Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 11:17 pm

Yeah, I'm going to do that with EQ2 tonight. I just hadn't realized that the WoW installation on this disk wasn't very recent...I should have copied the directory from my gaming system.

So today has been a bit more frustrating. First, it took a while to get SubVersion and TortoiseSVN installed and working correctly. Getting the SVN server running on Vista isn't as easy as it was in XP. I finally found some instructions for manually creating the Vista service entry, but then I couldn't access SVN from my laptop. I had forgotten to add svnserve.exe to the Vista Firewall, and the instructions for installing SVN on Vista didn't mention anything about that. But I finally got it all working.

Dreamweaver and my other web tools installed easily, as did my various MySQL and SQLite tools.

I'm a bit concerned about this Avast anti-virus checker. I started Delphi at one point and got a weird error about it not being able to access my license information. Avast was scanning it as it was running. The next time I ran Delphi, Avast didn't scan it and it worked. So I'm keeping my eye on this and might go back to AVG if it continues causing any troubles. It also has a slower startup than AVG did, so I'm not sure about those reports about AVG speed problems.

Then I started messing with VMware. I am getting more and more annoyed with this company. I had v5 installed and when I tried to create a Windows XP virtual machine using my WinXP Upgrade disk, it gets to the point where it asks you to put a CD from a qualifying OS into the drive. No matter what OS disk I use (Win95, 98, NT4) it fails and gives an error saying that a valid Windows disk is not found. When I try this on a real machine, it works fine. So it's a VMware problem of some kind.

First, I try going to the VMware forums (communities). They don't have any Search function! How can you have a forum without any Search? That makes it completely worthless. I try some Google searching and find some similar problem reports with no answers. I thought that maybe my version of VMware was too old, so I pay $99 to upgrade to the latest version. Same problem! Then I try to send in a support request and found that they don't have *any* free support options. You have to pay to get email support! That is BS and makes me want to stop using this product completely and get a refund for my upgrade.

I'm not sure I actually use VMware enough these days to make this worth the time, effort and money. I thought it would be nice to install a virtual machine for a clean XP install and an SP2 install for testing so that I don't have to use my dual booting to test CMUD. But if this is the kind of support I can expect, then it might not be worth it. Also, I have no idea how the XP Activation stuff is going to work within VMware.

Anyway, I'm giving up on VMware for now and moving on to the rest of the software installs. If things go a bit better then I might be finished with the main software installs later tonight.

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 11:42 pm

I'm trying one more idea. There is a free tool called the VMware Converter. It allows you to convert an existing machine installation into a VMware virtual machine. So I have booted my "Clean XP" partition and installed VMware Converter and am going to try and convert it to a virtual machine and see how big it is and if it works when loaded into VMware on Vista.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Why not just use Microsoft Virtual PC?
I use it at work and have 2000 and XP systems on my main work machine.
That way when I need a clean environment I just boot up one do what I need to do, then shut it down and delete the changes.

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:39 am

There are several reasons why VMware is much better than Microsoft Virtual PC, so I'm not going to get into that here...you can Google it.

Anyway, the VMware converter worked great. It was actually much faster than going through the entire XP install and patch process again! Took about 10 minutes total. I now have a XP SP2 virtual machine to test on. The only issue that I'm still thinking about is the stupid XP Activation stuff. It is warning me that this copy of XP needs to be activated within the next 3 days. But I just re-activated that version of XP on this new computer over the weekend, so I'm guess that it's going to fail and I'll need to talk to Microsoft/India *again* about why I need another activation.

VMware struggled a bit to load the old images that I had saved for Win98 and Windows 2000. These virtual machines were created using VMware 5 on my old XP system. So the hardware has significantly changed. It warned me about it, but I went ahead and booted the machines. "Windows" detected the hardware changes and eventually they both started working just fine.

Using the VMware Converter probably didn't make the smallest images, but I can deal with it. The resulting virtual machine sizes are:

Win98: 900 MB
Win2000: 1.8 GB
WinXP: 6 GB

Those were all with virtual machines that have a single saved snapshot and are suspended and not stopped (which adds some disk space to save the suspended memory image). But it kind of shows the kind of OS "bloat" that we are getting. I can't imagine what a Vista virtual machine would look like.

What was also pretty funny is that Windows 98 ran faster within the virtual machine then I ever remember it. In other words, the hardware improvements have come so far since Win98 that running Win98 in an emulator is actually faster than how it ran on it's original hardware back in the day. Kind of amusing.

Anyway, looks like I'm done with VMware now. Even though I'm still peeved about their lack of support and the original CD problem with XP, their actual software product *does* work very well. And it was nice to see VMware Converter and that it was free.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I use MS Virtual PC at work for testing etc... it has support for undo disks etc, so you can choose to commit changes, save 'em for later, or wipe 'em. I don't think it's quite as good as VMWare, but it's free and for all my testing purposes it's been fine.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

It uses XML config files, so it's easy to create multiple different machines - eg I have one which is one which is a clean XP install, another which is clean XP with SP2 + .NET, and another which is my "load app demo's etc here to test them before putting them on my real machine" machine.

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 2:23 am

I just called Microsoft last week to activate a copy of XP in a VMware image. I believe their policy is to allow a virtual machine copy to use the same license number if it's on the same physical machine as the 'real' licensed copy. So, as long as you don't say you want to run the VM on a separate machine, you should be fine.

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:10 am

Been playing with some benchmarks and clocking tonight during my "play" time. It's very disappointing! I'm running the free version of 3DMark06 and getting a result of 5483, which is horrible compared to other results from people with the same CPU, video card, and Vista. I also played with overclocking a bit. I was able to adjust the FSB from 200 to 210 and still have a reliable system (so far), but increasing it to 216 was flaky. At 220 the system wouldn't finish booting Vista. At 216 it would boot, but then crash when running benchmarks. And at 220, the CPU temp rose from 32C to 41C, and I'm not comfortable with that.

So I'll stick with a FSB of 210 for now. That's only a 5% boost in speed, which goes back to my previous remarks about overclocking. Maybe *some* people get significant boosts with extra cooling or stuff like that. But just basic FSB tweaking was hardly worth the trouble.

It definitely *feels* like the system is slower than it was yesterday. I tried taking out Avast and that didn't actually make much difference. Boot-time is still significantly slower. I remember noticing how fast it was yesterday and being really happy with it. Now it takes a lot longer to load the icons in the system tray. I've run Windows Defender to look at the list of startup programs and have removed or disabled the ones that I don't need. And I've gone through the system services and disabled some that I don't need. None of that has helped.

Make me wonder if one of those mysterious Windows Update patches for "improved performance and stability" actually caused the problem or not. But I have no idea how to really find out. But I might play with my system restore points to see what I can learn.

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:02 am

Playing with System Restore didn't do much for me, so I guess I'll live with the benchmark results for now. The actual games are running nice and fast, so it might just be a case where 3DMark is just comparing against some people who have outrageous configurations. For example, it showed some people with a NVidia 8600GT as having 512MB of video RAM instead of the 256 MB that it is supposed to have, so I'm not sure what's up with that. Also, most of the Vista results were for Vista 64, which probably makes a difference (twice the number of bits in the pipe between the CPU and memory?).

Anyway, WoW is running fine, as is EQ2. Not that I'll be playing much on this computer anyway. I just wanted to see how they would run on Vista. And it's funny...it's been so long since I played WoW that I forgot how to play my character! Sad.

Oh, and the trick with just copying the EQ2 directory worked great. I'm going to try that with LOTRO and Vanguard too. I'm really curious to see if Vanguard runs with all of it's graphics settings maxed.

Thats about it for tonight. I think I've got everything I need running on this computer now. Tomorrow I'll start programming again to see if Delphi is really working correctly.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

You might be able to run Vanguard at max settings. Maybe. I'm a lightweight with my Athlon 4200 and my 2 8500GTs (yeah, I know Vanguard doesn't use the second card even if you are in SLI mode). I can run pretty good with moderate to moderate-high settings, though some options are still killers. For some reason, HDR still gives it fits. This may just be the last AMD chip I ever get. They have finally started to put out their quad-core chips and from what I've read they aren't quite up to the Intel ones yet.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:12 pm

1GB of video RAM!? That's ridiculous - you'd need a screen the size of a tennis court to ever make use of it. I'm running one of the new 8600GTS 512MBs and video RAM is very far down the list.

I always say that I wish more games would take advantage of dual screens - maybe when that day comes, 1GB will be warranted.

Enchanter Joined: 11 Feb 2003 Posts: 511 Location: USA

Actually, for the new 1600i monitors 1GB of video ram would be awesome.

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:08 pm

We now return you to your originally ordered blog entry...

I'm back to Delphi programming! So, I only lost about ten days. Hopefully it will give me a fresh outlook on the new TreeView so that I can better find the new bugs. Don't know if I'll be able to get a release done this week or not, but certainly next week. Delphi is working very well, and this new speed increase is very welcome. All of Delphi is much snappier and it's very quick to compile and test CMUD now.

The downside is that I might not notice performance issues in CMUD as quickly as before, so be sure to point out anything that is really slow in the new versions. Most performance tuning is done towards the end of a beta cycle though.

So far the only loss with the new TreeView is that the tree is no longer "editable". For example, you cannot just rename the tree item, or change it's priority number when using Sort by Priority. The Tree is just a selection tool and not an "edit" tool. I think this will be fine for most people. Of course, this is a result of the fact that the underlying dataset has DisableControls called on it to keep it from updating the tree with every database change. And if a dataset has DisableControls, then the controls obviously cannot be used to edit the dataset.

Anyway, it's actually working very well. I just fixed a nasty bug that also exists in v2.18 when copying an item (either via Shift-Drag/Drop or via the Copy To menu). The original setting cache would get messed up. For example, if this was an alias and you copy/dragged it to a subfolder, then the new setting in the subfolder would be used instead of the original. This could explain some package corruption that people were getting.

The other good news is that this new design should allow me to properly handle renaming settings with duplicate names, similar to how zMUD worked. So I should be able to fix copy/paste so that it creates a copy of a setting and prompts you to rename the new setting.

Still a whole page full of new bugs in the new settings editor that I'm working on, but I feel like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Zugg, just wondered if you've ever used the 'Microsoft Application Verifier'
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=bd02c19c-1250-433c-8c1b-2619bd93b3a2&displaylang=en

I've not used this tool it for anything other than tricking programs into believing they're running in a different OS (when the installers claim to need to be running on XP SP2 and I'm using Vista or Server 2003 for example).
One of the options allows a 'low resource simulation' to help debugging? I tried running CMUD got an LP5 error saying not enough memory to unpack, so I probably didn't tick the right boxes etc, but might be worth a glance?

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:39 pm

I'll take a look at it. Although in that specific case, resources shouldn't be an issue on XP and Vista. The resource limits were only in 95/98/ME. And honestly, I'm still not sure how much I'd trust it...I'd probably still want to run the app on the real OS just to be sure.

But right now I only care about Vista and XP, which is a lot easier to deal with. CMUD is never going to work on 95/98/ME. Win2000 is a "maybe" possibility, but I'm not spending any time on it right now.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Wasn't thinking about making it compatible with older OSs, the description looked quite apt for a Windows application

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 7:11 am

The part about running with least-privileged user accounts sounds pretty useful, so I might look into it.

A bit on Vista performance again tonight. I was trying to copy a backup image from my Vista machine over to my gaming machine (which has a big hard disk for archives). Both machines have a Gigabit network interface and are connected via Gigabit hubs. However, I was only getting 200Mbit instead of 1000Mbit (20% utilization).

Now, the XP machine has the network adapter set to force 1000Mbs full duplex. But in the Vista driver, the advanced options for connection speed don't show any 1000 option. Just 10Mps and 100Mps. That's stupid. But how could I get 200Mbs if it was connecting at 100Mps?

Well, I learned that the latest NForce network driver *will* connect at 1000Mbs in the AutoNegotiate mode. NVidia just neglected to add the "force 1000Mps" option to the config list. Apparently it's been this way for many months and they still haven't fixed it. Honestly, while I prefer NVidia video cards over ATI, I'm still not very happy with NVidia drivers sometimes. (On the video front, they are releasing new Vista drivers every week it seems).

Vista has a very nice performance monitor in it. In the Start/Search box, enter "monitor". Specifically, it has a good network monitor. That is what I'm using to look at the network performance.

I had already turned off the "Differential Compression" feature in Vista that slows down network transfers. But I went ahead and did this:

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

One of the big problems with Vista was the poor network performance when copying files.
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx

It should be improved with SP1 which you'll be able to get in a few weeks or you can torrent the proper release today.

I'd be surprised if you ever got the full gigabit speed, I normally think of 50% as being good in the real world.

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:08 pm

I'm still going to wait for the official SP1 release. Not that I don't trust Microsoft...but I don't. Until it's official, I wouldn't be surprised if they are still tweaking it and I don't want to have problem with a pre-release version.

On the copy speed, most of those improvements are going to affect Windows Explorer file copies. I have already dumped Windows Explorer and am using the Directory Opus program, which already has faster file copy and avoids most of the "calculating time" problems. So I'm not sure SP1 is going to be a real improvement for me necessarily.

Also, I've seen some benchmarks that suggest SP1 has only improved "perceived" copy time by fixing the progress bar, and hasn't actually improved the actual total copy time.

I understand that I'm not going to see the full Gigabit bandwidth utilized. What I don't understand is that sometimes when the copy first starts, I can get into the 40% usage area, but then it drops to a steady 20% usage for the long term. Maybe there is some other bottleneck here. Like I said, I'd love to test it with another XP computer, but I don't have another one with a Gigabit interface. But there is clearly a lot of bandwidth available that isn't being used. And according to the performance monitors that I have running, neither computer is anywhere near maxed out on CPU or disk bandwidth. So there is still something fishy going on here.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

I've actually read that article on the network copy performance (from my TechNet e-mail, not this thread), and it's more than just fixing the progress indicator. They've improved memory allocation and transfer chunk sizes. Still, it's pretty much just improving network copy and not local copy, so it's not a major revolution.

Wanderer Joined: 09 Jun 2006 Posts: 62 Location: Florida

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I dunno how the virus scanner you have performs with vista, but like I said ages ago, mcafee that came bundled with my laptop was insanely slow under vista which makes me wonder if that comes into play with the lower bandwidth utilization. I only have 100mbit in my laptop (bleh) but my transfer speeds have been around the 7-8 megabyte/second which seems about right.

I'm also working my may through the tweaks you have suggested - under XP SP2 I was able to play 2 accounts on everquest at the same time with Alt+Tab and very little slow down, under Vista I've been suffering some serious lag issues when trying to 2box.

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 12:25 am

I've actually tried it with Avast uninstalled and it didn't make any difference. I have definitely read the reports about McAfee killing network performance though...yet another reason why I'd never use McAfee again. One of the things I actually like about Avast that is keeping me using it even though it's about the same speed as AVG is that when Avast is scanning something or doing anything in the background (like scanning an EXE when you run something), it's icon animates in the task bar. So it's really easy to tell if the anti-virus is running and causing slowdowns.

I guess we'll wait and see on SP1. I can cross my fingers, but I'm not hoping for much.

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:52 am

An update on my kerpowed computer, in case you were interested - finally installed the new motherboard. Pressed the button, nothing happened. Managed not to panic and moved the power switch connector - I'd missed and had it one space too far to the left. Booted and the computer and it starts making a high-pitched beeping noise that sounds different to the normal motherboard beeping. I panic and shut it down, then proceed to read a book and eat some cake to calm down. I have a flash of inspiration about an hour later - my graphics card has a speaker that beeps if you forget to plug in a PCI power cable!

I'm some kind of idiot today, I swear. I'm back now, anyway, and ready to rock :D

The reason I bring this up is because I'm trying avast on this computer. I've heard plenty of good reviews and wanted to try it out. I must say, I have no complaints so far. AVG always annoyed me, not just because it was slow, but because it only downloaded updates intermittently - it'd go for ages without downloading an update automatically (enough that the SP2 antivirus monitor thing would complain) and I'd have to download them manually for a while, which was all kinds of annoying. Then it'd start downloading them again all of a sudden.