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Technology in the morning

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We're doing a WDK presentation this morning for a bunch of driver development groups.  When we arrived yesterday we discovered that each attendee had been provided with two systems, a laptop and a 64-bit system connected via cross-over cable.  We decided to leverage that by enabling each person to walk through our demos hands-on.  The problem was that the OS on the 64-bit systems was not booting.  So, this morning we came in and installed ASI on each of the laptops then used it to install Windows Server 2003 on each of the 64-bit systems.  By 8:00 all the systems were running setup and we were eating breakfast.  By 8:30 we were ready to start the first session.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2005
    Half an hour to install Windows Server 2003 x64? Wow, compare that to my attempt, a less powerful OS on a less powerful machine, but still...

    Vista beta 1 checked build 32-bit from MSDN, on a Pentium III with 320MB of RAM, 17GB of available disk space, and ATI Rage Mobility which does not steal any of the system RAM (so the full 320MB is available). Theoretically paging could be an issue but in fact it isn't, because mscorsvw.exe is using more than 90% of the CPU, it is not idly waiting for paging operations. When the total CPU time accumulated by mscorwvw.exe went over 24 hours, taskmgr.exe stopped displaying the accumulated CPU time for that process. Elapsed time now is about 5 days and it's still going.

    Now that's what I get for trying Vista's checked build. Why didn't I just use a retail build which installs in less than a day. Why would I want to try a checked build when I can remember XP Pro SP2 32 bit's checked build showing that Microsoft hadn't tested some of its own stuff under a checked build. Oh yeah, the reason is because I want to test some of my stuff not Microsoft's stuff.

    By the way, what problem was keeping your 64-bit OSes from booting?
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2005
    Typo correction:

    > mscorwvw.exe went over 24 hours

    That's mscorsvw.exe, sorry. (Actually I'm typing that from memory so there's still a chance it could be wrong.)

    Hmm, if I think about this more, maybe the ASI portion of the install was done about 4 days ago, and it's doing other stuff now, JITting .Net Framework 2.something?

    I had to position the machine so that if the cat jumps on it she won't hit keys or close the lid, and cover the power cable so she won't find it, but still get the fan to ventilate properly since the CPU's been going at 100% for 5 days now. My cat is so smart, whenever she bites through a power cable she gets scared of all power cables for about 3 days, but after that she's back to the usual. Ethernet cables don't scare her at all and those have 8 wires needing repair, grrrr.

    Puzzle time. Miki likes drinking from Vista's bowl. Why?
  • Anonymous
    September 29, 2005
    OK no one asked for an answer to the puzzle so I'll ignore the silence and post it anyway.

    After the last goldfish died, we bought a more colourful species. The cat still doesn't try to eat the fish -- I wonder why, since after all we had bought the goldfish for her. The cat does like drinking from the fishbowl.

    The day we bought the more colourful fish was the first day that I started trying to install a checked build of Vista. So I knew just what name to give the fish. Guess what species it is.
  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2005
    We didn't have the time to investigate the problems with the server install that was in place when we arrived. It was set to auto logon and as soon as it logged on it logged off again, then did auto logo.....

    It was strange.
  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2005
    Hmm. What happens if the deadline for voluntary activation has passed? Ordinarily the login process asks if the user wants to activate immediately, and if the user says no then the system logs them off immediately. If autologin is enabled then does it interact with activation to get this result?

    I'm also wondering what will happen if my attempt to install a checked build of Vista beta 1 succeeds. It's now running at 9 days elapsed time, in which mscorsvw.exe has used about 8 days of CPU time. About once every one or two days, it writes a few hundreds or maybe thousands of events to the event log saying that some DLL is missing information needed to write the details, so I think the installation is still proceeding. But if installation completes then it will surely be past the deadline for voluntary activation. I will have to agree to activate it immediately. But it surely won't let me log in long enough to set the LAN adapter to use a fixed address instead of its default DHCP setting (which will fail because I don't use a DHCP server). With no network connection it won't be able to activate. Wondering if I'll ever be able to use the thing.