So, another oddity with Windows 7. Older versions of windows were a bit cranky about playing non-standard video files. However, it was fairly easy to work around the issue by installing ffdshow. Windows 7 (and WMP 12) are a bit more stubborn though.... they seem to think they'd prefer to use their codecs, and are very unwilling to accept anything else.
Enter a site called shark007.net, which provides a nice codec package for both 32 and 64 bit versions that mostly gets around it. Previews of "weird" types still won't show up in the file explorer, but at least you can just double-click a FLV movie, or an MKV, and watch it.
12 March, 2010
24 February, 2010
Damn it Bill!
Ok, so after spending most of the day yesterday getting Windows 7 re-installed and working, I wrote up the experience this morning and was all happy. For a while. Then, I rebooted.
Goddamnit Bill Gates. It's MY computer, let me use it!
Ok, it turns out that Rivatuner does something interesting with regards to it using a device driver, and that under a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista, 2008 server, and Windows 7), unsigned drivers are not allowed. Nor are drivers that are signed by an untrusted source.
*sigh*
In looking around for a solution, my roommate pointed me at a procedure to create your own signatures and push them into the local system's list of approved keys. That might have worked, but it's a mess.
I found another utility that would do what I needed Rivatuner for, namely to adjust my graphics card's fan speed as the temperature ramped up. This one is called MSIAfterburner, and the same guy is working on it. The good news, it works without a driver. The bad news, because it doesn't use a driver, it has to be left running. Ok, no biggie... it can sit in the taskbar and be quiet.
Ok, UAC annoyance now hits... trying to start it from the registry "Run" entry, UAC pops up a requester at login. Very annoying. More searching and I found a way around it.
To run a program as administrator (and thus avoid UAC) at login, you have to make a task entry for it using the task scheduler.
Note: This only works if you are an administrator. You cannot cause an administrative program to automatically start on a standard user's desktop.
1.Click start
2.Type: task scheduler
3.Press enter
4.Click create task in the right
5.Type a name for the task
6.Put a check next to the box that says 'run with highest privileges'
7.Click on the Trigers tab
8.Click New
9.Click on the dropdown next to "Begin the task", select At log on
10.Put a check next to 'specific user or group'
11.Click OK
12.Click the actions tab
13.Click New
14.Click browse
15.Find the program you want to run
16.Click Open
17.Click OK
18.Click OK
Wheeeee! So far so good. I'm gonna reboot once more to be sure and then make a system restore point!
Goddamnit Bill Gates. It's MY computer, let me use it!
Ok, it turns out that Rivatuner does something interesting with regards to it using a device driver, and that under a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista, 2008 server, and Windows 7), unsigned drivers are not allowed. Nor are drivers that are signed by an untrusted source.
*sigh*
In looking around for a solution, my roommate pointed me at a procedure to create your own signatures and push them into the local system's list of approved keys. That might have worked, but it's a mess.
I found another utility that would do what I needed Rivatuner for, namely to adjust my graphics card's fan speed as the temperature ramped up. This one is called MSIAfterburner, and the same guy is working on it. The good news, it works without a driver. The bad news, because it doesn't use a driver, it has to be left running. Ok, no biggie... it can sit in the taskbar and be quiet.
Ok, UAC annoyance now hits... trying to start it from the registry "Run" entry, UAC pops up a requester at login. Very annoying. More searching and I found a way around it.
To run a program as administrator (and thus avoid UAC) at login, you have to make a task entry for it using the task scheduler.
Note: This only works if you are an administrator. You cannot cause an administrative program to automatically start on a standard user's desktop.
1.Click start
2.Type: task scheduler
3.Press enter
4.Click create task in the right
5.Type a name for the task
6.Put a check next to the box that says 'run with highest privileges'
7.Click on the Trigers tab
8.Click New
9.Click on the dropdown next to "Begin the task", select At log on
10.Put a check next to 'specific user or group'
11.Click OK
12.Click the actions tab
13.Click New
14.Click browse
15.Find the program you want to run
16.Click Open
17.Click OK
18.Click OK
Wheeeee! So far so good. I'm gonna reboot once more to be sure and then make a system restore point!
23 February, 2010
Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 Retail
Today's nonsense is a short writeup of yesterday's adventure with Windows 7.
Like many people out there, I've been happily using Windows 7 RC since last September. On my new hardware, it runs very fast and I've had very few issues with stability. Like Windows 2000 and NT before it, if you use "weird" stuff, like a RAID array, you need to pre-load drivers during setup so it can find where to install stuff, but unlike the dinosaurs, it's smart enough to recognize flash drives AND smart enough to let you change CD's.
So, I had things working nicely with my RAID setup. I had 4 disks split into two RAID containers. The OS was a RAID 10 striped over all 4 disks, short stroked to the first 25%. The other was a RAID 0 striped over all 4 with the majority of the space. Very fast.
One bummer... about once a month, a disk fell out of the array and caused it to rebuild. Annoying for the RAID 10 part, scary for the RAID 0 part since there IS no rebuilding there... it either lives (nothing was being written at that moment), or dies. Of the 5 or so times it's done it, only twice did I see it happen, and both times my cat was near the case. My suspicion is that the cat brushed the case and discharged his static, and that the controller doesn't deal with static well (even though things are supposed to be grounded, no?).
So, last month I backed up the monster array to DVD and reconfigured it as another RAID 10 container. I could have done RAID 5 but I figured 10 is safer and in theory slightly faster (much faster on writes). Soooo, that sets the stage.
Now, because all my games, movies, porn, etc are all on D: (the larger array container), and it still wasn't anywhere near full, the easiest way for me to install Win 7 retail was to use Microsoft's Synctoy to backup all of C:\ to a directory on D:\Backups\. A handful of files failed, but no biggie... the majority of what's there is windows/drivers crap that we won't be wanting back anyways, but I didn't want to trust myself being able to track down every place a user content file lands. Good call, it turns out.
So, I did this twice. The first time, I got drivers messed up and couldn't get something working that worked before, and I totally forgot the system restore point concept. So, being grumpy at wasting 3 hours, I reformatted and tried again.
Prior to attempt 1, I took my $15 8G USB flash drive (from Meijer's supermarket), and set it up to be a bootable Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installation device.
You still have to figure out how to make your machine boot from a USB flash drive, but that's YOUR problem since it's different for every single PC out there.
I got this to work, and it did seem to work just fine. I say seem, because it is considerably slower than installing from my SATA DVD drive, so I aborted it halfway through the initial Windows hardware discovery phase. YMMV, and I'm happy to have figured out how to make it work.
First thing on my list is changing my workgroup. Start/Computer, right-click and hit properties. Now, go to the "Computer Name" tab, hit the "Change" button. Two things to change here... First, set Workgroup to your own workgroup name. I hope you're not using the default... mine is, of course, SHADOWLORD. Also, if you hit the "More" button, you can fill in your domain name, which for me is "shadowlord.org".
Next, while I have the properties screen still open (you may have rebooted when it asked, if so, reopen properties), click "Activate Key Now"! Yes, just do it and get it done. If you're a filthy piwate, you have your own problems to work around this and it's not my concern. :) Thankfully, it worked twice in a row for me... one supposed you could wait until you have everything installed right, but I just wanted to know for sure that it would work, or that I'd be playing phone tag, before investing more time.
Now, open up IE8. I don't plan to use it very often, but it will ask a couple of stupid questions the first time you launch it. I'd rather get it done and over with than have it ask 3 months from now when I have a site that refuses to work in Firefox. Choose whatever you want, I left everything default because I don't care enough about IE.
At this point, I'll mention that I've become a big fan of letting the OS detect and deal with every bit of hardware it can possibly deal with. The years have taught me that installing drivers for everything usually makes things degenerate over time as vendors don't support things well. Soooo, unless something flat-out doesn't work without a driver, I let windows deal with it. One exception, video. :)
Happily audio was detected and working out of the box. I configured my speakers as 5.1 surround with front left/right, center, subwoofer, and I chose back left/right. Another option was side left/right, and it's 50/50 in my setup which is right. I initially chose side, but after playing a game I decided back gave me better positional info and switched it. 7.1 would, of course, use both. Oh, you do this by right-clicking on the volume icon in your tray, pick "Playback Devices", then select your speakers and hit "Configure".
Also, if you hit "Properties", under the "Enhancements" tab, I like "Speaker Fill", which takes a stereo source and echoes it (with a slight delay) to the rear speakers. Makes things a bit fuller for music, IMHO.
Next, I installed the GSATA drivers. The first install, I though it was whining about the main RAID chipset, and even though I was *obviously* using it just fine, I installed the AMD chipset drivers. Ugh. Waste of time... that wasn't it. My motherboard has a second RAID controller for external drives and that needed a driver. I may never use it, but... all devices in the device manager now work properly.
Next up, my printer drivers. I have an old Samsung ML-2151N laser printer. NICE printer, duplexing, fast, 1200DPI. But, it's old. I found 64-bit drivers for it finally (ML-2150) and installing it you have to say "No, it's not connected", and then go manually setup a tcp/ip port. Once that's done, it works just fine.
I have a CyberPower UPS, so I installed the monitoring software/drivers for it. Win 7 saw the UPS just fine, and even told me it was at 100% battery and such, but the software that comes with my UPS gives me more control over things, and tells me stuff like the current load, so even though it wasn't needed, I think it's useful enough to install.
It's about this point I remembered a couple of tweaks I did to make life easier for myself, and one that I'd kindof have to do to avoid insanity. The first is to muck with the new Win 7 "Library" concept. If you open your file explorer, you'll see an entry for "Favorites" that has "Desktop", "Downloads", and "Recent Places" under it. Downloads is the one I want to move. I want my default download place to be D:\Downloads, rather than buried under my user profile. Right-click/Properties makes it easy enough to change, but I lose the spiffy blue arrow!
Oh noes! How to get it back??? Go to the download directory, right-click properties and under the "Customize" tab, pick "Change Icon". Now, browse to C:\windows\system32\imageres.dll and you'll find the folder with a big downward blue arrow a few screens off to the right. You ALSO need to change the shortcut in Favorites, and that's by right-click properties, and then "Change Icon", same deal.
Remember that, as you'll likely want to do the same for the Library stuff. Libraries is a nice idea. It lets you link multiple folders into a single "meta-folder", with a default write target. So, you can have one big "Media" library and if you mostly download movies, the default directory could be the movie one. Win 7 uses it to link your profile and system public areas. I also want to link in D:\ directories and make that the default save location.
So, Music, Pictures, and Videos all get their D:\ equivalents added. Easiest way to do this, select Music on the left. You'll see a listing on the right with some sample music. At the top, you'll see a link that says "Includes: 3 locations". Click that. Here, you can add new folders to the library, and you can also right-click to reorder them and set the default save location. So, I added my D:\ folders and made them the default. Then go fix your icons. :)
At this point, I remember that NTFS doesn't store user information by simple ID numbers or names, but by obnoxious GUID strings that are unique to each windows machine out there. That means... you have to reclaim ownership of D:\, since it's owned by your user from the old install!
The smart way is to just do it for every folder. I did that the first time. Doing all of D:\ has a few quirky side-effects that I'll have to live with for being lazy the second time, because some system folders get a bit wacked. Don't be lazy, it's hard to fix and I don't yet know if it matters. Assuming you care, to take ownership of a folder, right-click properties, go to the security tab, click Advanced, go to the Owner tab , click Edit, select the checkbox that says "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects", then select the new owner (you!), and hit apply. You may also want to remove the old GUID from the permissions list, although it might do that for you (I don't remember).
Whew! Almost done... are you tired of reading yet?
Next, Win 7 will bug you about installing a virus scanner. That's good, kids these days click anything that moves. I use Avast! Home edition. It's free, it seems to work well, it's very lightweight. I had to load up gmail in IE to find my registration key. They make you sign up for a key, you get one every year, it's still free. Might as well scan C:\ at this point too.
Just in case, I throw Spybot S&D on as well. I disable the stuff that's resident (TeaTimer and whatever the IE protection thingy is). I don't get much in the way of virii, so it's overkill. I run it once in a while, and that's good enough for me.
This is probably a good time to run Windows Update. Do all the critical stuff first until it gets them all done. Then, if you like, do the optional ones. For me, that was a video driver and ethernet driver.
Now, a few utilities. I like "Putty Tray". It's a version of Putty that has translucency for the background, meaning I can see my browser through the black while I'm doing stuff on my linux box. Yay, porn/youtube/thing-you-want-to-lookup. To make this work properly, you hopefully saved off the registry data from your old Putty. Restoring that gives you back your session data. I also had a public key pair to restore from my keychain backup.
Irfanview is my picture viewer of choice. CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWmonitor (from the CPUID guys), HD Tune, Furmark. All handy information tools, diagnostics, etc. I also installed AMD's RaidXpert, so it can log events on my RAID array.
Ok, ready for the video drivers. This took HOURS to get right! :(
Finally, I installed the newest Nvidia drivers (196.21). Then, I installed a tool called RivaTuner224c. In that, there's a section where you can tinker with the on-board FAN speed and temperature registers. See this page! Doing some math and such, I managed to get things setup so the fan runs at 35% most of the time (GPU is at or below 35C), and ramps up to 100% when the GPU gets to about 70C. It's not 100% accurate, but so far it seems to keep the temperature below 60C when playing WoW or EVE, and that's the important part. I used Furmark and GPU-Z to test tweaking the numbers.
A couple other trivial tweaks. Control Panel/User Accounts/Change account picture. Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Power Options Pick the high performance profile and then tweak so you have sleep/suspend/hibernate to NEVER, turn off hard drives to NEVER, monitor off to 30 minutes. If you use sleep mode, you might also want to go to your network card and disable letting it wake up from packets, otherwise your machine probably won't ever sleep. :)
Control Panel/Appearance/Folder Options/Show hidden folders... also don't hide file extensions. You might want to hide system files though, otherwise some things look cluttered and you can always unhide them if you really need to muck with them.
Oh yeah, important one! Computer Properties/Advanced System Settings/Advanced/Startup and Recovery... uncheck the Automatic restart in System Failure! That lets you see the BSOD so you have a clue what caused it. If that's checked (which it is by default), it just instantly reboots and you have no clue why.
Now, the last bit to restore 90% of my working desktop... Firefox. I installed WinRAR too, since some of the stuff I backed up, I rar'd for space. To transfer your profile and have Firefox back where you had it before.... do this.
Install Firefox (3.6), run it once. Close it. Browse to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. You'll see a stupid folder with random letters and ending in .default. Rename that by adding a .bkp to it. Go to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. Do the same thing.
Now, unpack your old backups into those two locations and change the folder names from whatever old random letter.default it was to your new random letter.default. That's it! Next time you start Firefox, all your stuff will be there, history, cache, extensions, porn. Yay!
Ok, I may have forgotten a couple things, but that's about where I am today. I was pleased to note that World of Warcraft, EVE-Online, Civilization IV, and Dragon Age can all be run directly from their old installation without having to reinstall or poke anything into the registry.
Maybe later I'll make a complete list of every utility and normal program I use, just to keep it in a place I can reference (IE: here). Until then, be careful out there!
Like many people out there, I've been happily using Windows 7 RC since last September. On my new hardware, it runs very fast and I've had very few issues with stability. Like Windows 2000 and NT before it, if you use "weird" stuff, like a RAID array, you need to pre-load drivers during setup so it can find where to install stuff, but unlike the dinosaurs, it's smart enough to recognize flash drives AND smart enough to let you change CD's.
So, I had things working nicely with my RAID setup. I had 4 disks split into two RAID containers. The OS was a RAID 10 striped over all 4 disks, short stroked to the first 25%. The other was a RAID 0 striped over all 4 with the majority of the space. Very fast.
One bummer... about once a month, a disk fell out of the array and caused it to rebuild. Annoying for the RAID 10 part, scary for the RAID 0 part since there IS no rebuilding there... it either lives (nothing was being written at that moment), or dies. Of the 5 or so times it's done it, only twice did I see it happen, and both times my cat was near the case. My suspicion is that the cat brushed the case and discharged his static, and that the controller doesn't deal with static well (even though things are supposed to be grounded, no?).
So, last month I backed up the monster array to DVD and reconfigured it as another RAID 10 container. I could have done RAID 5 but I figured 10 is safer and in theory slightly faster (much faster on writes). Soooo, that sets the stage.
Now, because all my games, movies, porn, etc are all on D: (the larger array container), and it still wasn't anywhere near full, the easiest way for me to install Win 7 retail was to use Microsoft's Synctoy to backup all of C:\ to a directory on D:\Backups\. A handful of files failed, but no biggie... the majority of what's there is windows/drivers crap that we won't be wanting back anyways, but I didn't want to trust myself being able to track down every place a user content file lands. Good call, it turns out.
So, I did this twice. The first time, I got drivers messed up and couldn't get something working that worked before, and I totally forgot the system restore point concept. So, being grumpy at wasting 3 hours, I reformatted and tried again.
Prior to attempt 1, I took my $15 8G USB flash drive (from Meijer's supermarket), and set it up to be a bootable Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installation device.
- Plug in your flash drive.
- Start/All Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt -> Run as Administrator
- diskpart
- list disk -- Take note of which disk is your flash drive, for me it was 3
- select disk 3
- clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=NTFS quick
- assign letter=k -- For "keychain"
- exit
- Insert your Win 7 DVD (or mount the image) -- I'll assume it's on R:
- r:
- cd r:\boot
- bootsect /nt60 K:
You still have to figure out how to make your machine boot from a USB flash drive, but that's YOUR problem since it's different for every single PC out there.
I got this to work, and it did seem to work just fine. I say seem, because it is considerably slower than installing from my SATA DVD drive, so I aborted it halfway through the initial Windows hardware discovery phase. YMMV, and I'm happy to have figured out how to make it work.
- First screen you get is to pick your language/keyboard/etc. USA... woot.
- Then, pick Custom Install since you want a clean install, no trying to upgrade and breaking stuff.
- Now, browse to your keychain and load the RAID drivers.
- Delete the partitions from your old installation. Careful! Don't wipe out your data partition!
- Delete the "system reserved" one from the same disk too... again, Careful!
- Now, that disk (it showed up as Disk 2 the first run, and Disk 1 the next time) should be all unallocated space.
- Select it, and move on.
- Windows will reboot twice before asking you stuff again.
- User name
- Machine name
- Password
- Again
- Hint -- This is requried! I chose the helpful hint "No hint!"
- Product Key -- Yeah, suck it up you filthy piwate!
- Use Recommended Settings -- Seriously, you can change it later.
- Time Zone
- Home Network -- This is classic workgroup mode, "Business" is domain mode.
First thing on my list is changing my workgroup. Start/Computer, right-click and hit properties. Now, go to the "Computer Name" tab, hit the "Change" button. Two things to change here... First, set Workgroup to your own workgroup name. I hope you're not using the default... mine is, of course, SHADOWLORD. Also, if you hit the "More" button, you can fill in your domain name, which for me is "shadowlord.org".
Next, while I have the properties screen still open (you may have rebooted when it asked, if so, reopen properties), click "Activate Key Now"! Yes, just do it and get it done. If you're a filthy piwate, you have your own problems to work around this and it's not my concern. :) Thankfully, it worked twice in a row for me... one supposed you could wait until you have everything installed right, but I just wanted to know for sure that it would work, or that I'd be playing phone tag, before investing more time.
Now, open up IE8. I don't plan to use it very often, but it will ask a couple of stupid questions the first time you launch it. I'd rather get it done and over with than have it ask 3 months from now when I have a site that refuses to work in Firefox. Choose whatever you want, I left everything default because I don't care enough about IE.
At this point, I'll mention that I've become a big fan of letting the OS detect and deal with every bit of hardware it can possibly deal with. The years have taught me that installing drivers for everything usually makes things degenerate over time as vendors don't support things well. Soooo, unless something flat-out doesn't work without a driver, I let windows deal with it. One exception, video. :)
Happily audio was detected and working out of the box. I configured my speakers as 5.1 surround with front left/right, center, subwoofer, and I chose back left/right. Another option was side left/right, and it's 50/50 in my setup which is right. I initially chose side, but after playing a game I decided back gave me better positional info and switched it. 7.1 would, of course, use both. Oh, you do this by right-clicking on the volume icon in your tray, pick "Playback Devices", then select your speakers and hit "Configure".
Also, if you hit "Properties", under the "Enhancements" tab, I like "Speaker Fill", which takes a stereo source and echoes it (with a slight delay) to the rear speakers. Makes things a bit fuller for music, IMHO.
Next, I installed the GSATA drivers. The first install, I though it was whining about the main RAID chipset, and even though I was *obviously* using it just fine, I installed the AMD chipset drivers. Ugh. Waste of time... that wasn't it. My motherboard has a second RAID controller for external drives and that needed a driver. I may never use it, but... all devices in the device manager now work properly.
Next up, my printer drivers. I have an old Samsung ML-2151N laser printer. NICE printer, duplexing, fast, 1200DPI. But, it's old. I found 64-bit drivers for it finally (ML-2150) and installing it you have to say "No, it's not connected", and then go manually setup a tcp/ip port. Once that's done, it works just fine.
I have a CyberPower UPS, so I installed the monitoring software/drivers for it. Win 7 saw the UPS just fine, and even told me it was at 100% battery and such, but the software that comes with my UPS gives me more control over things, and tells me stuff like the current load, so even though it wasn't needed, I think it's useful enough to install.
It's about this point I remembered a couple of tweaks I did to make life easier for myself, and one that I'd kindof have to do to avoid insanity. The first is to muck with the new Win 7 "Library" concept. If you open your file explorer, you'll see an entry for "Favorites" that has "Desktop", "Downloads", and "Recent Places" under it. Downloads is the one I want to move. I want my default download place to be D:\Downloads, rather than buried under my user profile. Right-click/Properties makes it easy enough to change, but I lose the spiffy blue arrow!
Oh noes! How to get it back??? Go to the download directory, right-click properties and under the "Customize" tab, pick "Change Icon". Now, browse to C:\windows\system32\imageres.dll and you'll find the folder with a big downward blue arrow a few screens off to the right. You ALSO need to change the shortcut in Favorites, and that's by right-click properties, and then "Change Icon", same deal.
Remember that, as you'll likely want to do the same for the Library stuff. Libraries is a nice idea. It lets you link multiple folders into a single "meta-folder", with a default write target. So, you can have one big "Media" library and if you mostly download movies, the default directory could be the movie one. Win 7 uses it to link your profile and system public areas. I also want to link in D:\ directories and make that the default save location.
So, Music, Pictures, and Videos all get their D:\ equivalents added. Easiest way to do this, select Music on the left. You'll see a listing on the right with some sample music. At the top, you'll see a link that says "Includes: 3 locations". Click that. Here, you can add new folders to the library, and you can also right-click to reorder them and set the default save location. So, I added my D:\ folders and made them the default. Then go fix your icons. :)
At this point, I remember that NTFS doesn't store user information by simple ID numbers or names, but by obnoxious GUID strings that are unique to each windows machine out there. That means... you have to reclaim ownership of D:\, since it's owned by your user from the old install!
The smart way is to just do it for every folder. I did that the first time. Doing all of D:\ has a few quirky side-effects that I'll have to live with for being lazy the second time, because some system folders get a bit wacked. Don't be lazy, it's hard to fix and I don't yet know if it matters. Assuming you care, to take ownership of a folder, right-click properties, go to the security tab, click Advanced, go to the Owner tab , click Edit, select the checkbox that says "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects", then select the new owner (you!), and hit apply. You may also want to remove the old GUID from the permissions list, although it might do that for you (I don't remember).
Whew! Almost done... are you tired of reading yet?
Next, Win 7 will bug you about installing a virus scanner. That's good, kids these days click anything that moves. I use Avast! Home edition. It's free, it seems to work well, it's very lightweight. I had to load up gmail in IE to find my registration key. They make you sign up for a key, you get one every year, it's still free. Might as well scan C:\ at this point too.
Just in case, I throw Spybot S&D on as well. I disable the stuff that's resident (TeaTimer and whatever the IE protection thingy is). I don't get much in the way of virii, so it's overkill. I run it once in a while, and that's good enough for me.
This is probably a good time to run Windows Update. Do all the critical stuff first until it gets them all done. Then, if you like, do the optional ones. For me, that was a video driver and ethernet driver.
Now, a few utilities. I like "Putty Tray". It's a version of Putty that has translucency for the background, meaning I can see my browser through the black while I'm doing stuff on my linux box. Yay, porn/youtube/thing-you-want-to-lookup. To make this work properly, you hopefully saved off the registry data from your old Putty. Restoring that gives you back your session data. I also had a public key pair to restore from my keychain backup.
Irfanview is my picture viewer of choice. CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWmonitor (from the CPUID guys), HD Tune, Furmark. All handy information tools, diagnostics, etc. I also installed AMD's RaidXpert, so it can log events on my RAID array.
Ok, ready for the video drivers. This took HOURS to get right! :(
Finally, I installed the newest Nvidia drivers (196.21). Then, I installed a tool called RivaTuner224c. In that, there's a section where you can tinker with the on-board FAN speed and temperature registers. See this page! Doing some math and such, I managed to get things setup so the fan runs at 35% most of the time (GPU is at or below 35C), and ramps up to 100% when the GPU gets to about 70C. It's not 100% accurate, but so far it seems to keep the temperature below 60C when playing WoW or EVE, and that's the important part. I used Furmark and GPU-Z to test tweaking the numbers.
A couple other trivial tweaks. Control Panel/User Accounts/Change account picture. Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Power Options Pick the high performance profile and then tweak so you have sleep/suspend/hibernate to NEVER, turn off hard drives to NEVER, monitor off to 30 minutes. If you use sleep mode, you might also want to go to your network card and disable letting it wake up from packets, otherwise your machine probably won't ever sleep. :)
Control Panel/Appearance/Folder Options/Show hidden folders... also don't hide file extensions. You might want to hide system files though, otherwise some things look cluttered and you can always unhide them if you really need to muck with them.
Oh yeah, important one! Computer Properties/Advanced System Settings/Advanced/Startup and Recovery... uncheck the Automatic restart in System Failure! That lets you see the BSOD so you have a clue what caused it. If that's checked (which it is by default), it just instantly reboots and you have no clue why.
Now, the last bit to restore 90% of my working desktop... Firefox. I installed WinRAR too, since some of the stuff I backed up, I rar'd for space. To transfer your profile and have Firefox back where you had it before.... do this.
Install Firefox (3.6), run it once. Close it. Browse to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. You'll see a stupid folder with random letters and ending in .default. Rename that by adding a .bkp to it. Go to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. Do the same thing.
Now, unpack your old backups into those two locations and change the folder names from whatever old random letter.default it was to your new random letter.default. That's it! Next time you start Firefox, all your stuff will be there, history, cache, extensions, porn. Yay!
Ok, I may have forgotten a couple things, but that's about where I am today. I was pleased to note that World of Warcraft, EVE-Online, Civilization IV, and Dragon Age can all be run directly from their old installation without having to reinstall or poke anything into the registry.
Maybe later I'll make a complete list of every utility and normal program I use, just to keep it in a place I can reference (IE: here). Until then, be careful out there!
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