If anyone thinks Windows 7 got the disk activity under control, here is one example showing otherwise. Disks are still the bottlenecks in consumer computers and there is no way you get a better performance out of the computer when there is a lot of disk churning going on.
Yesterday I got rid of the final Windows Vista installation I had. That is a monster machine with so many applications installed and configured I did not want to start on it unless I had enough time to deactivate/de-authorize applications, take backup of user settings etc.
Here are some images of my experience during the Windows 7 64 bit installation.
Those were due to BIOS settings that were not compatible and RAID1 being getting ready or something like that. Complete setup, user configuration restore and such completed in about 2 hours.
This time around for virus scan I chose Microsoft Security Essentials. One thing that link didn’t say at the time was that it is only for 32 bit. I downloaded and ran the setup and it failed saying it is 32 bit only. The error message had a link to get the 64 bit.
I do have Office 2007 professional but I decided to install Office 2010 beta.
I just completed the installation of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate beta on the new Windows 7 64 bit installation. I setup the backup to a SAMBA network drive. It failed a few times. I reduced the backup size (removed the HD video files from camcorder, I use Microsoft SyncToy for that.) and it is running right now. Windows backup to network location is still lagging.
I am about to get rid of the last Windows Vista installation I have at home. This PC has a dual boot, one of which is Windows 7 RC. I will be removing both of them and install Windows 7 Ultimate on it. To migrate some settings and user data I logged in and saw this message. Well, I probably don’t need a solution for Vista. The Windows 7 RC had been pretty good on this hardware even after  being installed on an inferior hard drive (PATA).
We have installed Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 on a bunch of servers at work this week. Suddenly most of servers with NLB settings started experiencing network errors. Connecting to individual nodes did work without any problem. But accessing those servers using their NLB address failed intermittently with the error “An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host”. There were other symptoms too. But most visible were from .NET applications connecting to web services on other servers.
Another department that installed the SP2 and experienced the same issue and they resolved it by calling Microsoft. The issue was an incompatibility of NLB with RSS (receive side scaling). Â SP2 seems to have automatically enabled this feature on compatible network cards. We did not see the RSS setting on all network cards after SP2 installation. The reason seems to be that the network driver not being NDIS 5.2 or higher.
The Microsoft support page is http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948496
We just manually disabled the RSS feature, updated the registry and rebooted. Our NLB issues were resolved. Most applications on servers with NLB did not experience the problem immediately. Only one set of servers that cater to very high traffic started throwing this error almost immediately and set off the troubleshooting.
Here is a default desktop screen capture.