Windows 7 RC Cracker Jack Surprise.

Windows 7 RC surprised me today with some computational behavior that was totally unexpected. You know sometimes I really hate giving bananas to the code monkeys at Redmond. But when the monkeys do it right, you gotta give them the whole bunch.

I was doing about three things at once as usual. I've been building/debugging a special Windows XP Embedded image that depends on a bunch of code and requires a lot of time consuming processes that leave me with my hands and mind free simultaneously for chunks of time. The old adage about free hands and the devil etc., in any case I was also punching at the Windows 7 RC installed on a DELL 755. It has 2GB of RAM, a Celeron CPU running about 2.2GHz. Not an especially impressive system but typical of our rental fleet.

I had installed Win7RC on it a week or two ago. I knew what the answer would be but I tried using Intel's VT reporting utility on the Celeron. I wasn't surprised when it reported that the Celeron was non-VT. Duh. (I only did it because every now and then I have found surprises inside the box. Like a Pentium Core2 Duo mounted inside a DELL that had a Celeron sticker on the outside. A real Cracker Jack surprise.)

I installed Sun's virtual box software on the Celeron running Win7RC. Everything was going great. It installed fine, then it was time to install Windows XP Pro SP3 in the VM. It got all the way to “6” minutes left to install. A message popped up on the screen telling me I had run out of hard drive space! What? I was installing XP Pro onto an “expando-matic” virtual drive. Well after looking at it for a minute or two, I realized I had run out of REAL hard drive space on the C drive. I had 64 Megabytes of empty space left (that didn't used to sound like a tiny drive space).

One of the really annoying things with Sun's Virtual Box is that it likes to install the first time into the User's profile, usually on C. I didn't even think about that. I had the REAL drive partitioned into 2 sections, C was 25GB and D was 55GB. What to do?

I put the VM into pause mode and closed the virtual box application. Wiped all the junk off the D drive I didn't need, all of it except the DELL drivers folder. I discovered that installing the Win 7 RC on top of the Win Beta left this big folder on C named Windows.old. Well I didn't need that. That saved me about 6 GB or so of space. I'm not really sure because I never could get Win7 to finish indexing the damn thing, no swap space.

I started deleting folders from inside the Windows.old folder piece-meal since it turns out the idiotic index service sits there and tries to keep track of all the folders being deleted. Once I got enough room to copy the DELL driver folder to C, with some spare room, I did it.

Then the original driver folder on D gets deleted. I go into Drive Manager via MMC and delete the D partition. Click on C and use the extend (or the REAL expando-matic) command in Drive Manager to make the C drive about 20 GB bigger. Finished deleting all the crap folders in Windows.old and then re-established the D drive.

Started Virtual Box. Un-paused the installation of Windows XP Pro SP3. Viola!!! It finished without burping or crashing. Everything was back to where it was supposed to be! Freaking amazing.

Now why am I giving the monkeys bananas? Windows 7 RC did NOT crash once during the entire procedure, it did not require I turn it off, it only “whited-out” Explorer once for about 3 or 4 minutes and it came back all by itself. It dealt with the lack of swap space, it dealt with the lack of hard drive space and it kept running. XP Pro would have crashed. Vista would have come to a complete dead stop with no apparent reason. It operates almost as stable as Debian Linux 4.0.

I am impressed with Windows 7 RC.