The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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MMD3: May 16, 2006; Montmartre -> Portland

think I just fixed it... I went into BIOS and discovered that my HDD boot order was mixed around... for some reason my SSD (which my OS is on) was at the bottom of the list.

no idea how that happened in the middle of the night but I feel a little foolish because that probably should have been the first thing I checked.

Now I know...

# ? Sep 16, 2010 07:34

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 19:39

Crumbletron: Jul 21, 2006; IT'S YOUR BOY JESUS, MANE

Xenomorph posted:

A few things.

* I would usually recommend 64-bit all the way, but I don't know about an older system like that. My old Athlon 64 3000+ system (754) hasn't had any proper chipset drivers in 5 years (and nothing updated for Vista/Win7). I'd only use 32-bit with it. Even though the platform is technically "64-bit", the drivers may be an issue. Even 32-bit Vista ran like crap on it (XP was the only thing really supported).

Old post, sorry.

I know it's a bit of a newer processor (compared to yours anyway) but I gave my parents my old gaming rig with an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2 gigs of RAM and a 5500 FX and it ran Vista 64 for the longest time and they've been running 7 64 since January now without a hitch. They've upgraded to a 7600 GT I gave them and the system will very occasionally blue-screen while my sister is playing Sims 3 but I figure it's just because it's old as poo poo and the game's new, and it was the first computer I put together myself.

# ? Sep 16, 2010 08:29

AlexDeGruven: Jun 29, 2007; Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box

MMD3 posted:

think I just fixed it... I went into BIOS and discovered that my HDD boot order was mixed around... for some reason my SSD (which my OS is on) was at the bottom of the list.

no idea how that happened in the middle of the night but I feel a little foolish because that probably should have been the first thing I checked.

Now I know...

Check your BIOS battery, it might be weak and reverting to defaults on reboot.

# ? Sep 16, 2010 15:05

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

The fading tree view glyphs in Windows 7 are driving me mad. How can I disable them? I've been googling around and haven't found anything except for this.

# ? Sep 17, 2010 00:36

Parantumaton: Jan 29, 2009; The OnLy ThInG
i LoVe MoRe
ThAn ChUgGiNg SeMeN
iS gEtTiNg PaId To Be A
sOcIaL MeDiA sHiLl
FoR mIcRoSoFt
AnD nOkIa

Parachute Underwear posted:

Old post, sorry.

I know it's a bit of a newer processor (compared to yours anyway) but I gave my parents my old gaming rig with an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2 gigs of RAM and a 5500 FX and it ran Vista 64 for the longest time and they've been running 7 64 since January now without a hitch. They've upgraded to a 7600 GT I gave them and the system will very occasionally blue-screen while my sister is playing Sims 3 but I figure it's just because it's old as poo poo and the game's new, and it was the first computer I put together myself.

I can top that, my mom has my old A64 3400+ with single gigabyte of slow-as-hell RAM and some passive cooled old beans GeForce and it's working just fine - including all the fancy UI things - even with full firewall/antivirus (F-Secure's, in this case) running.

# ? Sep 17, 2010 12:22

Xenomorph: Jun 13, 2001

Parantumaton posted:

I can top that, my mom has my old A64 3400+ with single gigabyte of slow-as-hell RAM and some passive cooled old beans GeForce and it's working just fine - including all the fancy UI things - even with full firewall/antivirus (F-Secure's, in this case) running.

I just remember my Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0 GHz) w/ 2 Gigs Pro system working great with XP, and then running like crap when I moved to Vista (32-bit).

Going from that to a Pentium Dual-Core E2180 (2.0 GHz) w/ 2 Gigs RAM on some VIA board that had current support made a huge difference.

# ? Sep 17, 2010 14:22

Suniikaa: Jul 4, 2004; Johnny Walker Wisdom

fletcher posted:

The fading tree view glyphs in Windows 7 are driving me mad. How can I disable them? I've been googling around and haven't found anything except for this.

Classic shell will let you do this, just install it and not the classic start menu part.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

# ? Sep 17, 2010 19:20

You Am I: May 20, 2001; Me @ your poasting

Suniikaa posted:

Classic shell will let you do this, just install it and not the classic start menu part.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

There are still people who want the Win95 type Start Menus in Windows 7?

:psyduck:

# ? Sep 18, 2010 05:57

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

You Am I posted:

There are still people who want the Win95 type Start Menus in Windows 7?

Some people hate change, no matter how much more awesome it is.

# ? Sep 18, 2010 14:32

akrob: Sep 5, 2009; by T. Finn

GreenNight posted:

Some people hate change, no matter how much more awesome it is.

Some people are also bedazzled by new things, vista works perfectly fine, unless there are noticeable performance gains, why bother formatting?

# ? Sep 18, 2010 23:19

fishmech: Jul 16, 2006; by VideoGames; Salad Prong

akrob posted:

Some people are also bedazzled by new things, vista works perfectly fine, unless there are noticeable performance gains, why bother formatting?

Good news! Not only are there noticeable performance gains, you don't have to reformat to install Windows!

# ? Sep 18, 2010 23:24

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

fishmech posted:

Good news! Not only are there noticeable performance gains, you don't have to reformat to install Windows!

And there are actual usability improvements!

# ? Sep 19, 2010 02:20

Never Odd or Even: Jan 21, 2009; This jerk again.; Fun Shoe

GoldenNugget posted:

just get a 30 dollar upgrade version and install that. Mine works fine.

Just installed today, everything seems to be working fine. I skipped the product code entry and I don't seem to have any issues thus far. Pretty neat.

# ? Sep 19, 2010 03:59

Kynetx: Jan 8, 2003; Full of ignorant tribalism. Kinda sad.

akrob posted:

Some people are also bedazzled by new things, vista works perfectly fine, unless there are noticeable performance gains, why bother formatting?

Vista is pretty good, and I spent a lot of time running Decrapifyer on friend's laptops and defending it to people that were horribly inconvenienced and traumatized by an occasional extra mouse click. 7 is snappier in a lot of ways, most notably boot and shutdown. It also runs amazingly well on moldy old hardware that could barely run XP.
That being said, I still have it on two desktops and a laptop in my house. I only have it on my personal laptop since I upgraded it to an SSD.

# ? Sep 19, 2010 05:33

Idran: Jan 13, 2005; Grimey Drawer

akrob posted:

Some people are also bedazzled by new things, vista works perfectly fine, unless there are noticeable performance gains, why bother formatting?

Besides what everyone else said, what does Vista even have to do with people wanting a Windows 95-style start menu in Windows 7?

# ? Sep 19, 2010 08:25

roffles: Dec 25, 2004

Has anyone seen their icon cache get corrupted on a consistent basis? I find I have to delete the icon cache file once a week or so to get my system tray icons to behave properly. I'm kind of worried there's some malware or something but I've run a ton of scans and haven't turned up anything.

# ? Sep 20, 2010 16:35

LooseChanj: Feb 17, 2006; Logicaaaaaaaaal!

roffles posted:

Has anyone seen their icon cache get corrupted on a consistent basis? I find I have to delete the icon cache file once a week or so

I used to have to do it after every boot! I finally just said screw it and created a new zero byte file and made it read-only. I didn't think it would work, but lo and behold it did.

# ? Sep 20, 2010 17:54

Landerig: Oct 27, 2008; by Fistgrrl

Suniikaa posted:

Classic shell will let you do this, just install it and not the classic start menu part.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

This looks awesome!

You Am I posted:

There are still people who want the Win95 type Start Menus in Windows 7?

Why yes, and I am one of them. :colbert:

# ? Sep 20, 2010 18:29

Hung Yuri: Aug 29, 2007; by Tiny Fistpump

I just want my windows to look like a slight redesign of XP with the "shortcut tasks" bar, but keep everything else like the taskbar and windows button and stuff like that.

Also remove the explorer sidebar on the left entirely from existence.

# ? Sep 20, 2010 18:46

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

I just want the drat tree view glyphs to not disappear. Microsoft knew this would drive devs mad, they don't fade out in Visual Studio 2010. Only in Explorer, Eclipse, etc.

# ? Sep 20, 2010 19:54

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

Recently I've had a group of Windows 7 machines where the NICs are shutting down and not waking with the computer after it's been idle for a while or after a sleep. I've been going into the device manager and disabling the check box not to allow the computer to shut down the device in the power management and then rebooting the computer which has resolved the issue. Has a recent Windows update broken this or is anyone experiencing the same thing? This shouldn't be happening.

These are desktop computers that are not on any type of battery power.

# ? Sep 21, 2010 13:17

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

IT Guy posted:

Recently I've had a group of Windows 7 machines where the NICs are shutting down and not waking with the computer after it's been idle for a while or after a sleep. I've been going into the device manager and disabling the check box not to allow the computer to shut down the device in the power management and then rebooting the computer which has resolved the issue. Has a recent Windows update broken this or is anyone experiencing the same thing? This shouldn't be happening.

These are desktop computers that are not on any type of battery power.

I had that with wireless and I had to install the latest Intel drivers because the HP drivers had the bug.

# ? Sep 21, 2010 14:45

IT Guy: Jan 12, 2010; You people drink like you don't want to live!

GreenNight posted:

I had that with wireless and I had to install the latest Intel drivers because the HP drivers had the bug.

That's weird. I should note that a lot fo the machines are different models and don't have the same NICs. Also, the power profiles on some are set to balanced and others are high performance.

# ? Sep 21, 2010 17:23

8-Bit Dracula: Dec 31, 2007

So I'm installing Home Premium OEM on a self built computer tomorrow. Anything I should think about? Should I NOT enter the key at some point or something like that?

I'm guessing I'll just start the DVD and let it work...

# ? Sep 21, 2010 17:25

LastCaress: May 8, 2004; bonobo

Would it be a good idea to convert 3 2tb hard drives to dynamic disks and then make a spanned volume so it appears as a single drive in windows? I don't care about redundancy (I will back up everything with mozy) or performance, but I fear I have to delete all the data? Is there any way to do this without deleting the data? Thanks.

# ? Sep 21, 2010 17:26

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

IT Guy posted:

That's weird. I should note that a lot fo the machines are different models and don't have the same NICs. Also, the power profiles on some are set to balanced and others are high performance.

Ok that's hosed. Can you go to a restore point and see if the same thing happens?

# ? Sep 21, 2010 17:43

LoKout: Apr 2, 2003; Professional Fetus Taster

LastCaress posted:

Would it be a good idea to convert 3 2tb hard drives to dynamic disks and then make a spanned volume so it appears as a single drive in windows? I don't care about redundancy (I will back up everything with mozy) or performance, but I fear I have to delete all the data? Is there any way to do this without deleting the data? Thanks.

If everything fits on one drive right now you can expand that volume to the other drives. At least you should be able to, I haven't created a 6tb volume before, so YMMV.

# ? Sep 22, 2010 05:17

WayneCampbell: Oct 7, 2005; You got me a gunrack?!? I don't even own a gun, let alone alone enough to nessecitate an entire rack.

I thought this would be an appropriate place to task this. If anyone who upgraded to windows 7 has an XP 32bit key they're no longer using, I'd appreciate it if you could pass it on to me via PM. If you want I can buy you a 5 dollar steam game or something in exchange for it.

Edit: Thank you, Suniikaa

WayneCampbell fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Sep 22, 2010

# ? Sep 22, 2010 23:01

devmd01: Mar 7, 2006; Elektronik
Supersonik

Protip don't install Daemon Tools or any software that installs a driver on a system like antivirus before sysprepping an image.

# ? Sep 23, 2010 16:00

Xenomorph: Jun 13, 2001

devmd01 posted:

Protip don't install Daemon Tools or any software that installs a driver on a system like antivirus before sysprepping an image.

Can you give more detail on this?

# ? Sep 23, 2010 16:56

Total Meatlove: Jan 28, 2007; Rangers died, shoujo Hitler cried ;_;

Downloaded the installer for IE9 beta, Windows 7 is completely up to date, nothing left in the queue from Windows.

So why when I attempt to install it does it say 'IE9 does not support your Service Pack'?

# ? Sep 23, 2010 21:39

BangersInMyKnickers: Nov 3, 2004; I have a thing for courageous dongles

devmd01 posted:

Protip don't install Daemon Tools or any software that installs a driver on a system like antivirus before sysprepping an image.

I have never had a problem with AV being on a system image. What happened?

# ? Sep 23, 2010 22:03

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

devmd01 posted:

Protip don't install Daemon Tools or any software that installs a driver on a system like antivirus before sysprepping an image.

Slight derail - I thought Virtual CloneDrive was preferred over Daemon Tools these days?

# ? Sep 23, 2010 22:18

fishmech: Jul 16, 2006; by VideoGames; Salad Prong

ibroxmassive posted:

Downloaded the installer for IE9 beta, Windows 7 is completely up to date, nothing left in the queue from Windows.

So why when I attempt to install it does it say 'IE9 does not support your Service Pack'?

The final version will require SP1 for install. Dunno if the beta is supposed to.

# ? Sep 23, 2010 22:22

c0burn: Sep 2, 2003; The KKKing

ibroxmassive posted:

Downloaded the installer for IE9 beta, Windows 7 is completely up to date, nothing left in the queue from Windows.

So why when I attempt to install it does it say 'IE9 does not support your Service Pack'?

Do you have the SP1 beta or something?

# ? Sep 23, 2010 23:57

ApproachingInfinity: Sep 14, 2008

Parachute Underwear posted:

Old post, sorry.

I know it's a bit of a newer processor (compared to yours anyway) but I gave my parents my old gaming rig with an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2 gigs of RAM and a 5500 FX and it ran Vista 64 for the longest time and they've been running 7 64 since January now without a hitch. They've upgraded to a 7600 GT I gave them and the system will very occasionally blue-screen while my sister is playing Sims 3 but I figure it's just because it's old as poo poo and the game's new, and it was the first computer I put together myself.

If you're still having trouble on this, try updating the video card's drivers (or if they're up to date, try getting older ones). Failing that, I remember having a problem with The Sims 3 (and some other games) where the card was overheating itself and causing blue-screens, until I turned on Vsync, or whatever the option is called in Sims 3.

# ? Sep 24, 2010 01:25

Hipster_Doofus: Dec 20, 2003; Lovin' every minute of it.

ApproachingInfinity posted:

If you're still having trouble on this, try updating the video card's drivers (or if they're up to date, try getting older ones).

Purely anecdotal, but I have had trouble with nVidia drivers offered by WinUpdate almost every single time and on different cards (and different windows versions) too. I really don't know what the gently caress, but I now have a policy of just saying no to them, period. (Never had a problem with an ATI driver via WinUpdate though.)

# ? Sep 24, 2010 01:55

Ryokurin: Jul 14, 2001; Wanna Die?

ibroxmassive posted:

Downloaded the installer for IE9 beta, Windows 7 is completely up to date, nothing left in the queue from Windows.

So why when I attempt to install it does it say 'IE9 does not support your Service Pack'?

I had the same issue. Ended up that the version of 7 I was running was one build behind the final version. check the following registry location and make sure your build number is 16385 (it's the second number after 7600)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion. Look for BuildLabEx

edit: for the record, I didn't try just changing the number, I just decided to buy a new harddrive I wanted anyways and do a fresh install with a image I made off a modified upgrade disc I had for another computer.

# ? Sep 24, 2010 02:08

Ryokurin: Jul 14, 2001; Wanna Die?

fishmech posted:

The final version will require SP1 for install. Dunno if the beta is supposed to.

It does not. If you have the full version it will download the prerequisites, otherwise you need kb2028551, 2028560, 2120976 and 2259539 installed first.

# ? Sep 24, 2010 02:12

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 19:39

devmd01: Mar 7, 2006; Elektronik
Supersonik

Xenomorph posted:

Can you give more detail on this?

Developers are all getting new machines, so instead of installing 20 apps on 8 different desktops, the obvious solution is a specific image. I got a base install ready and handed it off to a developer for the app installs, and once I got it back ran sysprep and pulled the image up to our WDS server.

Firing up the machine to test out the sysprep gets the lovely "Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration, restart the computer." Doesn't let you get past it, various solutions suggested online didn't work either. Image is hosed.

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

I have never had a problem with AV being on a system image. What happened?

Not necessarily AV per say, but from what i'm reading anything that installs a filter driver like daemon tool's SPTD.

fletcher posted:

Slight derail - I thought Virtual CloneDrive was preferred over Daemon Tools these days?

Yeah but the silly developer didn't know that.

# ? Sep 24, 2010 19:06

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