card into the machine (to run the PC dual head) and attempting to apply the ATI Catalyst Video Card Drivers (and I'm talking about the latest versions at the time, not even the decrepit old drivers on the install disc, although they would probably have done less harm).

To cut a long story short, the Catalyst install failed, and soon after, and this may be coincidence, my machine started behaving very badly, from a boot-up to usable time north of 8 minutes, to severe screen drawing issues and poor instability and performance.

I tried various things to fix the computer, but it was going from bad to worse, so after a few days I was given the go-ahead to perform a fresh OS install, and since XP is nearing end of life the OS of choice was Windows 7. This would also allow some testing of our applications under this new environment (remember, the company had skipped Vista, so any changes such as UAC and registry permissions were also being encountered for the first time).

As part of the re-install, the graphics card that spurred all the troubles was removed from my machine, so I'm now running a single monitor again.

That brings us up to where we are today.

I was (am) toying with the idea of using that old graphics card, mainly as I suspect the Windows 7 drivers will be much more reliable than those for XP. It's an ATI Radeon HD4350 card, so there's one or two of them in the wild. Having said that, there's absolutely no way I'm not covering myself this time, and fortunately Windows 7 Professional can help do this by allowing me to do a system image first.

This feature lives in the same general area as the backup functionality and looks quite interesting. From what I can tell it basically does a ghost of the system drive, which you can later either restore from Windows control panel, Windows start-up (alongside the Safe Mode options) or via the Windows7 install discs by choosing repair.

If it works then it should only take a very short time to restore... but here's the interesting part: The image file is written as a VHD, so it can be mounted into Virtual PC and essentially you have a clone of your main PC running in a virtual server, much like VMWare converter would do.

Additionally, I know it is possible to multi-boot using a VHD; so I assume, and this is an area I haven't investigated yet, that I could potentially multi boot into a second copy of the OS which would be identical to the first. I could then add the drivers to the second Windows 7 installation and run with this for a while.

If everything is OK I can then restore this second OS over the top of the main OS (making the machine single boot again and reclaiming the lost disc space), or if it all screws up just boot into the original instance and delete the VHD and all traces of it and the corrupt drivers.

That's the plan, only time will tell how much of this is possible (I suspect re-installing from the modified VHD will be tricky)

The next question is "Will I ever have time or the courage to do it and risk taking out my work PC again", even if it will only be for a few hours next time.

More info on this can be found at: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/675-system-image-recovery.html

*Of course, if I just keep the image in a safe place and do my experiments in the primary OS, then I can still restore if it all goes wrong. That is probably the approach I will take as it’s simpler, but I’ll investigate the whole boot from VHD and run as a Virtual Machine thing at some point, if nothing else it can be used to test the created image is not corrupt!

WHS: The Big Install (Part 3)

After my earlier entry WHS: The Big Install (Part 1) I received a comment from tolonensan noting that they solved a similar problem to mine, namely that my 1TB SATA 300 drive was not being recognised by my nForce2 motherboard. T

olonensan wrote that by setting a jumper on their drive they were able to force it to SATA150. I figured this would be worth a go and set about finding a document that would show which of the jumpers on the back of my drive would allow me to do this, since the label on the drive contained no information.

As it turns out the changes for a Samsung F1 1TB drive is set via a utility called ESTools (downloadable from the Samsung web site), which is both a step forward and a step back. I can see it makes some sense to add this functionality in with the general tool set, however it does rely on you having a machine available that can read the unaltered disc in order to make the changes. Fortunately this was not a problem for me, however some people may not be so fortunate (although I suspect these people also wouldn't know the difference between a SATA 150 and 300 drive anyway). So a catch 22 that could have been avoided by jumpers, but then these bring their own problems too.

Anyway, after making the change on my desktop PC I plugged the drive back into the WHS shuttle box and it was instantly recognised. Unfortunately there wasn't enough physical space for this drive in the machine alongside the others, so I merely added it to the array, then removed the old low capacity SATA drive from the array and waited about half an hour for the data to be moved from the old drive and re-balanced on the new configuration.

It was then just a simple case of unplugging the old drive and powering the machine back on and waiting for the moment of truth... and... it worked flawlessly.

So the machine is now in the configuration I first intended, well almost. I wanted:

• Primary (OS) Drive: SATA 1Tb (An old SATA 300 Samsung F1 from my desktop machine)
• Additional Drive: PATA 500Gb (The data drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: PATA 300Gb (The system drive from the old Ubuntu Box) 

What I've actually got is:

• Primary (OS) Drive: PATA 500Gb (The data drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: PATA 300Gb (The system drive from the old Ubuntu Box)
• Additional Drive: SATA 1Tb (An old SATA 300 Samsung F1 from my desktop machine)

which I'm perfectly happy with. Should I need more space I can either add a USB external drive (or possibly FireWire?) or simply replace the 300Gb PATA drive with a larger SATA drive by following the same process as removing to other SATA drive. I have no idea how difficult it is to remove the drive with the OS on it, but I imagine this is a no-no. It doesn't really matter as by the time that happens either the next version of WHS will be out and I'll have re-installed anyway, and.or more likely I'll be running on other hardware.

And the old SATA 150 drive? Well that's gone into my desktop machine as a scratch drive, but to be honest I'm not really using it at the moment. The grand plan is to have it as a local backup to replace the external 300Gb USB drive I currently have attached, and have one less power drain in the house. I would copy the data from this onto the WHS, but even with duplication I'm a little nervous about this, and as I've discovered to my cost with the Ubuntu box: You may call it a back-up copy on a back-up device, but if that device contains the only copy of your data then it's actually the primary and only copy and it's not backed up at all.

I also took the chance a week ago to take the graphics card out of my WHS box, so it is effectively running headless and hopefully saving about 10W (it's an old card). This didn't worry the installation at all (my trial installation restarted 3 times before it settled down) and a single re-boot had the machine back on the network and running fine.

What has stumped me (and I wonder if this is connected) is that I also updated the LightsOut plugin at about the same time, and this no longer wakes from sleep mode. I didn't change any BIOS settings, but to check I need to plug the graphics card back in and look at the BIOS settings, which isn't ideal.

If, and it's a long shot, LightsOut requires the graphics card to work properly (and I've no idea why it should), then it will be staying in as it's a good add-on, and will likely save me more than the 10W drop in power when the machine is on.

Although if anyone has any ideas what settings I should be using...