Hardware Profiles

RADCOMJ1 said:

Every now and again this thread gets resurrected with a few new ideas but HW profiles was just quick and easy. I don't want to run my huge power consuming graphics card for surfing the net, a simple surfing and gaming profile would suit me without having to resort to dual boot. Maybe I'll try hyperOS.

For quick simple solutions I'd try either Advanced Uninstaller Pro (excellent services profile manager in the suite of apps... might try and extract and use as a standalone) or tune up utilities (I think the turbo power mode can be configured to include disabling of various features... I'm tempted to analyse the reg etc after a turbo-up, and see how exactly TuneUp weaves it's black magic)

Alain Pannetier said:

Same case here. I'm used to running several OS simultaneously out of one box for SW development purposes.
To do so, I run VirtualBox. I've got a powerful laptop with a dual boot with Ubuntu and W7.

Most of the time I boot out of the Ubuntu disk as host OS and boot various other OS as guests (it's a 16GB RAM laptop with i7 720QM - showing 8 CPUs).

Most guest OS live in their own dedicated VMDs, basically 50GB files on the Linux disks.
Except for the W7 partition which has its own 750GB disk, in the state it was when I purchased the laptop.
As you may know, with virtualbox, you can also, all precautions taken, boot a guest OS from a real partition (termed in this case raw disk).

However, I sometimes need to boot the native Windows partition natively rather than as a VirtualBox guest. It used to be easy with XP hardware profiles.

Not any more !!

I can still boot the native W7 inside VirtualBox as a guest. But when I try to boot it natively, W7 tries to reconfigure things and ends up displaying a grey screen (after spinning the disk for ages) thereby showing it's stuck somewhere or can't access the graphic card....
I can "repair" things but the same thing happens each time.

So now I'm using W7 only as a guest.

I can't help noticing that HW profiles have disappeared from the radar precisely when MS have tightened their anti-piracy policy and virtualization has arrived in the Wintel arena. Are we just witnessing yet another revenue protection measure ? (like when Intel would consent rebates to OEMs disabling VT in their BIOS ?).

I've never heard of this raw-disk thing before. do you know how it compares (performance wise) to a standard windows install (directly to disk) or a native virtualisation (feature only available in win7)?

kazlady said:

I kind of think it is

Here's my setup:

Computer 1 (uber) - DVI out to 24" monitor DVI in, VGA out to 17" monitor
Computer 2 (inferior) - VGA out to 24" monitor VGA in (24" monitor has dual input)

It works fine, it's just annoying to have to re-setup the monitors every time I use them.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

(as an unrelated side note, this is the first time I've ever used dual monitors and I kind of like having the smaller monitor for side stuff like maps while I'm gaming and Internet webpages with sample code while I'm programming. I don't get that when hubby is playing but it's nice when he's not around)

I haven't setup my multimon stuff properly, but when I do I will definitely be using Actual Multiple Monitors again, and maybe tweaking with nirsoft's multimonitortool

Save/Load Monitors Configuration
MultiMonitorTool allows you to save the current configuration of all monitors on your system, including the screen resolution, colors depth, and monitor position of every monitor, by using the 'Save Monitors Configuration' option (Ctrl+Shift+S).
You can restore back the saved monitors configuration by using the 'Load Monitors Configuration' option (Ctrl+Shift+L).
You can also save/load the monitors configuration from command-line, by using the /SaveConfig and /LoadConfig command-line options.

DeaconFrost said:

What would you need a hardware profile for, in this day and age? I remember setting them up in NT 4.0 for docked and undocked status on a laptop. I haven't seen a need for doing so since those days.

maybe I shouldn't be messing around with this any more however I first used hardware profiles in Windows XP when I started disabling unwanted services which seemed to severely slowed the performance of my notebook. Default would be the full complement of default XP services which I would then copy and then boot into before disabling services. I had multiple profiles to progressively prune back the services according to Black Viper's Service Configuration Guides.

I haven't done since upgrading to Windows 7 which I am happy with but disappointed now to find out that this functionality has been removed from it.

Is there a safe alternative then to booting into a copied hardware profile before making changes to the services configurations i.e. without having to manually keep track of and or undo those changes?

I presently have 91 services running and I would dearly like to try to prune those back safely...