Salient Soft

My event viewer is slow to open – feels like 20-30 seconds or so.

This post here indicates that others have found the same thing.

The post has a workaround – copy the eventvwr.msc from Windows\System32 on an XP system, and it will run the XP style event view on Windows 7. This starts almost instantly, but of course it does not provide the nice error summary of the new version, so you can’t have it both ways!

Unlike the advice in the post I copy the file to another folder rather than System32, such as System Management, as it is a separate addition. I renamed it EventVwrClassic.msc.

You can just make a shortcut to it to run it. Unlike the standard windows 7 one, it will pop the UAC dialog to ask you to approve the privilege increase, even if you set the shortcut to run as administrator.

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This was done in order to resolve ongoing reliability issues with the OCZ Vertex and SATA port errors from the P6T as detailed here.

This post also follows on from my earlier post here concerning hot swap issues, where I went into some detail of the P6T flashing process. Reference should be made to that post for more details of P6T flashing.

The following steps were performed:-

1. I identified the current firmware version of my OCZ Vertex. To do this start device manager, find the disk under Disk drives, and open its properties. Then select the Harware Ids property and the version number of the firmware will be shown. There were hints in the forums of a more detailed revision number, but I could not find it. My initial version was 1.5.
2. I also tried to run the OCZ Toolbox which allows identification and upgrade of the firmware, and also auto downloads the correct new version. I nice idea if it had worked! In my case it failed to find the OCZ Vertex either before or after the upgrade process.
3. I did note that a number of posts suggested switching the SATA mode to AHCI in both the bios and windows. This OCZ post details the process, which (for the windows part) simply involves changing the value of HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Start in the registry from 3 (=IDE mode) to 0 (= AHCI mode). However, when I tried this at this stage, the system froze at boot time. Fortunately, I was able to switch the setting back in the BIOS, boot into safe mode, and set the registry setting back to 3, to restore the system to a working state.
4. The latest version for my Vertex was 1.7, but it is not possible to upgrade directly from 1.5 to 1.7. It is necessary to upgrade to 1.6 first. Finding all the historical versions of the firmware is not easy on the OCZ site – the main download area only has the most recent version. Older version may be found from a forum post here which has all the historical downloads.
5. For my Vertex, here is  the 1.6 upgrade and here is the 1.7 upgrade.
6. Note that as per the 1.6 upgrade, I had the ‘filename error’ which meant that I had an older version which needed a destructive upgrade to 1.6 due to a change in the NAND/wear levelling algorithm. This would mean loss of all data on the drive and a restore afterwards, and the use of a different kit for upgrading. The upgrade also could not be done with the drive in use as the system disk. The links in the previous paragraph give all the instructions and the alternative versions of the upgrade.
7. I then made 2 full backups with Acronis, plus another daily file backup, to be sure I would be able to restore the drive.
8. As per the instructions, I jumpered the drive to set it into standalone/upgrade mode, and booted from the previous version of Windows 7 which I still had available on a standard Hard drive. I kept this available just in case, and on this occasion I was very glad I did.
9. The destructive upgrade is available as 16_win_vertex.zip. Unfortunately the zip contains 2 versions of the update, 641102VTX.exe and 661102VTXR.exe. There are no release notes to say which version to use or what they are (!) I wondered if they related to the internal firmware/drive version from which you were upgrading, but I didn’t know that either as I have said earlier. Another forum post hinted that as may be expected, the 661102VTXR.exe was a later version and the ’R’ indicated revised. I decided to try this one.
10. Having jumpered and rebooted, the drive correctly identified itself as YATAPDONG BAREFOOT, and I proceeded with the upgrade, which went successfully.
11. I then immediately upgraded from 1.6 to 1.7 using 17_updaters_1.zip.  This time, a standard non-destructive upgrade could be done (not that it mattered in my case), which mean burning an ISO on a CD, and booting that to do the upgrade. The zip contained ISOs for a number of OCZ products plus some release notes this time, so I burnt the ISO for the Vertex. I booted it and did the upgrade, which went with no problems. One point is that I cannot recall whether I removed the jumper on the drive before or after this final upgrade. I am fairly sure that it was after, in which case the upgrade does not mind whether the jumper is present, but if there are any issues it should be tried without the jumper present as would be normal for a non destructive upgrade.
12. Following this, I booted the system. Initially it could not see the Vertex, so I rebooted into the bios, found it was then visible, and did a bios save and another reboot. This time the drive was visible but not formatted.
13. I then booted Acronis from its rescue CD and restored the backup, plus the Master Boot Record. This proceeded normally.
14. After rebooting, the system came up and ran fine, however it did present the boot manager from the other disk, and the system had to be selected from there. To prevent the need for this, I copied the boot files back to the new SSD using bcdboot as per this post here. It was also necessary to reset the boot order in the bios so that the SSD was chosen first, otherwise the boot manager is still presented even after you have run bcdboot.

Now I had a working system with the updated SSD, I decided to reflash the P6T as well. Previously I had had hot swap and SATA issues with later bios versions, as detail here. However, since then I had disabled the onboard JMicron controller which was giving problems, and replaced it with a Startech controller, as detailed in the update to this post here. Therefore, the original issues which were preventing the use of a later bios were no longer present, so I opted to flash to the latest version which at the time of upgrade was version 1408 :-

1. I used the in-bios EZ-Flash, and the process and precautions are detailed in the original section of this post here.
2. I re-applied the required motherboard settings as per the process, and rebooted successfully.
3. I then retried switching into AHCI mode, as detail above when I tried it prior to the upgrade. This time it worked correctly with no problems. In the bios, I just set the onboard SATA to AHCI. The JMicron controller was disabled, and the Startech controller was not touched as this was an add-in card just used for SATA backups. It is possible that now either the onboard ICH10 SATA or JMicron SATA might work and hot swap reliably in eSATA mode with AHCI enabled, but as I was happy enough with the Startech I decided to leave this issue well alone for now.
4. As a final test, I re-ran the Windows Experience tests to see if AHCI had improved performance, and indeed the primary hard disk figure had increased from 7.1 to 7.3, which is good considering the fact that my original OCZ Vertex is now an old  technology which has been set to End-Of-Life by OCZ. The system certainly felt snappier, but this is highly subjective as I had not run before and after benchmarks – the goal of the whole excercise was reliability rather than speed.

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My old TyTn II has had sync issues over the last few weeks, sometimes needing several attempts to sync.

A few days ago it failed completely with sync errors part way through.

I have tried a number of things to resolve the issue, with only partial success.

1/ WMDC 6.1 did not sync at all. I tried turning ‘advanced network functionality’ both on and off on the TyTn II (under settings/connections/USB to PC), and neither worked. The advanced setting is apparently what allows the device to share the PCs internet connection, and is not available with this turned off, although I have not investigated this.

2/ I tried removing WMDC 6.1 and installing WMDC6.0 for Windows 7/Vista 64 bit, but it always installed 6.1 as part of the install, and so was very tricky to roll back.

3/ This procedure worked in the end and allowed 6.0 to install (as per this forum post here):-

Note that as part of this procedure, when deleting the WindowsMobile folder, renaming it first then allows all the contents to be deleted (possibly rebooting after the rename but this was not always required). Note also that I turned windows update automatic mode off so that it would always ask about any update first, in case it was responsible for the ‘invisible’ update to 6.1

Here are the steps that I performed during this cycle of events that has got
my Dopod phone with WM6 sync’ing again with WMDC 6.0:
— Uninstalled the two Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 items from the
Control Panel > Programs and Features list
— Manually deleted the contents of the C:\Windows\WindowsMobile folder.
Initially I could not delete some DLLs but once the two “Windows Mobile
device connectivity” services were stopped from the Task Manager, I was able
to delete the rest of the files in the WindowsMobile folder, except for the
en-US folder containing the *.MUI files. I could not delete them and so
decided to leave them.
— Using Regedit, I deleted all entries from the following two keys that
related to my two devices:
* HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners
* HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Portable Devices\Devices (I left
in the entry for my memory card)
— Using Windows Explorer, I deleted all files in the following folder:
* C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Acti veSync\Profiles
— With my two Pocket PCs disconnected, I tapped on Start > Programs >
ActiveSync > Menu > Options, highlighted the Windows PC and tapped on and
the Delete button. Both of my PPCs had two entries in here so there could
have been some confusion on the desktop at some point, so I deleted both of
them. They do not sync with any other computer.
— Rebooted (Restarted) my Windows Vista computer
— Reinstalled WMDC 6.0 from the Microsoft Download website.
— Recreated the two relationships from my two devices, and they each did
the initial long sync
— I then tested each device that it could perform a sync not long after it
was reconnected, and they both now sync perfectly. I also tested that making
any changes to some contact details in Outlook 2007 would update the devices
after a sync. and it did.

4/ When using WMDC 6.0, I had to disable the Advanced Networking Functionality on the device, as WMDC was unable to install the correct driver for it when I tried.

4/ This now allowed the TyTn II to sync contacts, calendar and tasks. However, annoyingly, it does not sync the textual content of calendar appointments or tasks – only the headers are synced. This is the ‘partial’ solution that I am having to live with. The good point is that at least contacts are synced properly, and at least with the appointments I will get reminders on the phone plus the title details, which is enough for most of them.

5/ I retried the different versions a number of times but this behaviour was consistent. In the end I had to use system restore to remove 6.1 as the driver update would not remove. It may have done so in safe mode but I did not try this. The behaviour was consistent with both USB and bluetooth syncing.

6/ I also tried syncing with a laptop running Windows XP, but interestingly this also failed to sync, which perhaps points the finger at the TyTn II as this used to work.

7/ I tried running SCANPST.EXE (in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12 folder) to check for PST corruption as a possible issue. Interestingly it did find a number of issues. It fixed most, if not all of them ( I reran the check again after it had done the fix and some errors remained). However, these errors have not caused any issues when using Outlook and did not allow the TyTn II to sync with WMDC 6.1

It is not clear what the actual issue is, but it is interesting that WMDC 6.0 at least completes a full sync consistently (albeit without calendar/task text). There are any number of posts on the internet complaining about this issue, and I must say I agree with them. It is hugely ironic that an iPhone can sync with Outlook but in many cases a Windows Mobile cannot.

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I had issues getting Activesync to connect over bluetooth during the last few days. at each attempt activeSync on the HTCgave the error “attention required, unable to connect, bluetooth port may be in use” etc.

I tried restarting both and reconnecting but this did not work.

On one occasion, Window 7/panther was unable to complete listing the devices, but this appears to have been a one of as it is fine today.

In the end, I tried deleting the pairing and repairing the devices. This solved the problem. I was concerned that it would also delete activesync related info and require reconfiguration of that, but it did not. Once the pairing was set up, I was able to connect via Bluetooth from the HTC and resync correctly with no further errors.

I have seen this before in other situations where a bluetooth pairing appears to get corrupted in someway, and generally as in this case deleting the pairing and repairing seems to resolve it.

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Update 3/2/2012

One note to be aware of when doing this is that depending what other upgrades have been done, it may also be necessary to reset the boot order in the bios. Failure to do this may mean that the Windows boot manager on an old hard drive may still be presented at boot time even though bcdboot has run correctly as per the process below.

In my case, resetting the boot order solved the issue and boots were then done entirely from the SSD. I still had the option to boot from the other system by using the bios boot manager to pick the other hard drive to boot from.

Original Post

I needed to do this after installing Windows 7 64bit on an SSD, when I already had A Windows 7 installation on another HD.
I wanted the SSD to be the active partition/primary boot device – perhaps I should have made it the active partition in disk manager before installing but anyway I did not.

The install therefore kept the HD as the boot dev and installed a boot menu on it. The boot files were missing from the SSD. These can be added via the bcdboot  utility as follows :-

>bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

This had to be done from an elevated privilege command prompt (right click command prompt option or icon, run as administrator).

Microsoft information on bcdboot may be found here.

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According to Microsoft here you can do this if you install them in increasing order, i.e. you must install the earliest first.

In my case, Office 2000 would not play ball at all, as Word 2000 froze on startup.

Office XP ran ok, and does seem to coexist with Office 2007, but there are some issues.
I had to mess around with compatibility mode for XP, but ended up taking it off as it appeared to try to run Word XP in administrator mode even though this was not enabled – strange. I ended up not needing it and Word XP started OK but was initially a bit flakey as said.

Two issues remain outstanding, but they are possible to live with:-

1/ Double clicking a .doc document always opens Word 2007, even if you try to change the file association. I had it working correctly for a little while (loading up Word XP for .docs and Word 2007 for .docx, but Word 2007 ended up taking over. This may have had something to do with the next point – ‘re-registering’

2/ Both versions wanted to reconfigure themselves each time you switched from running one version to the other one. Even on a fast PC this takes 10-20 seconds of thrashing with a conifiguration dialog displayed – not nice, although Microsoft say that this is normal behaviour if you have multiple versions (Word XP did its configuration a lot quicker). This post  describes the way around this by telling both versions of Word not to ‘rereg’ themselves, by setting the following registry keys :-

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word XP

This fixed the problem, although it is not entirely recommended as it may cause issues during fixes/updates that may need the ReReg to be run. I would imagine that removing the keys temporarily and re-adding them would solve this.

If I was in this situation again, I would certainly try to avoid installing multiple versions on the same OS – it is clearly not supported well. It would be best to use another machine or a VM.

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e.g. Moved the Public Music and Videos folders correctly using the move button. To do this I had to temporarily disable User Account Control via control panel, as per Microsoft Instructions.
The old folders under c:\Users\Public remained there and were inaccessible even as administrator – could not list the owner, could not delete etc.

This  forum post describes the problem, but their solution did not work for me.

In the end, after a logout/reboot they seemed to be ‘magically’ accessible again – I managed to rename one of the old ones, then found I could delete them all, even after having restored UAC back to default.

This is a bit of a weird area – needed some tinkering to sort it, info on the net not fully clear. Only some of the public folders were affected, documents were not. The user folders were not affected. All very strange!

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Some desktop shortcuts cannot be pinned to the new taskbar/superbar in Windows 7, for example a desktop shortcut to a url.
You can enable the old quick launch toolbar to do this as follows :-

On the taskbar, right click and pick Toolbars/new toolbar…

1. In the Folder box at the bottom, paste in the following :-

   	%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

2. Click Select Folder to save the change
3. Note that the quick launch bar may end up to the right of the superbar. Dragging it to the left seems to be a fine art! I googled for a while and could not find out how to move it. In the end I discovered that the speed of dragging is very important here. It should be dragged by left clicking the dotted lines, or by left clicking just to the right of them so that the cross arrow appears. Click and hold and drag with a swift motion over the other bar, and drop, and this should work. If you are too slow with the drag it will not work and will just hit the adjacent bar. In my case, dragging the dotted lines seemed to work in either direction (i.e. can either drag superbar over quick launch or vice versa), but dragging with the crossed arrow only seemed to work rightwards. I did read a blog post that advocated unpinning everything from the superbar first, but this was not required, in the end it all comes down to the dragging technique. Once you have tried a few times and got it working it becomes second nature, but it is certainly very counter intuitive!
4. You may also find that the quick launch bar disappears on reboot. You can re-add it back as in 1. above, and you should find that its contents are still there as previously. This post details how to modify the registry to remedy the disappearance problem, but this post on sevenforums states that you only need to make sure the that the current theme is saved (right click desktop, select personalize, right click and save the current theme). I’ve tried saving the theme and will see if it still disappears, and then try the registry mod.

This will also give access to the hidden 3-D Window Switcher that was in Windows Vista.

Full details of this may be found on here.

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