Setting UP Win 7 Pro

I bought a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade [Home Premium to Professional Upgrade]. Microsoft says the upgrade will be easy and it has an XP compatibility mode for all those old programs I need to run. Plus I can set up Virtual Machines for things like DOS, Win3.3, Linux, XP, and who knows what else my devious mind can conjure. Maybe a Z-80 partition and virtual machine. Microsoft says it is going to be easy and will take around ten minutes. They lie.

You start off going to the Windows Anytime Upgrade gizmo under the Start button and give them the secret code that came with your (almost)empty box. You then can go to the download page and Microsoft gives you the privilege of downloading 500 MBytes of code. My speed was on the order of 1.5 MBytes a second. Not too shabby. If you have nothing else to do for 4 or 5 minutes. Then you run the sucker. It restarts the computer (the shutdown dance) 3 times with varying delays and dead times. Give it at least a half hour before you give up on it while it is in one of its idle modes.

Then I went here to get the VFirtual Machine stuff. Another significant load for your ISP. Well fine. You can fool around with that and see if you can get it to work. Or you can Read The Effen Manual. Which I highly recommend.

So any way I get some insight in the process and then I find this page which seems to work better. Which then takes you to this other page where you can do the actual downloads.

Click on XP Mode download then run the program. You then have to do the shutdown dance. Again. Only once though.

Then Virtual PC Mode - another shutdown. This is getting monotonous. And a lot longer than 10 minutes. And finally you get to do the Windows XP Mode update. Another restart. Yarghhhh!!!

Finally I'm done. More like an hour and a half or two later. Well there is the Virtual Machine Maker Icon under the Start menu. Excellent. I made a 2 GB virtual machine to see how it works. Looks good so far. I'm going to fool around some and see what I've got - by poking at it. Out of that 1 GB (roughly) of software there ought to be something useful. Like maybe I can use my schematic drafting program. After roughly three months without. But I do have about a fifth of a ream of schematic scribbles I have produced in the interim. Some transcribing is in order.

If I learn anything interesting or amusing I'll have another post. And if you would like the previous chapter of the saga you can go back to The Partitioning of An Area. Which has a link to the one before that.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

New Vistas

Reader Paul has sent me a couple of links on what Microsoft's Vista will mean to computer users.

This link is for non technical folks. Let me excerpt a bit:

...reviews have focused chiefly on Vista's new functionality, for the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista's "fine print." Those communities have raised red flags about Vista's legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user.

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.

Even after installation, the legal agreement grants Microsoft the right to revalidate the software or to require users to reactivate it should they make changes to their computer components. In addition, it sets significant limits on the ability to copy or transfer the software, prohibiting anything more than a single backup copy and setting strict limits on transferring the software to different devices or users.

For the more geeky among us here is a look at Vista by a computer security expert.

Here is a really neat geeky explanation of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which is another way of saying copy protection:

Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

When I first got into computers (1975) the promise was that what was once the province of the big guys (IBM) would now be available to the average citizen at a modest price. People would be able to do things never before possible (on a mass scale) and users, not software/hardware priests would be in control. Vista looks like a reversion to the bad old days.

Cross Posted at Classical Values