I had promised to write a post on Virtual Server in Windows 7. Well it didn’t materialize and the reason was that my machine got totally screwed. I mean 3700MB RAM and 100% CPU utilization kind of screwed. Nothing and I mean nothing was working. I would try to shut down only to be told that I am not allowed to shut down. No apps were loading, no mouse movement, nothing.
Somehow I managed to get TaskManager going and found that and instance of svchost.exe was totally borking my system. Oh how I wished I could start ProcessExplorer. One of the first things I will do from now on is replace TaskManager with ProcessExplorer
Open ProcessExploere
Click on Options
Click on Replace Task Manager
One of the many reasons why you should do this is because ProcessExplorer will tell you which Services are registered in a process such as with svchost.exe.
The solution I found was to Restore the machine back to a restore point from a couple days prior using System Restore.
Now, everything is working just fine.
I have also tried to install Windows 7 on one of my older machines that wasn’t being used. It was an ASUS P4PE with 2.4GHZ Intel CPU and 512MB of RAM. Well that didn’t turn out too well. There was no problem with the OS installing or even running. Where I couldn’t get any use was with the hardware drivers not being found. No ethernet, sound etc. And since the board is so old, there aren’t even Vista drivers.
I tried plugging in a RealTek lan card I had laying around but that didn’t work either. Finally I tried a USB wireless device that worked like a charm. Only thing was that it required WEP. Bah!
As far as performance goes, things were a little slow initially but then I was able to get it working properly by reducing the Visual Effects to Adjust for best performance in the System Properties.
That said, my machine is completely hosed because I was dual booting XP on IDE versus Windows 7 on SATA. Somehow, that was causing issues and I haven’t had time to play around and fix it.
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