Replies

If it doesn’t show up after you try the tips from Chuck and Byron…toss the Win 7 install DVD in the drive and boot to it. Proceed to the partition function and create a partition on the missing drive then quit. Actually, I would disconnect the original drive first….not possible to partition the wrong drive that way.

IIRC exact power data isn’t exposed to the OS, and the USB controller handles over-current shutdowns autonomously. Although you don’t want to do it, I think the best way is to get a USB extender cable and a cheap DMM that does DC mA, and make one. $10 tops if you shop well at eBay. Clamp-on meters are great, but they’re not cheap.

I’ve done the thing with an AC power meter and it works if you’re careful, but it’s not very accurate. I did it on a test system that wasn’t online and didn’t get interrupted often.

-John O

I need to capture the Win 7 installation screens.

Just to follow up, it eventually installed, took six hours. According to Computer > Properties the VM is running at 17 MHz. That explains the slows.

The host PC is running at 2.8 GHz, and CPU usage is low. Hmm. Good thing I only need this for capturing the installation steps.

You have a couple good options, but there’s a bunch of ways to do this. One alternative is to buy a couple mini-PATA adapters ($5 on ebay/amazon) and connect the old and new drives on a desktop at the same time. Clone one to the other. You can resize the system partition while you’re there, or simply make a second partition for data.

What I did with my Dell Latitude D600 was picked up a HDD adapter for the flex bay on ebay for $20. Now I can pull the optical drive and use two HDDs on my laptop. Don’t know if yours has this option.

Good Luck and have fun!

-John O

Well, that could be, but I don’t know how to troubleshoot it. I am using the SP-1 version. The CPU is hardly working, and the VM is using about 17MB of RAM. The DVD drive is blinking furiously.

Well, it’s at 89% now, just a short way to go.

I hope.

veegertx…I’ve used drive images on different motherboards and the results vary by OS.

In Win 95/98 it was a mess but the New Hardware Wizard would eventually find most everything and install proper drivers.

In Win 2k it wouldn’t work at all, IIRC. Same with NT4.

Win XP was much like 98. If the OS could launch–then it would run wizards for quite a while and reboot a lot. I wouldn’t use such a machine for serious work, but for basic operation and training it worked well enough.

Have never tried Vista or 7.

-John O

The OS will handle a lot of monitors, IIRC it was nine in Win 98SE. I’ve done several monitors several times, and the trick is your motherboard and available slots.

Right now I’m running a (Win7) desktop with a dual-head card plus the integrated adapter on the motherboard, total of three displays. The main two displays are the good stuff, the integrated adapter/display normally shows Win Explorer or my browser…low-end stuff. Point being, they don’t all have to be the same.

Does your Dell have an unused port on the motherboard? Might need to switch it on in BIOS, but that could be a quick route to three.

So if there is no third port, the question is, do you have free slots, and what kind? If you want high-end video on all three monitors your options may be limited by available slots. Can you add another PCIe x4 card in there? (Do they make PCIe x1 video adapters??)

If you plan to use the third screen for the browser or Win Explorer or Photoshop palettes, then any recent PCI video adapter should do the trick. Terry is right, not all PCI adapters can tolerate others, but anything built in the last five+ years should work.

Chet, what did I misunderstand?

-JohnO

I feel there are plenty of situations where upgrading is a reasonable choice. And as Sunrisecc reports, it certainly can work. As I understand it, you can’t really upgrade from anything but Vista, right? Upgrading from XP is really a clean install with settings copied across, and then apps migrated. I think that’s correct, please tell me if not. Seems that XP-to-7 is going to be the big upgrade. In my limited experience any maching that will run XP well, will run 7 just as well.

But I digress…in the end my opinion is that for the regular home user an upgrade is fine. I’ve spent far too much time in areas like the Adobe user forums, and odd problems can sometimes be traced back to OS upgrades. But, that crowd is using specialty fonts, and complicated software suites generally. So who knows.

What I want is a Win 7 Upgrade Advisor that doesn’t require a live Internet connection.

Thanks guys. This really reeks of a bug, the more I play with it it just feels broken…I can’t see how this behavior is supposed to be intentional.

Anyway, thanks again.