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!

[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.

[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.

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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

[LeperousDust]

Originally Posted by Flibster

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

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

[Flibster]

Originally Posted by LeperousDust

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

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]

Originally Posted by Flibster

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