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Last night I finally made the transition from the annoying Windows Vista to Windows 7. Although it was an upgrade on top of Vista, I’m still really impressed with it. The upgrade was really easy. I had to reboot before the upgrade as Vista had some updates to install, but other then that, it went really smooth, apart from taking good few hours.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it and try out all the new features, but there are a few that I have and I think the one that I’ll use the most is moving a window to the left or right, and it filling only half the screen. It’s certainly a lot easier then manually resizing two windows to just 1/2 the screen, and will make it really handy when doing HTML/CSS coding on my 23″ screen.

I’ve been running Windows Vista for a while now. Everything seems to be going fine, but as I do a bit of BitTorrenting, one thing slipped my mind. Our good friend Event 4226.

As it turns out, fixing the 10 connection limit in Vista isn’t as easy as it was for WindowsXP. As of Vista SP2, Windows requires that tcpip.sys be a signed file, so hacking/replacing/modifying it will cause to become unsigned.

I thought I was screwed, until I came across Half Open Limit Fix. It’s a simple program that will modify the tcpip.sys file, and sort out all the signing so Windows remains happy.

I’ve noticed a huge difference already, but it’s not all fixed. Any future updates to tcpip.sys will revert it to the default version, meaning that the limit will return, and you’ll have to run an updated version of the patch. But for now, it’ll do me fine.

Here is one for ya! I’m trying to install WindowsXP Home Edition onto a PC for a client. They handed me the PC with the copy of WindowsXP Home SP3 install CD. The PC isn’t anything special, but it’s has 2 250GB SATA II hard drives running in a RAID-1 (mirrored) configuration, and 4 DVD drives (2 are Samsung, and 2 are Lite-on Light Scribe). Now, this is where the fun begins.

As per a normal installation, I insert the CD and run the installer. Silly me forgot about the raid drivers the first time, but then I was presented with a BSOD. A Stop Error to be exact.

0x0000007b (0xf78d2524,0xc0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

Now, the interesting thing about this error, is that from my google research, it seems that either the installer doesn’t like the destination drive for the installation, or there is a problem with the CD. I checked out the disc, all fine there, so maybe a problem with the Raid setup.

Even after a second attempt with the Raid drivers on a floppy disc (a what?!?! people still use them?? Sadly, yep), I was still presented with the BSOD.

This now had me baffeled, and almost everything I tried had errors. In the end, I started trying different DVD drive. Both Samsung drives gave the errors. I then tried a Liteon drive, and wouldn’t you know it, Windows is now installing. Currently it formatting the Raid-1 drive (27% formatted), but so far it’s been fine and working as expected.

One thing that annoys me with Windows is how easily useless stuff builds up and never goes away until you stumble across it all. Sure you can trudge through it all and find uninstallers or manually remove it, but I usually find the best way is a simple reinstall of Windows. Oh, and by the way, I’m not talking about windows on your house, I’m talking about WindowsXP. :p

Over the past year I performed a number of hacks and mods, most of which can’t be removed. Two big ones I done were to add Media Center 2005 to XP Pro and add the sidebar from Vista.

So now, I’m currently going through Windows Setup (formatting at 25%), then comes the fun of installing drivers, updates and then finding all the programs that I use daily.

On the upside, this gives me a chance to look at what I use and see if there are any alternatives out there that may be better.

Some may wonder why I don’t just install Ubuntu (or other linux flavour), but the reason behind it is that I can do things much faster in Windows, I don’t really have time to tell Ubuntu who is boss trying to work it out, and I have a heap of Windows only programs that I use regularly and I don’t want to fart around with virtual machines, oh, and I stream to my Xbox360 and my wife doesn’t like Linux.

Reader Question: For you Windows users out there, how often do you do a fresh install of Windows and why? Any hints or tips I should take note of for next time?