Archives

Archives / 2009 / February

  • Setting Up Windows 7 Beta On Dell M4400

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    Windows 7 Beta I’ve decided to go for the Windows 7 beta on my new Dell M4400 due to the problems I got with the 64-bit Vista on it. Several blue screens and the most annoying audio stutter made me make up my mind. I must say I got some help from the pro support in the US (the Swedish support people didn’t get back to me at all), and after upgrading and rolling back several drivers things got a bit better, but not perfect.

    So, I downloaded Win 7 Beta from my MSDN subscription, build 7000, and the installation went super. I think it took 18 minutes from start to stop. No issues at all.

    I’m writing this blog post as a log for future re-installs so that I’m not forgetting anything the next time.

    • Screen drivers - Windows Update took care of updating the screen drivers, so I’m on Glass now, and graphics seems to be very responsive. Nice.
    • Anti Virus - McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i installed nice and seems to run just perfect.
    • ISO Mounting – I usually run Deamon Tools, but people are reporting issues with it so I went for another tool – Virtual CloneDrive. It’s free and has been serving me well on Win 7 so far!
    • Office stuff – Installed Office 2007, OneNote and proofing tools (couldn’t activate Office because I’ve been installing it too many times apparently, duh! A phone call took care of that)
    • Dev stuff – VisualStudio 2008 installed without any problems at all.
    • Chat – For some reason I could not install the latest Live Messenger via the Live installer tool, so I had to download Live Messenger 8 and it seems to work fine.
    • Backup – HomeServer Connector installed just fine. I still haven’t backed it up yet, but I will do that later today once I got a few more programs installed.

    Todo:

    • Dev tools for VisualStudio – ReSharper, TestDriven.NET
    • Dev tools in general – NUnit, Common Service Locator, NHibernate.*, Unity, EntLib… + a bunch more. I have to look at my old laptop to see what I’m missing.
    • Live Sync
    • Etc.

    There must be a way to automate all this?! I’m sure I’ve heard something on Hanselminutes about that. I’ll make sure I keep the downloads on my server so I don’t have to do that all over again.

  • New DELL M4400 Problems Makes Me Mad

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    I've been waiting for almost a month for my new DELL M4400 and I got it yesterday. Within some 30 minutes of "getting started" procedures, I got 3 different blue screens, several "recovery from an unexpected reboot error" Vista dialogs and (most annoying of all) audio/sound stuttering problem which gets on my nerves. There are some other minor issues as well, but I can live with those.

    I called the "pro support" which we pay extra for, and that guy was not aware of any audio stuttering problems with the M4400... amazing, Let Me Google It For You. It's been known for months now, but DELL keeps selling it anyway. I hate that. The poor support guy talked to a friend for 5 minutes, came back with a sigh and told me he had to get back to me on this one because there is no simple fix for this. I knew that already, that's why I called them :)

    Still not a word from him, but the day is not yet over.

    I've made a backup on my HomeServer now, and also downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 beta from MSDN Subscriptions. I've read that some M4400 users have successfully installed Win 7 on their machines and everything runs just fine. I'll first try whatever the support guy suggests, then go for Win 7 and see how that works out.

  • Spotify Stopped and I'm Paralyzed

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    I love to listen to music while programming, and I've been using Spotify for a few months now. Most of the music I love and like is in there and they're adding thousands of albums to the catalogue every month.

    Today it stopped working and I'm not sure why, if it's due to firewall changes here where I am at the moment or something else. All of a sudden the program restarted and went into some Update mode:

    image

    which fails:

    image

    I tried downloading the latest version but it still goes into that update thingy. Oh, the horror... I'll have to use Last FM for a while then...