Windows 7 RC Status Update

I was forced to rebuild my last Windows 7 Beta machine (an HP TX2510 convertable tablet pc) to the RC last night, as on July 1 it started shutting down every two hours in order to gently remind me that it was expiring. Oh bother! As I wasn't really that worried with preserving the state of the machine, I just reinstalled the OS, leaving the drive intact, so that I could reinstall everything necessary and still have it local.

I was amazed at the difference that just a few months could make in the smoothness of the process. This was the very first machine I moved to Windows 7, and while a fairly new technology, it nevertheless required a substantial amount of work to get drivers to work (well). This time, however, every single driver loaded during the install, including a third-party beta for the fingerprint reader, with one tiny exception. That being the driver for the commercial infrared sensor for the pop-out media center controller. One stop to HP.com was all that was required to solve that. Even the video drivers were correct, although it has ended up show the screen as 1-2 monitors in one. A little digging revealed that this is actually how HP implemented the hardware. Oh well, it seems to work just fine.

I am really looking forward to next March, when I get to upgrade all these machine yet again.

My WHS Has a Tweeter Account!

A couple of days ago, while doing my occasional review of Add-ins at WeGotServed.com, I found an add-in that allows my WHS to send out status updates as tweets, rather than email [http://www.whsplus.com/2009/06/10/whstweet/]. This has several benefits in that it doesn't clog up my Blackberry with personal messages that I have to manage, yet still allows me to have fairly instantaneous notification of issues on my home network, through my UberTwitter client. To do this, I had to create @jbharmanWHS account for my WHS to use to send, so that I don't spam my work colleagues with status notifications. So far, so good. We shall see how this lasts. Oh, by the way: in just 48 hours, @jbharmanWHS has already received 4 bogus (spam/porno) follow requests. Good thing I have my settings set to protected.

Windows 7 RC vs. WHS PP2

I have installed on 3 machines the Windows 7 RC, as well as a Tablet PC that I have left (for the time being) at the Windows 7 Beta. Without exception, all four machines are exhibiting bizarre behavior  in regards to Windows Home Server (WHS) which has recently been upgraded to Power Pack 2. WHS Forum members assure me that I have introduced 'networking issues', which clearly cannot be the case as I am able to access shares and files from any of the machine to the WHS and the same in reverse. Further, each of the machines run the WHS Connector software just fine and backup daily, as long as the default backup works. Therein lies the rub!

If you attempt to actually use the Connector console either from any of the client machines or from the WHS to the client, nothing at all happens. Literally! Eventually, the client software will give a message that it is unable to connect to the WHS and if it was recently rebooted to wait just a little longer. From the WHS side, after several minutes a message appears saying that apparently the Client machine is offline. However, the same Connector software tray icon will instantly start a backup, open the Software shares on the WHS, etc. And, the other 5 machines running Vista work perfectly. If I dual boot any of these Windows 7 machines into Vista, they instantly connect. Keep in mind that through all this, I can still connect using Windows networking and copy and move files in either direction from and to any of these machine as well as to the Internet.

What is further interesting is the the WHS Forum is FULL of people experiencing the exact same issues. Any yet, they continue to insist that networking issues have been introduced and that machines that worked perfectly fine before the PP2 upgrade have somehow been changed. I am very frustrated but expect that eventually even the most obtuse will see that there is a systemic issue here that needs to be addressed. In the end, I have one machine that will not backup at all because I cannot configure and exclude one problem drive that I can't do away with as it contains my entire iTunes library. Here's hoping that I don't do something stupid to damage my only machine not backed up!

Today at Church, 4 mothers sang, including the oldest mother in the congregation, Joyce Wilson @ 92 years of age. It was wonderful!

From Brent's Storm
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Rebuilds for Windows 7 RC

I finished downloading the Windows 7 RC (32- and 64-bit) on Friday morning. I have had my office Media Center PC in and out of Frys Electronics for warranty repairs and all they have done is muck the machine up. I told them it was the Video Card, but they assure me it isn't. It still didn't work longer than 3 minutes before freezing up, so I decided to wipe the OS and load Win7. That didn't work either: after 3 minutes the video would go away. So, I downed the machine, yanked the Video card and replaced it with one I got on sale at NewEgg and wow! The machine is wonderful now and I love Windows 7 Media Center. I left this machine at 32-bit because it is my main iTunes host and I need to move Calibre over to it too for my Sony Reader PRS-700, which can only run on 32-bit.

I am going to retire WHENIM64, my very first machine that used 64-bit full time. It has had XP and Vista 64-bit OS's, but as a single core machine, I think it is time for it to go. My wife has given me an ultimatum on reducing the number of machines drawing power in my office. I will be moving everything to GAMES-V, and bumping that machine to Win7 64-bit, with 8 GB RAM.

On Saturday, I loaded Windows 7 RC on my S10, loading over the top of the existing Beta build. Everything went great, but I am having some permissions issues with the directories that I left there. Shold have worked, but I am not going to spend a whole year with a flaky machine, so I will be wiping it this afternoon, installing fresh, and then restoring from WHS backup the necessary directories.

Today is Pam's birthday and I have been working on her present: a pink S-10. I have bumped the RAM to 2 GB, installed a 500 GB drive with Win7. She also has the original 160 GB drive with the XP and the QuickStart Linux front-end. She can pick which she wants to keep.