Hard drives these days seem ridiculously large, and yet I've run out of disk space! So where does 120Gb go on an installation of Vista these days?
Manufacturer losses
Firstly its not 120Gb. Its actually 120,000,000,000 bytes or 7.3% less. Disk manufacturers conveniently believe users cannot multiply by 1024 and so they round it down for us.
OS reinstallation partition. No shiny Windows Vista DVD with your laptop? That's because they've saved some money by eating up your drive space. I loose a whopping 5.15Gb of mine to the ServiceV002 partition.
So really I only have 106Gb.
Total loss 14Gb
Windows losses
So how much memory have you got on your machine? Bigger is better right? Well sort of? As soon as you hibernate that laptop that you need at least the same amount of space to swap the memory out to. Lose another 2Gb
Page files, event with a 2Gb machine I somehow need a whopping 6.1Gb of swap.
Finally remember that annoying Disk Cleanup tool from XP, well it's actually useful now. It managed to root out another 4.3Gb of disk space. Mainly from our old friend the temp folder 3Gb, but also from Windows Error reporting, Office cached installation files, and lots of Windows update patch folders.
Total loss 12.4Gb
Stuff I really want
That leaves me with three parts I should have left. Windows itself, Programs and of course data.
Total 44Gb
So where is the rest?
Now I have to take some of the blame here. I've been trying to get Windows Seven working on a VHD. The VHD was 6Gb and the copy that I took and recycled was another 5Gb. So 11Gb was in the recycle bin.
The one thing I've noticed since Vista is that the world has gone backup crazy. My hardware provider, Lenovo, provide a tool to do it. Windows itself does. Most annoyingly my Anti-Virus does too.
Now I can turn off Windows backup without any annoying nags, but if I try to do the same with OneCare I cannot get a green icon. Fortunately I can tell OneCare to backup to a network drive.
That unfortunately leaves the Lenovo backup. As much as I am a great believer in system images it can't really take up 40Gb can it. Actually yes it can. It took a full backup after I built the machine at about 15Gb, and then a couple of incrementals at 11Gb, mainly due to the VHD.
So what can I do?
Strangely enough I'm going to say goodbye to the Lenovo backup and restore. I have a plan. I have already used the service partition to export myself a couple of DVDs that I can use to the rebuild the system, and should I have to do that I'll have a whole 111Gb drive to write to. Next I am turning off Lenovo Backup for good, and should I ever rebuild my machine again I'll use the options to remove it from the machine install.
Next I am going to rebuild myself a modest partition of 20Gb and install Windows Seven. Partly because I want to try it out, but also because I get to install a clean Windows without any hardware manufacturer enhancements. I'll still have to track down drivers but I'm looking forwards to picking my build again, just as I did on XP.
Finally I am going to save my pennies, I want an SSD and they don't come in big sizes yet (at least without a lot of pennies). When I get that I am going to take an image and slap it on another drive. The image will be neat and clean and have no local backups enabled. Maybe its living on the edge but if I really have a problem that I can't reboot from, I'll have an old hard drive sitting around ready to go.
Its been a while since I looked at Reliability and Performance monitor, but saw somebody else doing the same recently. Now I am not sure if using laptop affects reliability over a normal machine, but compared to others, my Vista experience is more varied. On the whole I am very happy, I just get annoyed when like today my machine fails to come back from hibernation. So on with a quick review of the last three months
September
September shows the highest recorded reliability with 9.17 but then drops rapidly
Initially I see 3x Disruptive shutdown, 2x OS Stopped Working, 2x Outlook.exe stopped responding, 1x WinWord stopped responding, 1x TSMService.exe stopped responding, and 1x iexplore.exe stopped responding. The cliff highlighted is due to KHost.exe, Kservice.exe and 4x MSIExec.exe so I can safely blame BBC iPlayer for that.
October
October is pretty flat going from 7.12 on the 30th Sept to 7.52 on the 21st Oct. In between there are fails in PresentationDirector.exe, 3x Disruptive Shutdown, OneNote.exe, 1x DevEnv (VS 2005), OS Stopped working, BITS.exe, 2x TSMService.exe, 3x My own programs and 2x TabTip.exe (both on the 22nd)
November
November has ten Disruptive shutdowns but overall reliability gets better.
December
December sees a move to IE8 Beta, which is great but brings instability with it. IE8's 'reopen tabs if I crashed' feature is well worth putting up with any other issues it brings with it. Otherwise I get 5 disruptive shutdowns and a couple more iPlayer issues.
January so far
Well today's Disruptive shutdown, along with three IE crashes, 1x explorer.exe and an msnmgr.exe, drops me from a peak of 8.15 down to 6.83.
Conclusion
As I said before I am very happy with Vista on the whole, and I am looking forwards to Windows 7. However somewhere between Windows and my Hardware, I really ought to be seeing a lot less disruptive shutdowns. In this case I have to blame Lenovo. My hardware is less than 20 months old, being a Thinkpad X61 Tablet. The install seems a very customised Vista build with more time spent on the Lenovo pieces that the Vista install. I would personally love to flatten it and install plain Windows, no OEM components and compare how that goes.
Cruise control works quite nicely on Vista right up to the point where you do something that requires elevation.
In addition to the location where the source is stored, your build user will also need access to
ASP.Net
'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files'
DebuggerVisualisers
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers
VSIP Packages
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0Exp
Technorati Tags: CruiseControl, Vista, VirtualStore
Its just taken me two days to find a problem with a CruiseControl config, and the problem was it was using a copy stored in C:\Users\<Me>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files. This seems to be a Vista feature?
Deleting the entire folder and re-running meant that the files got re-created, so I can only assume its some kind of security/performance feature.
Now I don't particularly wish to join the ranks of Vista nay-sayers, but I haven't been having an overly productive time since getting my new laptop. I seem to get intermittent faults with the hard drive which manifest themselves as system freeze. I have had one instance where this has been caught by Vista and diagnosed but on the whole my experience has been pretty poor. I think I once managed about 10 reboots in one evening.
Now unfortunately I can't prove that anymore as it seems that after attempting to fix this issues with a whole load of System updates, I have lost all my previous Reliability information. I was hoping to do a post about how poor this whole experience has been but now I cannot prove that my reliability index has only ever gone down since a got my system and has dropped down to 1.02 only to briefly rise up and then hit 1.01. I think the highest figure I've ever seen was a low 3.
What is of course interesting is that I would never have even known this under XP. I would have just 'felt it was fairly bad', quite subjectively, whereas now I can objectively ask
Has anybody ever had a lower reliability rating than 1.01?