A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all.

Last week, I decided to put the final nail in Linux’s coffin by taking the SSD (Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D)out of it and putting it in my Macbook. The Macbook was pretty fast (Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz) but some things were noticeably slower on its 7200RPM disk than on Linux with an SSD, especially running Windows VMs.

I booted Linux to Knoppix and zeroed out the disk, then removed it. I backed my Mac up with Time Machine, shut it down, then undid the ~12 tiny screws, removed the bottom plate of the Macbook and popped the SSD in. I booted from the Mac DVD, restored from Time Machine and went home (it took ~4 hours to restore).

When I got in the next day, the restore was complete, though I had to click “Restart” to finish, which was annoying. Everything worked fine, and I was pretty impressed. The machine was kind of sluggish due to Spotlight indexing but once that was done I was pretty amazed at the transformation. Every app opened in under 1 second. Windows VMs were super snappy. Things were going well.

But then I started noticing periods of extended hanging. In the middle of some task, I’d get the beachball and the whole computer would become unresponsive (cursor would spin & move around but I couldn’t click anything). This would last about 30-60 seconds. I assumed it was some behind-the-scenes optimization, or some residual spotlight indexing.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t gone away. Earlier today I copied a 3 GB zip file from our file server to my laptop and it beachballed me on and off (about 60-70% of the time) for about 15 minutes as it copied. What’s odd is that the transfer speeds were pretty good, it appeared to be my computer itself that was bottlenecking it. After the download completed, I attempted to unzip it and was beachballed again. I checked Activity Monitor and it was peaking at 30 MB/s, but had extended periods of zeroes. I ran iostat and got basically the same information:

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EvanMBP:~ root# iostat -Kw 3
          disk0           disk1       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
    9.33   3  0.03     0.00   0  0.00   9  4 87  0.25 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  13  5 82  0.23 0.27 0.32
   20.00   0  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  15  5 80  0.23 0.27 0.32
   36.00   1  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  16  6 77  0.21 0.27 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  12  5 83  0.21 0.27 0.32
   20.02  60  1.18     0.00   0  0.00  17 10 74  0.19 0.26 0.32
   24.60 363  8.72     0.00   0  0.00  18 13 69  0.17 0.26 0.31
   25.40 307  7.60     0.00   0  0.00  14 11 75  0.17 0.26 0.31
   21.95 426  9.14     0.00   0  0.00  15 12 73  0.32 0.29 0.32
   82.50 352 28.35     0.00   0  0.00  17 11 73  0.32 0.29 0.32
  809.70  84 66.41     0.00   0  0.00  22  9 69  0.29 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   9  5 86  0.27 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     8.89  11  0.09   9  5 86  0.27 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   9  5 87  0.33 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  12  7 81  0.33 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  14  8 78  0.38 0.30 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 83  0.35 0.29 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  6 84  0.35 0.29 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 84  0.32 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 84  0.32 0.29 0.32
          disk0           disk1       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 84  0.30 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 84  0.27 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  5 84  0.27 0.28 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   9  5 85  0.25 0.27 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.25 0.27 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.31 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.45 0.31 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.45 0.31 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.41 0.31 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 85  0.41 0.31 0.33
  384.49  10  3.85    10.00   0  0.00  12  6 82  0.32 0.29 0.32
  291.73 126 35.78     0.00   0  0.00  23 13 64  0.38 0.31 0.33
  236.65 338 78.20     0.00   0  0.00  30 17 53  0.34 0.30 0.33
  397.61  21  8.02     0.00   0  0.00  15  8 77  0.34 0.30 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 83  0.32 0.30 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  12  7 81  0.32 0.30 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  12  6 82  0.29 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 83  0.35 0.30 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  13  6 80  0.35 0.30 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  6 83  0.32 0.30 0.32
          disk0           disk1       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  13  8 78  0.32 0.30 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  7 82  0.29 0.29 0.32
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  5 86  0.35 0.30 0.33
  148.94 124 18.03     0.00   0  0.00  18  8 73  0.35 0.30 0.33
  267.73 121 31.72     0.00   0  0.00  17  8 76  0.32 0.30 0.32
  355.54 162 56.35     0.00   0  0.00  22  8 69  0.32 0.30 0.32
  738.07  38 27.38     0.00   0  0.00  16  6 78  0.30 0.29 0.32
  512.42  67 33.52     0.00   0  0.00  20  7 73  0.27 0.29 0.32
  835.74  61 50.05     0.00   0  0.00  19  7 73  0.27 0.29 0.32
  536.83  69 36.17     0.00   0  0.00  17  6 76  0.49 0.33 0.34
  543.89  83 43.90     0.00   0  0.00  20  8 72  0.49 0.33 0.34
  720.70  59 41.74     0.00   0  0.00  18  7 76  0.45 0.33 0.33
  541.23 124 65.70     0.00   0  0.00  22  9 70  0.41 0.32 0.33
  260.54 210 53.37     0.00   0  0.00  22  9 70  0.41 0.32 0.33
  806.93  73 57.78     0.00   0  0.00  20  8 72  0.46 0.33 0.34
  874.98  43 37.02     0.00   0  0.00  13  7 80  0.46 0.33 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  4 85  0.42 0.33 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.39 0.32 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   9  4 87  0.39 0.32 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.44 0.33 0.33
          disk0           disk1       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  11  5 84  0.44 0.33 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  13  6 81  0.48 0.34 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  10  4 86  0.44 0.34 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.44 0.34 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.41 0.33 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.41 0.33 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 87  0.38 0.32 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   7  4 89  0.35 0.32 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 87  0.35 0.32 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   7  3 89  0.32 0.31 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.32 0.31 0.33
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   7  3 90  0.29 0.31 0.33
  347.11  92 31.29     0.00   0  0.00  20  8 72  0.43 0.34 0.33
   49.98 656 32.03     0.00   0  0.00  32 10 59  0.43 0.34 0.33
  113.45 351 38.90     0.00   0  0.00  40 15 45  0.47 0.35 0.34
  819.41  34 27.20     0.00   0  0.00  26 12 63  0.47 0.35 0.34
  686.99  50 33.76     0.00   0  0.00  18  7 76  0.52 0.36 0.34
  878.17  23 20.01     0.00   0  0.00  20  8 72  0.47 0.35 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 87  0.47 0.35 0.34
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00   8  4 88  0.44 0.34 0.34

You can see in the MB/s column, lots of “0.00″ followed by some bursts of ~30 MB/s. The zeros didn’t actually print at the time, but flooded the screen in bursts when the bottleneck cleared up. It seems to me like it might be some problem with queueing or caching, or maybe the SATA controller on this Mac just isn’t up to the task of SSDs. I’m not sure, but at this point I’m afraid I might have to go back to the 7200 RPM Seagate that came with the Mac. 30-second hangups are far more annoying than having lots of things be slower. Kind of a strange amortization, if you think about it. Anyway, I’ll keep looking into it, now that I know how to reproduce the problem (unzip a huge file).

Updated: A quick Google search for “beach ball mac SSD” turned up this thread which seems to be about this same problem, with a different model SSD. Also referenced in this thread on Apple.com. It feels like the problem may be due to an “old” SSD.

Updated again: Here’s someone having the problem with a Corsair 128 GB SSD: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=91061.

Updated again: According to this post, this appears to be a problem with the SATA controller in the 2009 Macbooks. Bah.

I just finished reading JavaScript: The Good Parts, one of the best programming books I’ve read. The ending is fantastic:

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries.

Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual, increasing training costs. Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products and programming languages, we want to get the core features—the good parts—right because that is where we create most of the value.

We all find the good parts in the products that we use. We value simplicity, and when simplicity isn’t offered to us, we make it ourselves. My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.

It would be nice if products and programming languages were designed to have only good parts.

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

I don’t know how much management the average SAN requires but our sales rep recently asked me how much time per week we spend managing the SAN. I crinkled my brow, because I don’t really spend any time managing the SAN. I’ve logged in to the web interface a lot more over the past few weeks than I normally do because the SAN filled up quickly due to our experimentation with Hadoop, and I wanted to make sure we didn’t get to 100% before I was able to order more disks. But aside from that incident I think the only times I’ve logged in to the management console have been to add a LUN or map a datastore to a new ESX host.

I was reminded about this simplicity when we finally added the disks last week. We went to the datacenter Wednesday to move some servers around in the racks to ensure there would be enough power in the SAN rack for the new enclosure (16x 2TB disks). We also updated a firmware update for the SAN (required so it would recognize the new 2TB drives). We have redundant controllers, so we were told there shouldn’t be any downtime. I don’t tend to trust those types of statements – if someone says something will be down for an hour I budget for 4. If it’s 8 hours I budget for a day. If it’s zero I just think they’re lying and it’s going to explode and kill people.

So all things considered I was rather impressed. We have dual controllers, so the update was installed on one controller first, and that controller rebooted. When it rebooted, the iSCSI traffic did actually fail over properly to the secondary controller. This wasn’t completely flawless – the console on some of the machines showed some iSCSI errors, but the machines seemed to be working fine (I rebooted them just to be safe). A couple of the VMs (whose data/swap drives are all on the SAN) barfed and had to be rebooted – I think our Jabber server was the only casualty, but that was back up in under a minute. When the second controller updated itself, its traffic failed back over to the first one. When it was all done (took about 30 mins total) there was a warning about the ports being unbalanced, which was rectified by clicking the “rebalance ports” button. So all in all, I’d say there was “pretty much” no downtime. After the update, we racked the new enclosure and called it a day.

This week a tech from Compellent came onsite to do the actual install for the enclosure (hooking up the fibre loops and installing the new license). This was really zero downtime. I got some alerts that one of the loops was down, but it didn’t affect anything. Pop the disks in, wire it up, install license, and we’ve got another 32 TB usable space. It’s been over a day and the data is in the process of moving from our tier 1 (32x 15krpm FC disks) down to tier 3 (SATA). All in all it was a pretty painless procedure. Sure, it would have been easier had we not had to do the firmware update, but I guess when a new type of drive is introduced that’s to be expected.

So in conclusion, I guess this just reinforces my theory that the only bad thing about Compellent is the price. And if that’s the worst thing someone can say about your product, that’s probably a pretty good place to be.

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

Like I said, I realize these guys are running a business and they want to make money, but this type of price gouging is just infuriating. Assuming a 2TB SATA disk retails for $200, and they tack on 100% markup, so $6400 for 16 disks. $5000 for the enclosure. $10,000 for their “special sauce.” That’s about $21,000 for 32TB, or $0.65/GB, which is still about a pretty healthy profit. This doesn’t take into account the insane annual support contracts you’re paying for in perpetuity.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just cheap. I’ve complained about this before, and I complained about it again this time to our reseller. The SAN vendor is Compellent, and while the product is very good, the pricing certainly doesn’t scale the way they made it sound during the sales pitch. They kept saying how they’re able to leverage commodity hardware in order to keep costs low. Well, maybe they meant their own costs. It’s certainly not getting passed on to us.

Though maybe I’m jaded because this is the first SAN I’ve worked with. I’ve heard lots of horror stories about SANs and carving luns and having to restripe arrays and worrying about hot disks, etc. With Compellent I don’t have to worry about any of that. It is a nice product. I just wish it was cheaper. My reseller’s response to my complaint was basically “It’s definitely expensive, but at least it’s good; all SAN vendors mark up their prices wildly but the product often sucks.”

Anyway, I guess when you have shareholders to please, if you can milk people, you’d better do it. I suppose my advice would be to buy what you need up front and don’t expect to be able to leverage falling costs of storage. The savings don’t get passed on to you.

I’d almost forgotten that I hate computers. Then I came home from Memorial Day weekend and woke my desktop up from Sleep in order to extract the pics I’d taken. The computer looked ok for about 15 seconds, then kind of froze. The cursor would move but it didn’t do anything. I watched it do (apparently) nothing for about 2 minutes when I hit the hard-reboot button. It hung at POST with the HDD light on solid. I couldn’t get into the BIOS, so I tried plugging into a different SATA port on the mobo, and finally got the thing to post by … unplugging the drive completely. I got into the bios, did a “load failsafe defaults” and tried plugging the drive back in and booting. It made it through POST this time but gave me the “INSERT SYSTEM DISK” error. After about an hour of messing around with it I turned it off and came upstairs to go to bed. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 1000 GB, purchased less than 18 months ago (Christmas 2008). I know things die, but this is just dumb. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if anything shows up using a USB-to-SATA adapter. Sigh.

I found a script a few months ago that generated a CSV report of mailbox size, which included the Mailbox Name (usually the user’s name), size in Kbytes, number of items, which server it’s on, etc. This was very helpful, but I wanted to see which department within the company used the most space on the mail server, and the department wasn’t one of the pieces of data included in the report. It took a while but I figured out how to do LDAP lookups in vbscript and was able to add that info, so the report now has the user’s department, office location, and quota limit in it as well as the other fields. This makes it very easy to do a PivotChart in Excel to generate a pie chart of the size by department. The script is attached – change the extension to .vbs to run it. You’ll need to plug in your Exchange server and domain controller where the placeholders currently are.

EmailSizeByDepartment.vbs

I upgraded my work laptop from FC11 to FC12 yesterday using the “preupgrade” tool. It was pretty simple, though it took a lot longer than I expected. There was some funkiness with my screen going crazy after the upgrade – my external monitor and the laptop’s LCD both did this crazy wavy-line thing. I tried changing the refresh rate, running system-config-display, nothing worked. I found a post that suggested passing “nomodeset” to the kernel boot options – that solved it. Yay!

The other problem I had was reinstalling VMware Workstation – I couldn’t. I got this error: /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmnet-only/vnetUserListener.c:240: error: ‘TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE’ … etc. I ended up having to edit the vmplayer source files directly (!!!) to get them to compile – instructions found here

So far FC12 seems exactly like FC11. But that’s fine – I only upgraded because I didn’t want to be on a dead-end version once FC13 is released.

I’ve known about ssh keys for a long time and frequently use them, most frequently so that a script can transfer a file between two servers without having to do some mumbo-jumbo where I try to pipe a password into it or some other wacky thing. I hadn’t fully embraced ssh keys, though, because I didn’t like the idea that if I lost my laptop, I’d be losing a free key into my servers. Then I discovered ssh-agent. This isn’t new, so I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t know about it, but I’ve been using it for a few months now and I can’t imagine going back.

Using ssh-agent, you can wrap your private ssh key in a password and the only time you’ll need to enter your password is when you add the key to the agent. Once that’s done ssh essentially behaves as if your key wasn’t password-protected – you don’t get prompted for it again.

If you enable agent forwarding, and put your public key on all the servers you connect to, life gets even better. If your machine is A, and you put your key on B, C, D, and E, using ssh agent forwarding you can go A -> B -> C -> D -> E without being prompted for a password. It’s sweet!

Lots of power outages lately. Not the greatest time to move my site. Good thing I don’t need 99.99%+ uptime. Or even 95%…

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

I tried restoring my .ova into vCenter and it failed. It said something like “Device ‘virtual disk’ uses a controller that is not supported. this is a general limitation of the virtual hardware version.” This kind of pissed me off, especially when I couldn’t really find anything in Google about what the error meant, but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix – I just clicked “upgrade virtual hardware” in VMWare Server to upgrade the hardware version from 4 to 7. I then created another .ova, uploaded it to the datacenter and successfully deployed it in vCenter in its own resource pool. Yay!

I think the real problem was that some of our VMs were created with the BusLogic driver rather than the LSI Logic driver (which is recommended for Linux guests).

Ovftool also turned out to be a pretty sweet way to backup VMs. Once in .ova format you can use ovftool to convert back to .vmx just by specifying the .ova file as the source and something .vmx as the target. Because it so nicely shrinks the .vmdk (my 20 gig VM became a 2.5 gig .ova) and is pretty quick to run (seemed like < 10 minutes per 20-gig VM) it seems like a decent choice for backing up VMs.

Well, I thought this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it turns out not to be a really big deal. I found this post which includes instructions and a link to download VMWare’s “ovftool”. There’s a win32 version and a 32-bit and 64-bit linux version:

-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 19326184 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.i386.sh*
-rwxr--r-- 1 evan evan 17212108 Sep 11 17:16 VMware-ovftool-installer-1.0.0-166674-lin.x86_64.sh*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 evan evan 43833393 Sep 11 17:33 jdk-1_5_0_13-linux-amd64.bin*

I installed JDK 1.5.0_r13 because that’s what I had laying around. The 64-bit installer for ovftool ran without a hitch. I haven’t yet tried importing the .ova to my vCenter cluster (the export was from our Vmware Server (free) environment) but the conversion itself seemed fine. The one problem I encountered was that it was complaining that the cdrom was connected. The VM in question had an ISO configured as its cdrom drive, but it wasn’t connected, yet the ovftool still complained about it. I shutdown the VM, deleted the device completely, and then the conversion went fine.

[root@thardus ~]# /opt/vmware/ovftool/ovftool /nfsroot/VM/Monitoring/Monitoring.vmx /nfsroot/OVF/test.ova
Opening VMX source: /nfsroot/VM/Monitoring/Monitoring.vmx
Opening OVA target: /nfsroot/OVF/test.ova
Target: /nfsroot/OVF/test.ova
Disk Transfer Completed
Completed successfully

The whole thing took about 10-15 minutes I guess for a 20 gig VM. Actually that’s another interesting thing: the source directory with the VMDKs was ~20 gigs:

[root@thardus ~]# du -sh /nfsroot/VM/Monitoring/
21G     /nfsroot/VM/Monitoring/

But the OVA that was created was only 2.5 gigs.

[root@thardus ~]# ls -lh /nfsroot/OVF/test.ova
-rw------- 1 root root 2.5G Sep 11 18:45 /nfsroot/OVF/test.ova

I assume this is due to compression and only including the parts of the VMDK that have actual data (basically thinly provisioning it). I haven’t restored yet, which would be the real test, but so far it looks like it’s a pretty easy tool that does what it’s supposed to.

Update 2009-11-25: With the current version of ovftool you can’t create .ova files with ovftool for VMDKs larger than 8 gb. See this post on the VMware forums for more info.

So I’ve been having problems with my computer since I built it. In particular the screen will freeze up from time to time with this checkerboard of black and normal. I can’t really describe it, and since the computer’s frozen when it happens, I can’t screenshot it. Anyway, I reinstalled XP a while ago and that didn’t do anything to solve it.

On Thursday my computer started really pissing me off because when I plugged in my camera, the Canon CameraWindow app that I use to transfer stuff off wasn’t autostarting. When I then tried starting it manually it still wouldn’t start. When I opened “My Computer” what greeted me was a flashlight, apparently searching for the innards of my system. It searched for about 60 seconds before showing me the correct contents of the computer, but when I closed My Computer and reopened it, it did the same thing. This persisted through a reboot. So I had a bad feeling that maybe the computer was about to do something unpleasant.

This probably doesn’t sound like enough of a reason to ditch the whole OS and install a beta as a primary OS, but I was already kind of sick of running a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware; my computer has 4 GB of memory and XP was only able to see 3.25. So I resized my 1 TB partition down to 500 GB and installed build 7100 of Windows 7 in the free space. I assume this will allow me to boot back to XP when I want to, but I haven’t tried it.

Anyway, the install went fine — my computer’s performance score is only 5.9 out of 7.9, I guess due to disk performance — though it did spend a lot of time doing absolutely nothing, which made me think it was hanging. I’m not crazy about this taskbar, and I miss the Quick Launch bar from XP. Also not a fan of the Program selector in the Start menu. I’ve never liked “personalized” menus; I like to know where something is always going to be rather than having the computer populate a list for convenience. There are some other minor annoyances but overall it seems pretty fast – Firefox started up very anyway, and that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve installed so far.

One problem I ran into was trying to connect to my old Linux box via Samba. It wasn’t accepting my password no matter what I did; I reset it on the server and it still wasn’t working. A quick Google search turned up a solution: Get Vista and Samba to work. This post is from 2006 and it’s now 2009 and it’s still a problem, so I guess Microsoft doesn’t consider it a problem. My Samba installation is way older than that, though, so maybe it’s more of a Samba issue than a Vista one.

The other thing, which wasn’t as much of a problem as something that just sucked, is I had to reauthorize my computer in iTunes. I copied over all my settings – this page explained what goes where – but I still had to reauthorize the computer. I guess I could have dug further, but I just assumed that going from Windows 5.1 to 6.1 and 32-bit to 64-bit, there’s no way to “trick” it. This is only my 2nd authorized computer though so it’s not a big deal… just annoying, since it’s not a second computer.

Anyway, back to my original problem: the camera now works as expected. That reminds me of another problem I had – I couldn’t run my Java program to reorganize the pics for some reason. It turned out that even though I had a 64-bit JVM installed, and Java is supposedly platform independent, I need to download 64-bit Eclipse. Then I just had to hunt down the old jars and put them back in the classpath of my project and that worked well.

So overall I’m pleased with the speed and responsiveness, and the Aero stuff is pretty, but I don’t get the taskbar changes.