All posts by Matthew Greensmith

Windows XP to 7 upgrade step by step



I decided to devote a large part of last weekend to upgrading my main system to Windows 7.  In the interest of science I decided that I would read no guides or tips beforehand, I would test how easy it was using only the information and instructions that came in the packaging.

So the stage was set for the install.  The system I am upgrading was very powerful when I built it 5 years ago.  While I do most of my web surfing on it, the main use for the system is to manage my media, either syncing it to my portable player or streaming it to devices on the network.  It started this process with Windows XP Media Centre Edition installed; I had a brand new copy of Window 7 Home Premium upgrade to work with.

Stage 1 – Preperationxp27 - device mgr xp

Even the packaging for Windows 7 made clear that a clean upgrade was only possible if you were upgrading from Vista.  The claim was though, that even though the main programs would need to be re-installed, the settings would be maintained.  I have never had a software upgrade that ran well so my confidence was not high.  Given that the test is to see how easy it is to have a usable system after the upgrade I took a few notes first on the beginning state.

When I performed a Vista upgrade on a relative’s computer the main issue I had was with a lack of drivers for all the installed devices.  At that stage it has already been 3 months or so since Vista was released and it was months more after that before all devices had working drivers.  I have a number of extra components installed so I am interested to see how many work after the upgrade.

xp27 b4 upgrade advisor devices

Microsoft has released an upgrade advisor to check which parts of the system are supported under the new environment.

The reports showed that Outlook Express would not be available and the game port would not work.  No great loss for these as I do not use either of them.  More worrying though was that my network card was listed as not compatible.  I have recently put in a new wireless-n router so I took the precaution of buying a new wireless card prior to starting the upgrade.

As you can see from the image to the right, the majority of my devices came up as being supported.

Once I had a level of confidence that I could support Windows 7 on this PC I was ready to start upgrading.  The only change I made to the system was to upgrade the RAM to 2GB.

Stage 2 – Settings transfer

xp27 b4 easy transfer startFirst step of the XP upgrade process is to run the Windows Easy Transfer program.  This is designed to take all the settings and files from the old to the new system.  There are options to save these to disk, USB media or a network share.  If the Windows 7 and XP installs are on different computers the transfer can also be done directly across the network.  In my case I set the target as a directory on another drive in the system.

While the process completed with no errors it took a long time.  Even though there was only about 260GB of data the process started at 5:05pm and didn’t finish until 12:51am, nearly 8 hours later.  Given that the processor was much busier than the disk during this time it appears like this was more than just a simple file copy.

Stage 3 – Install

The actual install on Windows 7 itself was a breeze.  I chose to install to a brand new directory so I could still boot XP if everything went pear shaped.  Even though I was using an upgrade version the install didn’t complain and there was very little interaction needed over a 15 minute process.  Within half an hour of shutting down XP I was running the Windows 7 side of the Easy Transfer.  This time I didn’t wait for the finish, I left it to run and went to bed.

xp27 7 system properties

In the morning the transfer had finished and I had a working system.  The next step was to check whether it was functional.  The Easy Transfer Report showed a few strange issues, including the “programs without identified manufacturers” including 5 Microsoft Programs.  Happily, even though the upgrade assistant claimed my system wasn’t up to Aero, it was running happily.

Stage 4 – Is it working?

A Device Manager repoxp27 7 device mgr after installrt showed that there were 5 devices that did not automatically find a driver.

-MS  Keyboard with Fingerprint reader

-Soundblaster Audigy

-Avermedia TV tuner

-SB Gameport

-DLink USB wireless-g NIC

This last was of course the problematic one as it prevented me getting onto the Internet to find drivers.  Thankfully I was pre-prepared with my brand new replacement NIC.  Such cunning, such foresight, such misplaced optimism.  This is where I ran into my first actual problem with the install.  The Netgear wnda3100 wireless n USB NIC came with a Vista driver that would not load and management software that crashed 5 seconds after it loaded.  As I no longer have any UTP running to my study from the router this would have been a problem without the miracle of multiple computers and flash memory.

Doing a few searches I found that it may not have been Microsoft’s fault.  The general feeling around some of the forums was that the Netgear 64-bit drivers were flaky to begin with and people had similar problems with Vista.  I managed to find someone who had hacked a driver to actually work located So thanks to unnamed author who gets some link love and a $10 donation.

xp27 7 device mgr after autocorrectNow back on the Net I ran an autocorrect feature that Windows 7 provided.  This managed to find drivers for 2 of the remaining issues, the SB Audigy and the TV tuner which both now worked.  This left just the gameport, which I was unconcerned about, and the fingerprint reader on the keyboard.  While the whole keyboard is listed in the report, the reader is the only function that does not work.  How ironic that the only device that caused me a lasting problem on a Windows OS was a Microsoft problem.

I was also having problems with the system freezing coming out of hibernate.  I am currently avoiding this by diasabling the auto-hibernate feature.

Stage 5 – Application re-install

The big test was next.  The two biggest worries I had going into this were Firefox and iTunes.  Firefox has a number of plugins, greasemonkey scripts, and heaps of favorites and links.

xp27 7 firefox after re-install

I was very pleased with this install though.  No only were all of the mentioned features there instantly after install, the new version of FF remembered all of the tabs I had open under XP when I shut down.  I had left a number of tabs open as what a I though would be an unfair test of the upgrade and was pleasantly surprised with the result.

xp27 7 itunes after re-install

The iTunes install went just as well with all of my songs and playlists surviving intact.  Most importantly all my podcast subscriptions, listened stats and player sync details came up automatically.  I did need to re-authorise a couple of songs though, which highlighted again for me the danger to consumers of DRM.  Almost all my digital media is DRM free because I stayed with CD’s until iTunes offered DRM free downloads.  I have 5 iTunes DRM’ed songs though that I bought for my daughter because she bugged me at a weak moment.  I have already used 3 of my 5 total re-authorisations and they were only purchased 2 years ago.

Conclusion

The other programs I re-installed had no significant history to remember.  All in all a relatively quick and painless process.  A benchmark claims that the system is about 15% slower running Windows 7, which is not bad for a 5yo system jumping 2 OS generations in one step.  The browsing and podcast syncing, which are the main functions of the system are running just as well as with XP.  The next couple of weeks will show whether problems start to show up and I’ll report back on my progress.

For the upgrade process though I will give Microsoft an 8.5 out of 10.  They lose some marks for the length of elapsed time the whole process took, most of which was waiting for the Easy Transfer process to finish.  This was the only real negative though from what was a painless process that delivered a better than expected result.


McBride still after Linux Payday Despite Firing



So the latest SCO filings quietly stated that the man most linked to the long running SCO litigations, Darl McBride, was no longer with the company.  His role as CEO and president had been eliminated.  One might have thought that this was an indication that the other people in charge at SCO were cooling to the whole thing.  In case you are not aware, SCO is currently in bankruptcy in what is arguably a direct result of the litigious course they have followed.

This is not the case with McBride himself though.  He is still pushing for SCO to aggresively continue to try for a big payday from IBM.  He is using his shareholdings, and the backing of some other shareholders, with the objective of  “…putting together an alternative plan … that will ultimately get SCO its day in court.”  What this actually means is anyones guess at this stage, but McBride has a long history of grandios pronouncements.

It is hard to believe that this is still going on, or that McBride still actually believes that there is any chance that SCO is going to prevail in any way, or even that SCO has any shred of moral high ground in this case.  Having followed this case closely over the years there must be some severe self blinding going on here.  If there was any secret information that needed to come out, the time for it to come out passed 2-3 years ago.

As always, Groklaw has all the best dirt.


Can a Tablet Succeed?



The rumour machine is abuzz with the prospect of Apple releasing a tablet, and there are a number of other people, most notably TechCrunch and Archos, have tablet systems either out or on the planning desk. It will be interesting to see if anyone can finally make one that is worth owning.

The first tablet PC I had used was a Compaq Concerto somewhere in the mid 90’s which was a 486 based tablet version of a standard Compaq notebook. I believe the much glorified Apple Newton preceded it, however while both these products were much hyped at the time but never delivered any real value and were cancelled without replacement.

In the 15 years or so since they first appeared tablets have made periodic returns, always for a brief flurry of enthusiasm that eventually came to nothing. The most sucessful itteration was the slight tangent into the PDA space. While that eventually was a dead end market as well, it did directly contribute to the creation of the smartphone market, which has been an increasingly bouyant tech market.

I am not confident that the track record of tablets gives great hope of success this time. There are a couple of new technologies that give this iteration a better chance. The first is multitouch touchscreens. This will make the platform more usable and increase the number of applications. The second is pageflow. While it is more an application of technology rather than a radically new technology, it does change the feel of scanning though multipage documents or lists of items, essentially making it a more natural feel.

The other positive aspect is the operating system options that exist now. A major problem previously was trying to use a full size operating system on a platform that needed to be lightwieght. A modified iPhone OS or Android platform could offer the functionality needed for the platform to operate while being lightweight enough to operate well on a less powerful platform and get good battery life.

I think this article in PCMag might have a good handle on what the Apple platform might end up looking like. One factor I definitely agree with is that new version of the tablet has to offer a different experience from a standard laptop, which needs to be more than just adding a different interface. There is also a good rundown of the tablet market in this NYTimes article.


Potentially the Worst Microsoft Marketing Idea Ever.



You too can throw a Microsoft Launch Party.  Unless you live in the US where they have already met their quota.  Presumably with a mix of Microsoft employees and people that signed up ironically.  If you haven’t seen the instructional video with its politically correct mixing of presenters look no further.

YouTube Link

The whole event seems to be outsourced to a group called House Party.  This group seems to fill a void for companies that want to run in home events as a one off rather than a standard channel to market.

In home marketing has been a successful business strategy for some companies, it seeks to generate extra sales from having people able to touch and see the product.  Add to that the peer pressure of having to make your purchases in front of your friends, with some suttle hints that the host will miss out on their gift if a particular quota is not met.  On the scale of “honest business image” it runs somewhere between direct marketing and infomercials.  This is because it is trying to force an outcome rather than just inform.  The best marketing is word of mouth references, and ‘party’ style marketing is trying to make this occur faster or stronger than it would naturally.

Whoever made the decision to use this as a marketting strategy for a blue-chip IT company is either completely ungrounded in reality, or is some sort of genius savant that the marketing world will be hailing once it thrills the world.  I’m not so sure about the second option.

Here’s a tip to other companies thinking about this type of advertising.  If your product has some sort of link to a party, like food, drink or music, it might be worth considering.  If your product is the sort that is involved in party-killing conversations, like psoriasis treatment or computer operating system upgrades, it might not go so well.  This beats Songsmith!

A good rundown of this and some other Microsoft advertising genius from history check out CNet.


802.11n is now actually a standard



I don’t classify myself as an early adopter, I usually wait until a new technology has been out a while and the price has come down a bit before I jump in.  Consequently I rarely find myself ahead of the certification curve.  It is more a measure of the length of time that the IEEE certification has taken that I am already on my second generation of 802.11n router when the standard has only just been approved.

Considering that Draft-n wifi gear has become almost the defacto standard for most new networking gear it was only a matter of time.  Some time was lost deciding between one of three proposals until the groups behing them decided to merge into one.  A patent case from CSIRO on technology used in the draft standard also delayed things to some extent.  Regardless of the delays n is now a standard.  All we need now is something faster.


Does Skype have an Underpants Gnome business model?



For those of you not fans of South Park, the Underpants Gnomes featured in an early episode.  They would sneak into peoples houses and raid their underwear drawers.  When questioned they reveled the great business plan.

Step 1: collect underpants

Step 2: ?????

Step 3: Profit

I would not be the first person to suggest a similarity between this and many Internet business plans.  Thankfully I don’t believe any companies actually tried to build an underwear theft based empire, still

Step 1: attract lots of users

Step 2: ????

Step 3: Profit

has an eerie similarity.  This model was always based loosely around the theory of network effects.  Network effects are well illustrated by the phone system.  If you own the only phone it is of little use to you.  The more of the people you know that own a phone the more useful it is.  This is a network effect, where the value to you of the product depends on how many other people have one.

If you look at companies like Facebook or Twitter it is obvious that they need a base level of other people in the system before it offers you any real value.  You certainly wouldn’t be tempted to pay for the service if it only had a thousand or so users.  This is the main reasoning behind the “everything for free” model many Internet companies start out with.  They are trying to get the network effect kick started.  The problems occur when they try to then monetise the users they have.

As I have discussed before, advertising models are often flawed, particularly in a market so oversaturated with a consumer base so jaded.  Turning free services into paid services generally loses you a lot of users.  And whatever way you want to introduce charged services, your product needs to be sticky enough that people will stay with you, or pick up the charged content.  In general, if you do not have a viable method for generating revenue from day one you have an Underpants Gnome strategy which can only dream of future profits.

Early on in the piece Skype looked different from this.  While it offered an attractive proposition for free Internet calls, it very early on had a revenue model for calls to non-skype phones.  And while it probably will never be able to charge for all calls, it could also easily have added a premium service where conference calls, calls with QoS, or assurances you would not be used as a node attracted a reasonable charge.

And then when Ebay took them over it still all looked rosy.  Ebay were themselves an Internet company that started with a viable revenue model so they at least appeared to have some idea of how to profit online.  The promise has never seemed to pay out under this combination though.  While Skype is still generating a reported $550M per year, this is still clearly not enough to pay for their costs.  So while Skype is generating about $10 per user each year some analysis has estimated it costs them up to $45 to acquire each user.

So was Skype actually out there collecting underwear?  A collection of private equity, and venture firms obviously believe that this is an issue of bad management enough to pony up $2B for theor controlling stake.  That is generally the sort of situation that drives these companies to buy.  At the same time Skype is fighting a legal battle over its technology and inking big ad deals to help acquire more users.  The latter is arguably a bad move when it is still losing money on the users it has.  As with most things time will tell, in the meantime my underwear drawer will remain closed when I am using Skype, just in case.


The MPAA may have a point…



…or at least a bit more justification than the RIAA for their fear of downloaders.

I have discussed in past posts how the biggest downloaders of music files are generally the biggest purchasers of music.  This makes a policy of prosecuting downloaders a strange one since they are attacking their biggest customers.  In the case of music, piracy can actually mean better sales.

Early this year I noticed how many people I came across were casually mentioning downloading movies in general conversation.  It sparked a note of interest and I have been taking a bit of an informal, and completely unscientific, study of peoples movie piracy habits.

The first thing that has changed radically from when I first studied music downloading 3 years ago is that people with very low technical ability are participating.  It is not just the computer literate and teenagers.  I have heard from people who still double click on web-links that have no trouble downloading a movie and burining it to a DVD to watch.  I have particularly seen a huge number of parents that are talking openly about either downloading movies, or borrowing copies of pirated movies off other people.

While the most common type of movie mentioned is a new release, i.e. a movie that is currently in cinemas, the essentially free access to movies has not prevented many of these families from going to the cinemas.  I would be surprised if there was no impact at all to movie attendance, however the impact of the GFC and the current state of movie quality have a greater impact on the box-office than piracy.  There is potentially also an impact to later DVD sales which is again unlikely to be large.  The people I have talked to have generally been happy to pay for the better quality, and the extras on movies that they liked.

Another potential loser is the rental market.  Again this did not seem to be so much of an issue.  The general usage case seems to be that people pirate the new release movies that they are sort of interested in, but are not willing to choose as one they see when they go to the cinema.  The second most common reason people gave for the piracy was that they had a level of interest that was too low to invest the cost of a cinema visit too, but high enough to not wait for it to get to video or TV.  Movie rentals will undoubtably have a larger impact to them than cinema attendance or DVD sales though.

The biggest loser in all this seems to me to be TV.  Most people were using the pirated movies as their choice of casual entertainment.  Rather than watching whatever was on TV.  They had a stash of movies that they would slot in when they wanted some casual entertainment and were not happy with the choices on TV.  Not only would the impact be to the viewers of general TV, viewership for premier movies on free to air and cable TV probably decline as well.

Regardless of whether piracy might actually be harming movie company profits, it is a mistake to be trying to use technology like DRM to block piracy.  As has been shown many times in the past and present, whatever DRM technology used will eventually be circumvented.  The only effect it has is to restrict what legitimate customers can do with their legal purchase.  While this might be part of the intent of the movie companies it actually lowers the value of their product to consumers and gives a justification to pirates to continue their practices.  In purely economic terms, reducing the value of your product has two negative effects.  It reduces the amount you can charge for your product, and it pushes more people over the cost/benefit line of piracy.

Even launching legal action against casual piraters (i.e. those that make no money from the practice) makes no sense.  People that are consuming pirated media are essentially your potential customers.  They want to use the media companies product, it is simply not available at a price and convenience level attractive to them.  Downloading movies is not getting it for free.  Regardless of your plan the bandwidth used has a real cost.  There is also the time and effort required to do the download and the cost of burning or storing the media.  These costs are neither large nor negligable.

The answer for movie companies is to find a tiered delivery method that caters to the time, convenience and cost factors.  The other clear answer is for them to stop limiting the useage rights of their legitimate customers, or try to use release schedules to force customers into higher cost consumption practices they do not wish.  The first step in this would be to have close to simultaneous release across multiple distribution models.

  • Cinemas would cater to the event crowd at a premium price.  Releasing a short time earlier (like 1-2 weeks) would also gather in the early adopters in this group.
  • DVD release with extras to entice those that want the movie to keep or to see the background information, deleted scenes, etc.
  • Online download for the home viewer convenience.  These need to be free of limitiations on how quickly, or how often it can be viewed.  It also needs to be at a cost at somewhere around half that of the DVD or less.
  • Potentially even release at the same time to a TV option, free to air or cable depending on who will pay more.  I’m not knowledgable enough on the economics of the TV movie market to know whether this could pay off or not.

The key is to have the movie available at the cost level that is attractive to all potential customers in a convenient fashion.  The higher cost methods then offer more experience or value to cover their higher cost.  DVDs offer the extra content and cinemas give the going out experience.  As I said in the beginning my analysis is based on anecdotal evidence.  From this though, the main driver for movie piracy seems to be less about price and more about a combination of convenience, price and lack of restrictions.  It does no seem that hard for movie companies to come up with a distribution method to fox this.  Changing your model is a scary thing though, much easier to whinge about how your customers don’t like your artificial barriers.