Yesterday, I installed Windows 7 on my 3.5 years old notebook. The new harddisk I ordered for it came, that’s why. And because Vista was slow like hell.

Well, Vista booted on it in around 3 minutes, before the harddisk stopped making noise and the PC became usable. The inital firefox start took one more minute.

The new drive isn’t that fast – 60-70 MB/s max (my Desktop PC’s HDD has 120 MB/s average and 150 MB/s max). Despite from this, Windows 7 boots up in 38 seconds – As fast as on my (destroyed) desktop PC!

Windows 7 never cease to surprise me. It’s definitely better than Vista and as fast as (or even faster) than XP.

Ok, my PC now runs on Windows 7 x64 on my new 1TB HDD.

It’s incredible fast. Bootingtimes from around 30 seconds. XP took longer. Also the new HDD (1000GB Seagate ST31000528AS 7200rpm 32MB 7200 U/min SATA) is really fast too. 120 MB/s in average, 150 MB/s for peak. All in writing data on an unencrypted NTFS partition.

After encryption (TrueCrypt), I have rates of around 105 MB/s and 120-130MB/s in peak, so I loose around 15 MB/s. But I have to say CPU now rises to around 30-50% instead of <10% because of the encryption process. But I never mind. I have a dual-core (and soon a quad-core) so I don’t notice this “loss” at all. Safety by encryption is more worth. In my opinion, everyone should encrypt their drives.

Anyway, the rate-drop is still nothing compared to my old HDD (also a Seagate) with another encryption programm (Safeguard Easy). I had a loss of around 40 MB/s and rates later of 50 MB/s. So I’m lucky and I hope, finally GMod starts faster

It seems like I have a method now for imaging my encrypted hard-disk without the need of doing a sector-by-sector image of the encrypted partition (which would be as big as my partition – 25 GB – and uncompressable).

I now do it that way: I have Windows 7 installed on my primary partition, 25 GB huge. Then I encrypt only this partition with TrueCrypt using Pre-Boot Authentication (PBA). For PBA, I enabled in the options to cache the password in the driver memory. This allows me to use the password I entered upon boot to mount any other truecrypt device with the same password in windows later.

So do I. After Windows 7′s bootpartition was encrypted I created new encrypted partitions with TrueCrypt. These will be mounted when I login into Windows with the password previously stored in the driver-memory.

To the backup part: I create a hot-image from within Windows using TrueCrypt 2009. Since TrueImage now sees the partition unencrypted, I can create a compressable image (filesize is around a DVD’s size). To restore it, I boot up a BartPE bootable CD and restore the image to the system partition. BUT here, the data is written unencrypted! After image restore, I simply bypass the TrueCrypt bootloader pressing Esc, boot into the now unencrypted Windows and start encrypting the partition again (takes 20 minutes).

This method is not really elegant but it works. I just wish, the TrueCrypt developers finally add a “boot from CD” function into the PBA so I can use dos-backup-tools like NortonGhost 2003 which are able to read and write data then unencrypted. With SafeGuard Easy this works, but SGE only supports Windows 2000/XP.

We hesitated the last few weeks how and what is the best way to get our new server running. We started with Xen for virtualisation just to find out that for some strange reason Windows Server 2003 and 2008 refuse to run. We activated all settings and Intel Vanderpool was activated in the BIOS. Still no results. It always errored out with tellung us that we tried to run an x64 application on a non x64 platform (winload.exe failed). But it was x64 and even x86 (32 bit) failed to run.

So we came to the conclusion, Xen isn’t that good for us. We lately switched to Proxmox where we have been told, it will definitely work. And so was it: Windows 2008 booted up but wait: Linking it with the ip did not really work (some special network driver was necessary and it is not ported fully to Win2k8 yet). So now it’s Windows 2003 x64 Enterprise R2 which will run on it. And it seems to work.

Sidenote: The Windows 2008 server booted up in around 4 seconds. That’s incredible fast. I hope Win2k3 will be as fast as 2008.

Some of you may know that there are several good Vista-Transformation-Packs  which gives the new Vista-style to Windows XP. The best I know is the BricoPack Vista Inspirat which I’m using. I thought “hell yeah, that’s how Vista looks like”. But it isn’t. After a few months when I came to the pleasure in actually installing and using Vista on my Notebook I saw how different Vista really looks so I got jealous.

I didn’t want to install Vista on my Desktop PC so I searched for alternatives: True Transparency.

This little tool adds PNG support for the frames in Windows. And since PNG supports transparency, a real Vista Skin is possible (Ok, there is no blur-effect like on Vista, but that’s anyway useless). You have absolutely no performance loss! Just a few applications which have their own style system (e.g. Trillian) start to lag. But you can add exceptions for TrueTransparency in the “exclude.dat” file.

And just a hint: On this site I linked (www.crystalxp.net) you’ll find other really interesting stuff.