Win 7 restore - impressive

[Zirax]

Now I have to say I am quite impressed with win 7 from using for a few months. The other day one of my old 300gb hdds died but I could carry on as it was in raid 1.

The worst job of all beckoned..... the dreaded reinstall :'(

So I thought I would see what tricks win 7 has up it's sleeve. I used the restore feature and created an image in about 30 secs of the c drive. Then whipped out the remaining 300gb hdd (manufacture date 2005 so it's getting on) and installed the new drives.

After 10 mins fiddling due to the case, I turn the machine back on, insert the restore cd and within 15mins from start to finish (inc hdd install time) I am back on the desktop with all programs configured correctly.

I've gotta say from a stock windows image program that is bloody impressive! :cool:

[MarcLister]

Sounds good Zirax. Is this the Backup and Restore prog you're talking about? Should be getting an SSD this week and I've not yet decided if I want to reinstall W7 or image my current install and restore it. :p

[LeperousDust]

It is very good :)

Backup and restore would be much better if they worked more intelligently with external removable drives...

[Stan_Lite]

I'll second this. I spent ages trying to make an image of my hard drive. I did it once as a trial run using Gparted in Ubuntu which worked fine that time. When I went to do it for real, I couldn't for the life of me get it to work. I decided to try the Windows 7 image tool. It worked absolutely fine and within a couple of hours, I'd swapped my entire install from one hard drive through an external drive to a new drive and everything was working exactly as it had before. Well done MS for supplying a free tool that works so well.

Sounds good Zirax. Is this the Backup and Restore prog you're talking about? Should be getting an SSD this week and I've not yet decided if I want to reinstall W7 or image my current install and restore it. :p

It is.
Control panel -> System and Security -> Backup and Restore -> Create a system image. you can create a system restore disk from there as well or you can use your Windows 7 installation disk to restore the image.

This is now my preferred backup method. If you schedule regular backups, you can have your system back up and running exactly as before within a couple of hours in the event of a catastrophic hard drive failure.

[Knipples]

Is anyone finding firefox a bit unstable on windows 7?

I have a laptop thats 4 months old now, and I get an error message (next time it does it I will write down exactly what it says - something about syntax error) at least once a day, where I click on ok and then and it crashes and the webpage disappears completely. I am then able to restart it straight away, but it is getting somewhat tedious.

I also have a different issue where the little blue circle goes round and round, and the page goes white, and the only thing I can do is click on the cross and then it says "firefox is searching for a solution to the problem" and then shuts down the webpage, and I have to restart it again.

I'm running FF version 3.6 but it hasn't started since the recent upgrade to 3.6 it was doing it on other versions. No bugs have been found when I scan the computer, so I don't think its a virus or anything doing it.

Windows 7 is definitely much better than vista though, which I always hated and was glad I was able to miss, having been on XP before.

Error message I get is this

Runtime error!
Program: C:\ program files (x86)\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe
Abnormal program termination

[Mark]

I'm posting from Firefox 3.5 on Windows 7 64-bit right now. No problems whatsoever.

Most likely causes:

Broken plug-in - I keep my plug in list minimal - ABP, dictionary, IE Tab
Corrupt profile.
Disabling plug-ins you're not sure about may help with the first. Trashing your profile will help with both. I've never cleaned up from a broken profile though so I'd best leave it to someone else to explain that one.

PS - Only reason I'm not using 3.6 - IE Tab doesn't work with it.

[Flibster]

I'll second this. I spent ages trying to make an image of my hard drive. I did it once as a trial run using Gparted in Ubuntu which worked fine that time. When I went to do it for real, I couldn't for the life of me get it to work. I decided to try the Windows 7 image tool. It worked absolutely fine and within a couple of hours, I'd swapped my entire install from one hard drive through an external drive to a new drive and everything was working exactly as it had before. Well done MS for supplying a free tool that works so well.


If it's that good, how long before they're forced to remove it by the EU then?
:angry:

[LeperousDust]

If it's that good, how long before they're forced to remove it by the EU then?
:angry:

I dunno i see what it's doing as more of an OS feature than a browser. And i'm all for MS selling a stripped out bare OS that costs a tenth of the price of their bundled versions if they want to do that :) Would most people buy a house fully furnished? And if so would it suit everyone :p

[Flibster]

I dunno i see what it's doing as more of an OS feature than a browser. And i'm all for MS selling a stripped out bare OS that costs a tenth of the price of their bundled versions if they want to do that :) Would most people buy a house fully furnished? And if so would it suit everyone :p

Fine - make it apply equally to all operating systems then. ;)
MacOS, Linux, yadda yadda yadda...

Just the bare OS and nothing else included as standard.

[LeperousDust]

Fine - make it apply equally to all operating systems then. ;)
MacOS, Linux, yadda yadda yadda...

Just the bare OS and nothing else included as standard.

I think thats is a different situation though, if you were given a free house with free stuff inside then i'm sure you'd look at it totally differently. And the funny thing about Linux is every distro is different. Some are fairly barebones in their way and fit onto a single floppy, others are gargantuan and will do almost anything out the box. MacOS needs looking at though really competition wise, if it were more popular it would be under exactly the same fire as MS. Is is different in the fact it ships on with its own hardware, which changes things in the grand scheme.

So summing up you can't compare anyway :)

[Mark]

There's justifiable good cause for Win7 having a built-in backup solution. Fact is that despite numerous companies coming up with backup software over the years, no-one backs up.

Besides, System Restore is a necessary evil to deal with Windows' built-in self-destruct button. :p

[Stan_Lite]

If it's that good, how long before they're forced to remove it by the EU then?
:angry:

I can just picture lawyers from Acronis, Symantec, et al sharpening their pencils as we speak.

There's justifiable good cause for Win7 having a built-in backup solution. Fact is that despite numerous companies coming up with backup software over the years, no-one backs up.

Besides, System Restore is a necessary evil to deal with Windows' built-in self-destruct button. :p

You could argue there is justifiable cause for MS to include IE in their OS. After all, an OS in today's world isn't much use without a web browser. Personally, I think forcing MS to include other browsers in their OS is wrong. I don't see what is anti-competitive about including your own browser in your own product. What's next? Will they be forced to include a selection of media players, backup programs, image editors etc.?

I don't see system restore as necessary for Windows self-destroying - I've only ever had one Windows install die on me. It's more useful for catastrophic hard drive failure. After all, as the saying goes "It's not a case of if your hard drive fails, it's when".

[Flibster]

Will they be forced to include a selection of media players, backup programs, image editors etc.?

MS were forced to produce a version of Windows without Media Player. Version N iirc and I've never seen a copy of it.

It still had Media Player on the disk, it just didn't install it and you had to do install it if you wanted it through add/remove programs.

[Daz]

I can just picture lawyers from Acronis, Symantec, et al sharpening their pencils as we speak.
I dont think they'll be bothered, their money is made in the server/enterprise storage markets, I cant imagine the home market being any great percentage.

Fine - make it apply equally to all operating systems then.
MacOS, Linux, yadda yadda yadda...
I dont think Linux is a fair comparison really - distro's are combinations of other people's software. I can download the kernel on it's own, or the gnome desktop, or any individual part of the gnome desktop, if I wanted to - source code and all :)

It's difficult really. I do feel for Microsoft, but they're in such a dominant position that it's easy to argue they can affect markets to the detriment of competition - but what's a market? I never really felt that web browsers were a market - with them all being free (as in beer at least) - and IE's market share was falling without regulatory intervention.

I think it's more important that government makes sure MS complies properly with open standards so there's a level playing field. IE6 still causes so many web dev headaches, though not so much outside of business these days at least. IE7 wasn't much better, IE8 is decent IE9 will be better still - and this was brought about by competition, not EU sanctions/regulations.

[Davey_Pitch]

Is it possible to create a system image on an external drive as a scheduled task, say once a month or something like that? I'm not worried about doing it on my laptop as I don't keep anything vital on it that would require backing up, but if I get Win 7 on my desktop PC (which has 2 500GB external drives always connected) it could be very handy :)

[LeperousDust]

Yep thats all really easy to set up, esp if you keep in connected. Windows isn't so good if you regulary have the drive disconnected. It just doesnt do anything about it. And then i suddenly have "1 issue" next time i restart, i'd much rather it politely ask me to plug the drive i usually use in or postpone backup... I need to set my server up again, wifi backups where much nicer...

[Admiral Huddy]

It does a decent job and pretty quickly too.

I still prefer instant access to my personal data backups rather than wrapped in an application extension. However, once a month I backup an entire image of the system to external HDD and create a rescue disk. I still use SyncBackSE for daily backups of personal data to a separate internal HDD.