cluberti

Sounds like a small system-builder shop built this machine - were you provided a COA sticker (Certificate of Authenticity) with the 25-character product key on it in the materials with the computer? Don't post the key, but it should look like one of these. If it doesn't, you most likely have a non-genuine (non-legal) copy of Windows installed on that PC. From the Microsoft.com piracy site: Only the *really large* OEMs have licensing agreements with Microsoft to provide you a recovery CD or recovery partition only - if this PC was not purchased from one of the very large OEM shops (and from your description of the machine, it was not) you SHOULD HAVE a hologram emblazoned Windows CD and a Certificate of Authenticity sticker affixed to the computer (or in the packaging with the CD and the user's manual that came with the PC). I want to make sure we're dealing with *authentic* Microsoft software before continuing, only because if it isn't you likely will not be able to easily (if at all) make a recovery CD from what you have. I'm trying to avoid us all wasting our time (you included) on this endeavor, so we need to know this before we continue.

Yeah, well, lack of caffeine and all that .

No, I'm saying the reason it performs like crap is because the OEMs don't do a good job of initially installing Windows, they don't tune it for performance, and they load it up with crapware, bloatware, and trialware (I'm not sure which is worse, honestly). The very first thing you do when you buy an OEM machine, after finding all the latest drivers for the hardware, is reinstall Windows. If it's still slow, then go from there, but trying to get an OEM preload to be performant is an exercise in futility - you might succeed, but you'll have far less hair on your head after pulling most of it out. Yes, there are ways to do it posted here on MSFN, or you could consider using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 to create an installer for Windows that will work from a USB key (shameless plug for my blog here).

According to the header files in the SDK, this error is: # as an HRESULT: Severity: FAILURE (1), FACILITY_WIN32 (0x7), Code 0x6f8 # for hex 0x6f8 / decimal 1784 ERROR_INVALID_USER_BUFFER winerror.h # The supplied user buffer is not valid for the requested # operation. As wierd as this may sound, I wonder if this is because you modified a Vista SP2 source from a Windows 7 RTM box - what happens if you run the same preset against a Vista SP2 source, from a Vista SP2 machine rather than from a Windows 7 machine?

How is session directory configured and installed? It sounds like that portion of your TS farm isn't performing properly if users can't RDP to it properly and then get redirected to a farm host, or perhaps there are switch issues preventing your remote clients from hitting the NLB IP address and forwarding to the "real" server.

Correct - I didn't think I needed to quantify again, as I'm assuming our OP isn't an id*** and can figure that out for himself since it's already been mentioned once .

What does this have to do with unattended XP? Moving to a more appropriate forum.

It's a well written article. I think his experiences with Vista echo a common thread by most folks who got Vista with a new machine from the major OEMs, in that they managed to take an OS that really did need decent hardware and a decent load environment and place it on substandard hardware, and then load it down with crapware/bloatware and substandard drivers. In the end, this is how I felt about recommending Vista to colleagues and friends - go ahead and take the plunge with a new machine, but make sure it has 2GB RAM or more, at least an 80GB HDD, and for their own sanity make sure the first thing they did was reinstall Windows. Most technical folks have known to do this for years, but I'm sure the vast majority of folks (the non-technical) don't, and that was Vista's downfall, more than anything else.

Note that on any system, there's going to be a delay - it'll be made worse with a projection, so make sure you use the wizards at the beginning of the game (at least in RB, I'm not familiar with GH) to calibrate the controller/instruments, otherwise it'll be bad. As to controllers, again I can't speak to GH (but I think it's safe to assume they are the same), but controllers that work for RB are wireless. They're also not specific to the version of RB either - v1 instruments work with v2, and vice-versa. I do believe it requires a hard disk though, so that would mean you'd have to buy an Arcade and a HDD, or just get a Pro system. I'm partial to the Beatles Rock Band game currently, as it's a blast and the music is nostalgic (and still good), but you'll know your audience better than I will - I haven't been on a college campus in over 15 years and I don't know any college-age kids either.

Indeed - I ended up with a 9800GTS because I couldn't find any 8800's here at the moment, but I still run an 8600GT in my MCE box because it seems to work the best (perf-wise) of all the cards I've got. In speaking to others running Vista and Win7 MCE, this actually seems to be sort of a consensus - there's something about the 8600 in particular that makes it do particularly well in that environment.

What are you load-balancing, specifically? Is it NLB for IIS, or something else?

Upgrade the device driver before installing Win7? Dell should have a driver available to you for this model if the Windows Update Advisor found that you need it. Most of the WUA output is based on the testing and the beta product cycles, meaning if it knows there's a problem and you need to update, then you should be able to find an update (otherwise it would have blocked the upgrade if there was nothing newer for the device). I'd contact Dell and get the driver Win7 setup is mentioning before upgrading, or just do a clean install.

Correct - for the most part, the 9xxx bits are exactly the same as the 8xxx bits. The differences come down to core clock, amount of and speed of RAM, etc. Zenskas is right - an 8800GTS is most definitely a better card than a 9600GT.

Another vote for DriverGrabber on XP systems.

Copying files and folders to places on the hard disk is what the $OEM$ folder structure is for.

This has been discussed before. You need to actually integrate the drivers using tools in the WAIK, not use vLite to slipstream them. Otherwise, this is what happens.

Or, knowing that Windows will assign a second partition on the only hard disk in the system the "D" drive letter, you could relent and just use "D" instead of "I".

Set your template machine to "System Managed", and then export the "Paging Files" value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management - this will contain the "System Managed" setting as a hex blob. There's no API or script to set the system managed size, at least not one that's public. I only know of ways to set the paging file size min and max via WMI and powershell.

Right - it seems to be something funky in the TFTP request / response made by the linux server - you can see it in a network trace. I'm guessing there's a bug in the implementation of either the TFTP server or the SAMBA server behind it when attempting to serve the startrom files.

Also, consider using MDT to create your images, and WDS to deploy the finished WIM files. Assuming you've got a Server 2003 or 2008 machine you can use as the WDS server, MDT 2010 is a free download.

From one old man to another, happy birthday, old man

Not within the Windows DNS server itself. You'd have to have a separate DHCP set up and configure reservations in DHCP on your network for admin machines so that they'd get DHCP and DNS info to use a separate DNS that didn't do this redirection for this to work for specific users.

This error, 99.999% of the time, means your installation media is invalid. Re-download the original ISO and retest - if your ISO and the original ISO have the same hash, it should work. Again, this error is complaining about the underlying installation media having a problem.

Sounds like a driver is corrupted, likely a boot driver like an antivirus filter driver or some similar kernel filter driver. If a Vista repair didn't fix it, that would limit it to a disk driver or boot filter driver for certain - you won't be able to fix that without a reinstall, so you're probably on the right path in recovering data with an external adapter or enclosure. As someone who does this from time to time, consider something like this.

First, please tell me you aren't using the OEM preloads that ship with these things and you're reinstalling Windows from scratch using the Windows disc and key that shipped with the machines - if not, you can stop right there, don't go any further. If you're reloading Windows from scratch, from OEM media (not recovery media, but an honest-to-goodness Windows install disc) and you're not adding anything else software-wise but Windows and Windows Updates, but still seeing the problems, then you've entered the twilight zone and you should investigate further. If you use perfwiz to create/capture logs, the .blg files it creates can be opened and analyzed in perfmon - you need no additional software. As someone who worked doing primarily performance-related and crash/hang-related support for many, many years, I can say if there's a problem with the OS (and sometimes even with the hardware), you'll find it with perfmon/perfwiz on 2003/XP and older. There are other ways to do this now in Vista and Win7 that are far more advanced than XP/2003 was, but this will work.