Adam Caudill's Blog » Windows

Upgrading Windows 7 Pro VL

Adam Caudill — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:42:05 +0000

While performing some testing on a Windows 7 Professional workstation running a VL build from MSDN found that a feature I needed was missing – the new Multi-Monitor RDP support. After a little research I found that only the Ultimate and Enterprise editions support this feature; which thanks to Windows 7′s Anytime Upgrade feature I assumed this would be no issue.

But, it was an issue.

It turns out that the build of Windows 7 I was using was missing WindowsAnytimeUpgradeUI.exe and the other related files needed to make the Anytime Upgrade work – and copying the files from another box doesn’t work. It seems this build simply can’t be upgraded in this fashion. So I tried a few other tricks, hoping to find something that would work:

Reactivate Windows with an Ultimate key; fails with an error indicating that a Professional key is required.
Run Ultimate edition installer from Windows; fails with this error indicating that you can’t perform edition upgrades.

So being stubborn and determined not to re-install Windows to make this feature work, I started looking for other options. Thanks to a hack for upgrading the RC builds to Final, I found what I needed.

I edited the EditionID and ProductName to reflect Ultimate instead of Professional, rebooted, and then ran the Ultimate installer from within Windows. This time the installer ran without issue and after an hour and a couple reboots it was done. This in-place upgrade/repair procedure allows you to jump to a different edition with fairly little pain. A couple of Windows settings needed to be corrected (primarily display related) and Visual Studio 2010 had to be re-installed, though otherwise everything worked just as it did before.

This is the only method for upgrading these Windows 7 builds that I’ve found, the only other option is to re-install Windows from scratch.

Still running Windows 2000?

Adam Caudill — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:12:23 +0000

For those that may be running Windows 2000, there’s some things you need to know.

With the change in DST taking effect March 2nd, your Windows 2000 boxes may see some odd behavior. There won’t be Windows Update patch or hot-fix released for this (unless you have an extended support agreement); so there’s some work ahead to keep things running smoothly.

Microsoft has released (read more) a fair bit of information (complete with sample scripts) that can be used to update any 2000 boxes you may have lying around. Those of us that keep 2000 boxes around for testing or even production use will need to make sure they are updated. I can only imagine the odd errors this will cause if these changes aren’t put in place.

This is a bit of an annoyance, I really wish Microsoft would have released this in the form of a Windows Update, though I guess this will probably help drive home the reality that it’s time to upgrade for many users.

IE Developer Toolbar

Adam Caudill — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:17:58 +0000

For those that do any web development, you’ll be interested to know that the IE Team has released beta 3 of the IE Developer Toolbar. From what I’ve seen, this looks like an impressive release. This is well worth the download and has saved me a fair bit of time in the past.

Installing Vista

Adam Caudill — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 18:10:51 +0000

I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:

Laptop

My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It’s been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business. It checking for compatibility it found a couple applications it had issues with, but it seems it wasn’t happy just telling me that they might not work, but they had to be removed before I could go on.

This required exiting setup and uninstalling both Nero and the freshly released Windows PowerShell so that I could continue. Once the offending applications were removed, I started the process again (including the 15 minute compatibility check). From here on, the process went well, although surprisingly slow. From start to first boot into Vista was a bit over three hours.

Once Vista was finally running I had my first taste of Vista, as I had not installed the betas, this was the first time I had used it. The first few minutes were full of disappointing surprises, such as the two INI files adorning my desktop, or the new ‘home’ folder full of permission errors and various configuration files. It’ll take me a fair bit of time to clean my hard drive up from that, it’s really quite a mess. On the upside, pretty much all of my software worked fine, except for the various drivers and utilities to adjust things just as power profiles and wireless network settings, but Vista includes enough to cover the functionality of everything that stopped working.

Impression: Overall positive, it’s a nice operating system, but I’m disappointed in how long it’ll take to get things cleaned up, get the permissions corrected and back to a similar setup to what I had before.

Desktop

My desktop is a bit more beefy, but still nothing special, it looks something like this: 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1.0GB of RAM, 80GB system hard-drive (plus a separate data drive), nVidia GeForce MX4000 128MB (PCI) and a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (AGP). This box was also running XP Pro and had been in need of rebuilding for a couple months at least.

This was a fresh install, and surprisingly quick. I made it to the first boot into Vista in around an hour, a third of the time required for the upgrade. This one went a fair bit smoother than the upgrade process and seems to be a fairly pleasant one. Once the system was up and running, I found the file system to be a fair bit cleaner than the upgrade produced.

Among the first things I checked was the ‘Experience Index’ to see where my computer ranks, and what the odds would be of getting Aero working. With a grand score of 1.0, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So, I check and sure enough my hunch was right, it was my graphics cards that were to blame. Me being the geek I am, I had to have Aero, so a 10PM run to the local Best Buy, and picked out a ATI Radeon X1600 Pro. I figured this card would have plenty of power for Aero.

Thankfully, Windows was able to identify a driver so I didn’t have to do any searching. All I had to do was reboot, and there was Aero, in all its glory. If you’ve not seen Aero yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. This new shell is great, very different, but really nice.

Impression: Quite positive, much better than the upgrade. System is stable and almost all of my normal software is working. If you’re going to install Vista, make sure your box has some beef, and start fresh. I’d advise against doing the upgrade, while it does work, it leaves a bit of a mess.

Is Vista Gold?

Adam Caudill — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 06:02:57 +0000

The legendary Robert Scoble has just posted word the Vista may now be gold. It’ll be interesting to see when we get official word. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t wait till Vista hits the MSDN Subscriber downloads so I can start playing with the final.

Final Vista Public Beta Released

Adam Caudill — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:10:44 +0000

The final public beta build (5744) of the next generation of Windows has been released (via shell: revealed). With this announcement it looks like Vista will indeed be on time. For awhile I was wondering if Vista had any chance of making it, but it seems that it will indeed. While this is certainly good news, the RTM build is the one that has my interest.

Playing with a release candidate can be fun, there’s no doubt about it; but the real fun starts when you can see how things work and behave on the final – (hopefully) working build. I’ve got a ton of software to test, and a number of applications to update to take advantage of the latest goodies Vista offers – that’s the fun part.

Make XP Pretty

Adam Caudill — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:33:19 +0000

While going through my (long) list of RSS-feeds that I monitor, I found this gem of an article: Vista Transformation Pack: Vista-ize your XP. The Vista Transformation Pack is a clever little application that moves your XP desktop several steps closer to the beauty that is Vista. While the ‘transformation’ doesn’t give you all of the new UI goodies that come with Vista, it does add a fair bit of eye candy.

I’m not typically one to promote UI tweaks like this, but after playing with the settings, I’ve now have a great looking setup without the instability that still goes with Vista.

Running RegEdit as SYSTEM

Adam Caudill — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 23:59:49 +0000

While facing an interesting research challenge, digging into the inner working of Windows, I realized that I needed to change a registry value. That’s simple enough, I fire up RegEdit, make the change, then politely as RegEdit knows how, it told me that I couldn’t change the value! Being one that hates when my computer tells me I can’t do something, I had to find another option.

So after some research, I found my answer: sc. This is a great little utility (included with Windows), and made the task of running an application as SYSTEM* much easier. At this point some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just use RunAs instead, as it’s designed to allow execution as another user. Well, from all that I’ve found, there is no way to get RunAs to spawn a process as SYSTEM, one of the downsides of SYSTEM not being a true user.

Another option that I found (somewhat) attractive initially is RunAsEx, an open source, GUI based version of RunAs. This could be useful, but I found it to be more hassle than it was worth. Still might be useful for somethings, but with all the bugs I found in it, I knew there was a better way.

Now, back to the solution I chose: Using sc to create a service that will execute the application I’m after. This works because by default all services execute under the SYSTEM user context, so all we have to do is create a service to call the application we need. Surprisingly simple, and it works quite well.

Creating the service looks something like this:

SC CREATE AcDebugSvc binPath= "regedit.exe" type= own type= interact **

This creates the service, so that now all you have to do is start the service (SC START AcDebugSvc ***) and you’ll see your copy of RegEdit. If you check in Task Manager, you’ll be able to confirm that it is actually running as SYSTEM. This is an extremely powerful debugging tool, as it allows you to instantly execute any application as the most powerful user that Windows offers.

Once you are done with your work, just delete the service (SC DELETE AcDebugSvc) and call it a day, that simple. This can also easily be scripted if you tire of typing the commands so often, and it can also be used with most applications. Using this for the Command Prompt (binPath= "cmd.exe /K start") and for Task Manager (binPath= "taskmgr.exe") both strike me as being quite useful.

* WARNING: As I hope most of you know, System is a very powerful account, it’s almost limitless in what it can do. If you aren’t careful while working under this user context; you may end up with a rather expensive paperweight instead of a computer. You have been warned.

** Note: As odd as it is, the spaces after the equals and before the value of the parameters is quite important, the call will fail if you omit them.

*** Note: You’ll get an error message (“The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.“) when you call this, it’s nothing to worry about. The reason that it occurs is that to respond to the message it receives the target application must be designed to operate as a service. Since we are using this for other purposes we, we don’t really care.

Useful Notepad Tip

Adam Caudill — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 17:13:31 +0000

Here’s a great little feature I just heard about to make the always useful though mostly featureless Notepad utility even more useful. If you create a new file and put “.LOG” (case-sensitive) as the first thing in the file, each time you open the file after that it will append a timestamp to the end of the file. While you could just press the “F5” button to insert the timestamp, this does have the advantage of added simplicity.

Microsoft has a knowledge base article on this feature, it indicates that the feature is supported on Windows 98 & Me, but my tests indicate it is also present in 2000 & XP.

This is a great feature if you need to keep manual logs, I think this just might come in handy.