For all my life I’ve been loyal to PC. It’s been a pretty good relationship, certainly with its ups and downs like in any relationship. It started back in 1992 with my dad’s i486-based computer, and after that there was no stopping us. Fast forward to today, and I’ve been through more than a dozen machines and numerous rebuilds. I’ve even built a couple of water cooled rigs just for the hell of it.

I’ve been a steadfast supporter of the PC platform and what it stands for. I’ve regularly argued against Apple whenever they’ve done bad things, such as locking down pretty much everything they make to suit their business models, or enforcing unfair censorship of publishers’ content – all the while pointing fingers at other. So, I hope my point is made clear: understand that it would take a lot to make me buy an Apple product.

Just a few days ago in July of 2011, however, I decided to do just that.

I’ve finally fallen victim to the Apple propaganda machine. Just got to have it, ‘cause it’s got a glowing bright Apple logo on it, right?

No, I’ll tell you why: the hardware. I’m first and foremost a hardware enthusiast. I’m not like the fanboy that stays loyal to any single platform just because he can’t afford to buy them all. There are a couple of very logical reasons why I decided to upgrade to the new mid-2011 Macbook Air 13”.

I bought the laptop I’m typing this on back in 2009. This Asus 13” laptop is almost perfection in all ways to me. I upgraded it with an SSD and it’s been running Windows 7 like clockwork ever since I got it. Note the “almost” – I demand perfection!

Ever since the invention of the term “High Definition”, PC manufacturers apparently decided to stop – no reverse – the direction of development for PC screens in terms of resolution and aspect ratio. Wherever you look, it’s near impossible to find any laptop that doesn’t sport an “HD LED 16:9” screen, whether it’s 11” or 15”. The fancy term “HD” in numbers is actually 1366×768 pixels, and you have to go up to 16” or more to transition to the even fancier “Full HD”. And since when was 16:9 better than 16:10?

I have an old Asus 15” laptop from 2006 that sports a 1680×1050 16:10 screen, so why on earth can’t I get something like that on a 13”, now five years later?

The new Macbook Air 13”, with its 1440×900 resolution screen, is the first slim laptop with a higher resolution than 1366×768 that I’ve seen, period. It doesn’t really take much, does it? Why aren’t PC manufacturers even trying to advance in the same way? Why don’t we have 1920×1080 screens on 13” laptops in 2011? We should have been there years ago.

Rant over, those are the two main reasons for me buying a Macbook Air: it’s slim and has a higher resolution screen than any comparable PC laptop. There’re more personal reasons why I am going for a mac: they have lower latencies in audio applications, which is a big point for me as a digital composer and remixer. There’s got to be a reason most DJs and producers are happy with their Macs. The Macbook Air also comes with an SSD pre-installed, so no need to open it up and reinstall the OS as soon as I get it. You need SSD these days, trust me. You also get a special connection option called Thunderbolt. What is this Asgard tech you speak of? It’s better than USB 3.0, can be converted to Firewire, and even supports daisy-chaining! Now that’s what I call development.

I’m looking forward to receiving my Macbook Air 13” soon. I will probably be installing Windows 7 on it,  alongside the included OS X Lion. Old habits die hard, right? We’ll see … Word 2010 just crashed on me as I was typing this very paragraph.

Intel X25 SSD: Sometimes not showing up to the party

There’s a lot of people who have had issues with their SSD not showing up in the list of available hard drives when installing Windows 7, and today I got to be one of them. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows 7 on an Intel X25-V SSD (40GB), but the disk just wouldn’t show up.

This particular disk was used as a swap disk in a different system, so I figured it might have some problems related to formatting. Changing from IDE mode to ACHI mode did not do anything. (For Intel SSDs, IDE mode is required for the Intel software to work).

After looking around for a solution on the interwebs, I found two possible solutions, listed by “ease of use”. The second one worked for me, as I happened to have a bootable USB with GParted on hand, but the first one should work too.

Solution 1: Using Diskpart during Windows 7 Setup

1. When Windows 7 Setup has loaded and the language selection dialog is showing, press SHIFT + F10 simultaneously. This opens a command prompt:
   
2. Type “diskpart” and hit ENTER.
3. Type the following commands one by one – hit ENTER for each of them to run the commands:
   1. list disk (to show the ID number of the hard disk to partition, normally it’s Disk 0)
   2. select disk 0 (change 0 to another number if applicable)
   3. clean
   4. create partition primary
   5. select partition 1
   6. active
   7. format fs=ntfs quick
   8. exit
4. Type “exit” again to close the command prompt window.
5. Continue Windows 7 setup as usual. The disk should now show up in the list.

Solution 2: Using GParted “Live USB” or “Live CD”

1. 

   Gnome Partition Editor

   Either Download Tuxboot and follow the instructions to create a bootable USB, or download the CD ISO image and burn it to CD using any DVD burning application that supports loading and burning ISO’s. I suggest using the freeware image burning tool ImgBurn for this.

2. Make sure that your USB or CD/DVD-ROM device is on the top of the boot priority list in the BIOS. Sometimes, a USB disk will be not be recognized as a “removable disk”, rather a hard drive and must then be moved up the list in the separate “hard disk boot priority” list (if available). Some computers also have a special button you can press to bring up a boot device selection menu.
3. Tuxboot should start up. Just hit enter when it asks for keymaps and such during loading.
4. Information about your disks and partitions should now show up. Select your SSD from the right hand drop-down list if you have more disks installed and connected.
5. If you have an existing partition on the disk, right-click on it and select delete (this was enough for my disk to work). Alternatively, if it just says “unallocated space“, right click and create a new NTFS partition. Basically you’re doing the same then as in the first solution above, only using a different tool.
6. Hit “Apply” so that the changes actually will be made. Wait until it is done.
7. Double-click the Exit icon and select Shutdown. Unplug/unload your GParted USB/CD.
8. Try Windows 7 Setup again, and the disk should now be available in the list!

Robocopy is included in Windows 7 and features a new multi-threaded copy option. To perform a multi-threaded copy, you use the new /MT[:n] switch, where n indicates the number of threads to be used. By default, n is 8 when you use the /MT option, and can be any value from 1 to 128.
Note that the multi-threaded option is not compatible with the /IPG and /EFSRAW options.

“The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.”

This error can be triggered by many different things, but in general they’re all related to something to do with power management.

I just went through three motherboards, different VGA cards and harddisks, basically changing out everything except for the CPU, only to eventually find that the computer crashes were triggered by Windows 7 trying to manage the power state on my Intel Core i5 750 CPU. As soon as I disabled all C-States, it stopped crashing.

I found out about this workaround from the Technet forum threads “Periodic server core BSOD/Reboot, need help with bugcheck report” and “Iam having Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power crashes“.

The problem with this workaround, is that the new CPUs are supposed to save you energy by enabling the latest operating systems such as Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 to manage them more effeciently. By disabling all of the C-States, you’re basically forcing the CPU to run at full steam. This is most severe if you’ve invested in the latest Xeon processors mainly because of these features, as mentioned somewhere further down in the first forum thread I linked to.

If this is a fault with the new Windows core, I really hope Microsoft comes out with a hotfix soon. It cost me a lot of time and frustration to find the source of – and workaround to – the problem.

On my Media Center PC, after reinstalling some video codecs, my MKV* video files made Windows Explorer crash regularly when opening a folder with one of these files in it. To solve this problem, I had to disable automatic thumbnail generation in Vista or Windows 7. Disabling thumbnail preview in Windows Explorer can make Vista/Windows 7 perform notably faster in any case, as Explorer will no longer be generating thumbnails for every video and image file in every folder you open. This is especially useful when browsing back and forth between multiple folders. Follow these steps to disable the automatic thumbnail generation:

1. Press and hold the Windows key on your keyboard, then press E to open Windows Explorer (alternatively click Start > Accessories > Windows Explorer).
2. In the Windows Explorer window, click on the Organize button on the menu/shortcut bar.
3. In the pull down menu, click on Folder and Search Options.
4. The Folder Options dialog window will appear. Click on the View tab.
5. Under the Files and Folders tree heading, check (tick) the box next to Always show icons, never thumbnails option.
6. Click the OK button and you’re good to go!

* MKV is a common container format for video, audio and subtitles, often used to distribute standard and high definition video, audio and associated subtitles in one single file, with support for multiple audio and subtitle tracks, just like on a DVD.

To be able to access administrative shares and shut it down remotely, I added another user to my media center computer (HTPC) matching my usual username and password. Upon next boot, I discovered that instead of being logged on automatically, I was now presented with a logon screen, where I had to choose between the default (passwordless) user and my newly created “remote control” account.

“There’s got to be a way to get the automatic logon back”, I thought. Of course there is! Following is the simple solution to configure automatic logon in Windows 7 or Vista. (Please bare with me, and pretend that the Norwegian screenshots are in English for now.)

1. Click the Start button and and type in “netplwiz” into the search field on the bottom, and hit Enter.

   
   

2. If you’re prompted by User Account Control, click “Continue”. The User Accounts window should appear now. Select the user that you want to log on automatically on startup, then untick the box next to “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer”.

   

3. Click “OK”. You will get prompted to enter your password twice.

   

4. Reboot and you will be logged on automatically!

How do you enable remote access to admin shares using a local administrator account in Windows 7 / Vista?

When you try to do this the same way you could in XP, you get prompted to log in, but get access denied. Apparently, for “security reasons” this option has been disabled. Thankfully, a small registry hack is all it takes to get around the issue:

1. Open regedit (<Windows> + R, type “regedit”).
2. Expand the tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ policies \ system.
3. Create a new key (Right click -> New -> choose “DWORD Value (32bit)”).
4. Name the key “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it the value of “1″.
5. Click OK.