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64 bit experiences
Hi everyone, just joined.
Have been experimenting, in odd moments, with the released version of Win 7 - oem 64 bit.
Working out where it stores all the configs is a nightmare, bits all over the place and some very odd behaviour. Have not got around to dissecting the registry yet, I just pray they have not messed with that too much.
A few observations:
If you edit the name of a desktop shortcut, it disappears. You can get it back with ctrlZ but you have to edit it in Users and ProgramData to change things. Same issue and solution when you Pin something.
Sometimes, when you cold boot you get a blank screen, this is a problem that is in XP and Vista, although I have never personally experienced it, others have reported it to me. Use ctrl alt del to get at Task Manager, then use run to start explorer. Everything then ok.
USB disk drive will not eject - "safely remove" says disk is not removable. Disk manager is correctly configured and nothing seems to be holding the disk open. Have installed "USB Safely Remove" shareware product which does the job. But that is having trouble starting as a service sometimes, I think it is trying to start too soon, must investigate.
Had a look at a couple of tools. "Tweak-7" still needs a lot of work as it does not display properly and some bits just don't work. "Windows 7 Manager" works ok and sorts a few issues. It also contains a crap cleaner that will run on start-up - VG.
The installation, on a clean disk, went brilliantly. It found all the correct drivers and left me no work to do at all - damn, they are trying to do me out of a job.
What was worrying however was that I have used a 50G system partition and every time I reboot the available space gets smaller, now down to 2G. Problem seems to be HIBERFIL.SYS which is now almost 10G in size. All hibernation functions are disabled so it should not be there, let alone getting bigger. You can't delete it, but if you run the following from the command prompt it gets deleted.
powercfg.exe /hibernate off
I now have 11G free.
Have installed and configured, but not used, quite a few apps and utilities, always the latest versions, and not had any failures. But my requirements are probably very different to most users. No games, no messenger services, Office 2003 with Outlook (I hate Office 2007), Adobe suite, Firefox, etc.
Installed Winamp and it worked ok. Today, it has corrupted, no skins, no file associations. Uninstalled, cleaned up, reinstalled, rebooted a couple of times to test, works ok, weird.
Firefox 3.5 has display size issues. Either too small to read or to large to fit on the monitor screen.
Edited the config file, only two options that work are -1 and anything else, although the advice is set it to 96. Have settled on 96 with a display resolution of 1689 x 1050. Then have to use ctrl mouse wheel to bring the size up a couple of notches on many sites. Changing the Windows character size does not fix this although it sorts the desktop icon text size issue.
A quick way to test your monitor / driver settings is with a single line a code in an .html file:
<a><img src="test_square.jpg">
where test_square.jpg is a coloured square that you can easily make in any graphics program.
But do measure the results with a ruler, as to me it always looks wrong but the actual measurements are correct.
I am getting annoyed at regularly being told "access denied" or "does not exist" when Explorer shows it does exist. I have full admin rights and properties, permissions, special says I have full access. Perhaps if I was a good boy and turned show hidden folders and system files off, they would disappear. But I hate having things around that I don't know what they are for.
Well that's my rant for today
Have a nice day