My computer has been crashing in games lately, and I narrowed the problem down to the video card or software.

So, before burning completely through my pocket buying a new video card, I decided to try and go back to XP to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, once back to Windows XP my gaming stability did not change one bit. However, it made me think, what really are compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista?

Security Features such as DEP and ASLR would be more relevant if most developers coded with them in mind. Vista is certainly more pretty, with its glassy, see-through features. Also, there is the fact that all the security patches and upgrades you would have to download and apply after installing XP SP2 are already included or not needed in Vista

But after using XP again for a few weeks, the only thing I missed from Vista was the start menu and its bottom search bar. This may be something for the more keyboard oriented users out there. But I’m guessing most geeks can type quickly and are very at home at the keyboard. I prefer the ease and efficiency of pressing the start button on the keyboard, typing ‘word’ and pressing enter, to using the mouse to navigate the start menu.

XP does not have this excellent feature, but luckily there are several programs you can turn to, if you have not yet “upgraded” to Vista.

Launchy is a free, open source solution which I found on this Lifehacker article, Best 5 Application Launchers. It runs on Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome)!

All you do is pick a keyboard combination to bring up Launchy. I chose Ctrl + Space. Then you begin typing the name of the program you wish to launch, and the results come up (which are indexed based on your start menu contents and desktop) in a Firefox like magic box, then you press enter.

The time I have saved by launching my applications via the keyboard is probably equal to the time it’s taken me to write this article, so just be grateful I’ve let you know about this excellent program.

Let me know if there are any features of Vista that would stop you from going back to XP, or simple productivity savers like this that you “just couldn’t live without”.

These instructions show how you can copy your entire Vista installation with the contents of its partition to another hard drive and sucessfully boot from it. This method uses only the tools found on the Vista Install DVD.

I tried this about a month ago and I tried so many things to fix it, I lost track of what processes actually caused it to work. So, after a few test runs thanks to VMWare, I have been able to pin down the steps required. Most procedures and commands are taken from the blog post and comments at http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/12/07/100596.aspx. The reason I am re-writing someone else’s work is because their example was for Windows XP. I tried it for Vista Ultimate 32bit and it would not work. I had originally thought bootrec /fixboot solved the problem, but it appears I was wrong : )

1. It’s a good idea to run a program like CCleaner to get rid of any garbage files you don’t want to waste time duplicating first.
2. Stick the Vista DVD in your optical drive, shut down the computer, connect up your new hard drive and power her up.
3. You should be booting the Vista installation process. Select your language, then click Next, then Install. When the license terms come up, press SHIFT+F10 to bring up the command prompt.
4. Partition and format your new hard drive. Type DISKPART to bring up the relevant Microsoft tool. Use a variation of these commands. Make sure you identify which hard drive is which with LIST DISK
   • LIST DISK
   • SELECT DISK 1
   • LIST PARTITION
   • CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
   • LIST PARTITION
   • SELECT PARTITION 1
   • ACTIVE
   • FORMAT QUICK
   • LIST VOLUME
5. Determine which partition is your old and which is your new one on the new hard drive with this tool. In my case it was C: and I: respectively.
6. Type exit to terminate DISKPART and type
   ROBOCOPY C:\ I:\ /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0 /XJ
   replacing the first drive letter as the source and the second, the destination partition. This command could run for a couple of hours, it depends on the volume of data.
7. When that’s finished, exit the command prompt and turn off the computer. Disconnect the old hard drive. Start the PC up and boot from the Vista DVD again.
8. This time, select your language etc and on the next screen click ‘Repair your computer’
9. A dialog box will pop up saying ‘Scanning for Windows installations’, then it will report ‘Windows found problems with your computer’s startup options. Do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?’. Click ‘Repair and restart’
10. Cross your fingers

When I installed Vista to try it out, I only created a 20GB partition for it. Now completely out of free space for that system drive, I wanted to copy the installation over to a 30GB hard drive (Wow, I know). A search on Google turned up a very promising result; Howto: Duplicate any Windows installation to a new hard disk using only a Vista DVD (!)

This was excellent because all the tools you need to copy a Vista (or XP I’m guessing) installation to another hard drive is included in the Vista install DVD. First, I booted up the Vista DVD and selected English for the language, then clicked Install (one reason this took so long is because it takes at least 5 minutes to go between these screens). Then Shift+F10 brought up a command prompt. Another way to do this is to click repair instead of install and go to the advanced tools.

A quick use of Diskpart allowed me to identify the correct hard drive. I followed the instructions and created a new active partition on the 30GB. I then ran the command

ROBOCOPY C:\ I:\ /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0 /XJ

which proceeded to copy the whole contents of C drive, including hidden and system files to my bigger hard drive, I. I didn’t pay much attention to what the switches meant, but XJ helps by not copying certain Unix like shortcut/links present in user data.

When the copying finished, I restarted and made sure to boot from the 30GB. At first, a black screen the with word GRUB was all that happened. The hard drive had previously been used for Fedora 8, and the damn thing was still on there. So I booted back into the Vista DVD command prompt and ran the command ‘bootrec /fixmbr’ which had the Vista bootloader working again.

I restarted again. It had worked! But wait – not really. My 30GB had now been assigned drive H, while my original C drive had kept it’s original letter assignment. Hmm. My computer showed that C drive was still the system drive, so I had still booted into the old hard drive, and I was still out of free space.

Not having a very good knowledge of Windows’ startup processes then led me to miss the actual problem, and I proceeded to try and fix the problem with the registry. Disk management was not letting me change the drive letter assignment of the system drive, so I swapped around C and H drive in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices.

Rebooting the system, I how had my bigger hard drive assigned drive C, but it was still not the drive that Vista was running on, as shown by a Windows icon now on drive H. I then tried changing system variables like SystemDrive, SystemRoot, etc. I had successfully changed these values back to C drive, but still Vista would boot from the old hard drive.

Then it occurred to me that it was a boot problem (finally). First I tried disconnecting my original drive. But then it wouldn’t boot at all! There was an error about Winload.exe being missing. I figured this was from all my registry fiddling. OK, so I plugged it back in and booted up, and found a free tool for editing the Vista boot loader (the name of the tool escapes me, but one I didn’t use is VistaBootPRO) The boot entry was set to drive H, so I changed it to C. Simple enough. But when doing this and disconnecting the old hard drive, I got the same boot failure due to missing system files.

I knew of a program to fix missing system files, SFC (system file checker). Running ’sfc /scannow’ in the Vista DVD command prompt yielded some strange error which lead me to believe you could only run the tool in an actual installation of Windows.

After some more googling, my hopes to get this working had been extended by a couple more ideas. I started the process again. I loaded the Vista DVD command prompt without my old SATA drive connected, so that the 30GB would appear as C drive to diskpart. Then I plugged the SATA drive in (hotplugging them works, but keep the power connected the whole time) and ran the ROBOCOPY tool again. This process took about an hour. Then I restarted the computer without the old hard drive plugged in as described by the link provided on that blog.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work either. I was still missing system files apparently. But my last idea was still untested. I went back into the Vista DVD command prompt, and typed the command ‘bootrec /fixboot’ and restarted again without the old hard drive.

Eureka! These many hours and I had accomplished an extra 10GB of system drive storage. But I think the learning experience was worth it.