Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes

After deciding that PDAs are too large for everyday use, I anxiously waited for my cellphone contract to expire so I could get Cingular 3125 Windows SmartPhone. On paper it had everything I wanted: GSM, latest Windows Smartphone OS (which means I can write .NET programs for it), extension flash card, and synchronization with Outlook Email and Calendar. Describing my experience with the phone would be a full-fledged entry on its own, but I am not ready to talk about that right now. Today I'll write about synchronizing my windows smartphone with Vista.

The big news is that ActiveSync is no more. Unlike older versions of Windows on Vista external devices are synchronized using built-in ActiveSync replacement called Sync Center. Back on XP ActiveSync has rarely given me any issue with couple of iPAQ PDAs I owned for the last few years. Therefore Vista's Sync Center got me confused from the start because its tray icon  does never seem to be reflecting the reality: is shows syncing in progress while it has finished long time ago, or it claims that no devices are connected, while the phone is connected. I was trying to troubleshoot connection issues, when I almost by accident stumbled across Vista Mobile Device Device, where connection and synchronization status were displayed correctly. From that point forward I started ignoring Sync Center and would simply click my phone icon in the Sync Center to go straight to the Mobile Device Center.

Here's how the two look like when my phone is connected:
Exhibit A: Phone connected but Sync Center does not show that


Exhibit B: At the same time Windows Mobile Center sees my phone connected and correctly reports time of the last successful sync.

The Verdict: Skip Sync Center and use Mobile Device Center.

I wanted to try new Vista's feature called ReadyBoost (how many marketing brainstorming sessions did it take to come up with the name?). It's essentially a copy of Vista's virtual memory page file on a flash drive, which is about 10 times faster than the hard drive when it comes to readying small non-sequential chunks of data.

My new Cingular 3125 Windows Smartphone rejected a 1GB MicroSD card made by Kingston, so I found nothing better to do with the flash as to make it a ReadyBoost drive. There are a couple of ways to turn a flash drive into a ReadyBoost storage:
   1. Bring up volume's properties dialog and go to the ReadyBoost property page;
   2. Select appropriate option from the auto-play dialog box after you inserted the drive into the usb port.
I read somewhere that card readers will not work as ReadyBoost drives, that only actual thumb drives will, but my experience is actually opposite: 256MB thumb drive from Dine-Elec was reported by Vista as too slow for ReadyBoost, but Kingston's MicroSD in the USB card reader passed the speed test and was made a ReadyBoost drive.

Well, I didn't notice any difference in performance after ReadyBoost was up. May be it's because my system has 1.5 Gig of memory and 7200 RPM drive, which means on those rare occasions when it needs to swap pages, it is fast. But notebooks will probably benefit much more: on laptops with limited memory and slow 5400 RPM hard drives fast flash card is much more likely to deliver some performance benefits.

When security experts get together with lawyers we end up with security features that shield software publishers from liabilities and don't do anything to improve security - just think of all the overly complicated, impossible-to-remember passwords forced upon us, with passwords end up written on the post-it note stuck to your monitor. So much for security. The same thing is Vista's User Account Control. UAC pops up so many security warning that after just one day of using Vista I stopped reading them altogether. After one more day of playing whack-a-security-warning, I decided that time is right to turn User Account Control off for good.

To turn UAC off start with launching Control Panel: Start -> Control Panel, and then type "turn user" in the search box and then click the "Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off" link:

Then UAC screen will appear. Just clear the check box and hit OK button. Vista will probably require rebooting.

Once you have rebooted, your life will be back to normal, except the nagging red shield icon in the icon tray reminding you are truly extreme person living on the edge.

Norton Ghost 9 does not work on Vista. That's a diagnosis that could have stopped me from using Vista altogether. However, I found that Vista's Backup & Restore center does what it's supposed to, with some caveats.
I skimmed through the Internet trying to find answers to a few questions that bothered me:
1. Is it possible to restore system using Vista setup DVD and the OS image on the external drive?
2. Is backed up image compressed?
3. Is it possible to restore system to a partition or volume of the size that does not match the original OS partition size?

I was surprised to find that information I was able to find on the topic was just derivative from Microsoft marketing material. Here's what I found.

1. Yes. all you need to have to restore your system is Vista DVD and the backup image on any kind of media. Just boot from Vista DVD and then follow the lead of these screenshots:






2. Image is slightly compressed - not nearly as much as Ghost did. Original size was 35 GB, backup image size was 28 GB. I had to upgrade my external backup drive to ensure Vista backups can be handled from now on. Another interesting thing is that core of the backup image is a file with .vhd extension - the same used by MS Virtual Server. I wonder if it will be possible run saved OS VHD image in MS Virtual Server.

3. This is the worst part. Restore completely removed all the partition information on the target drive. My target drive had two partitions: first for the restored OS was not formatted and was larger than original OS partition from which the image was made. Second partition had a formatted volume with some information on it. Before restoration started it asked whether is it OK to delete all information "on drive C:", without specifying what drive C: means. I assumed it's an unformatted partition, because formatted one was present and had another letter. Boy, was I wrong. Apparently what Vista called "drive C:" was actually physical disk 0, thank you very much. Vista's Restore completely re-partitioned the drive to make destination partition of the same size as the original one. This is the most destructive Restore utility I have ever seen. After restoration was over, I had to use Disk Manager's rudimentary knock-off of the Partition Magic utility that allowed me to extend the destination partition to the desired size. Of course, I had to re-create second partition and restore the information from the backup copy. So please MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR DESTINATION DRIVE before using Vista Restore function!

In the brave new world, where nearly all CPUs are 64 bit, and Vista x64 is poised to have a large market share, how many ASP.NET 1.1 developers will find themselves in the situation where IIS7 running on x64 OS can't create an application pool for .NET Framework 1.1, therefore making it impossible to debug ASP.NET 1.1 applications under IIS7 using Visual Studio.NET 2003? All because when looking for available ASP.NET versions, IIS7 is probably looking into 64 bit .NET Framework folder - "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64", which only has 2.0 and 3.0 versions in it. Not knowing this would be the case, I recently installed Vista x64 on my newly upgraded Dev box and almost fainted when I realized I can't use VS.NET 2003 to debug legacy ASP.NET 1.1 apps. It took me a while to realize that our own Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 1.1 may work just fine, because it has its own routines for discovering location of .NET Framework 1.1 files, and it can be used for debugging of ASP.NET 1.1 application in VS.NET 2003. I tried it a few days ago, and sure enough our little Cassini saved the day - Visual Studio.NET 2003 ran an ASP.NET 1.1 app on our Cassini in Debug mode without a hitch!

Microsoft Virtual Server R2 SP Beta works really well on Vista x64 and Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU, which has Virtualization support. Installer was not completely hands-off - I had to add CGI module to IIS7 manually - otherwise VSWebApp.exe was treated as downloadable file and not as CGI module. MS needs to update VS installer to automate this step.

Please note that although MS Virtual Server R2 Beta can run on Vista x64, it can't host 64-bit OSes. To host 64 bit OSes you would need free VmWare Server installed on x64 Windows 2003 Server, and either AMD 64 bit CPU or Intel EMT64 CPU with Virtualization Technology (VT) support (like Core 2 Duo E6300 or E6400 CPUs).

[July 16, 2007 UPDATE:] After downloading Nero 7 Ultra Edition Update I was able to upgrade my original dysfunctional Nero 7 Essentials. I tried to uninstall Nero 7 Essentials, but uninstallation failed. I had to use Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to get rid of Essentials first. The good thing was that after Essentials was gone, Ultra Edition upgrade found registration key of Essentials and used it to get installed. Naturally, after it was installed it still only had functionality of Essentials, not Ultra. Nero 7 Ultra came as a ridiculous 120+ MB download, with tons of junk, like ASK.com toolbar, so I had to spend time making sure it won't get installed. Funny, but help system is not included into the 120 MB download. To my surprise there was no "Burn DVD Files" option in Nero Start Smart, which used to be there since Nero 6. Fortunately, I found "Burn DVD Files" in the Nero Express UI itself. At this point I haven't burned any dual-layers, but single layer DVDs burned at 16x speed on my NEC 3550A drive just fine. Hopefully days of no decent software for DVD burning on Vista x64 are over.
Success: Nero 7 Essentials with Ultra Edition Update.
[END OF UPDATE]

[ORIGINAL POST:]
Tried to burn Dual-Layer ISO image on Vista x64 with a few different pieces of software. These are the results:

Success: (with caveats) ImgBurn - does the job, but created a few dual-layer coasters, and almost invariably fails the burned disk verification at the end, even if disk is perfectly playable.

Failed: Nero 7 Essentials - filed to start after installation.
Failed: ISO Recorder V3 64 Bit - failed after finishing the first layer.
Failed: Active ISO Image File Burner - failed after finishing the first layer.