Protecting your Vista installation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Colin Barnhorst
  • Start date Start date
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Colin Barnhorst

This one is for folks who like to reformat and reinstall Windows
periodically.

Windows users have pet practices, one common one of which is periodically
flattening the system and starting over when Windows becomes sluggish or
problems creep in causing blue screens and other symtoms of a breaking
system. This has been common practice for some since Win98 and some veteran
users are tenacious about this. Is there an alternative? The discussion
about Upgrade Editions makes finding an alternative compelling.

The root cause of a breaking system is usually the accumulation of poorly
written apps, aplets, activeX controls, and the aftereffects of malware
(even though removed). Good practices like defragging don't help in these
cases.

There is a way to avoid a lot of this from touching your new Vista system.
Use another computer. Yep, that's what I said.

To do this you need a retail copy of Windows to spare. How about that old
retail Win98, ME, 2K, or XP cd?

Anyone running Vista on a 1GB machine can do this. Install VPC 2007 and
create a Windows virtual machine. Set up the vm with a standard set of apps
and then make a copy. Store the copy as a base system. Use the vm to surf
the web and do downloads as well as run legacy apps that don't like Vista or
are just plain poorly written. When the vm gets crappy throw it away, copy
the base system you made, and start over with your fresh Windows computer.
This is the virtual equivalent of flattening the system and reinstalling,
but oh so much easier.

If you have a retail Win98 or ME cd, use it. If you have a retail 2K or XP
cd and were considering using it to take advantage of Vista upgrade pricing,
consider keeping the legacy cd for a vm and buying a full edition of Vista.
You can still do an upgrade-in-place with a full edition of Vista if you
want to without tieing the legacy Windows license to Vista.

There are other advantages. An XP vm is a good alternative to dual booting
during the transition from XP to Vista. We all know some software vendors
are going to be a while catching up with Vista. Besides the inconvenience,
dual booting with XP and Vista has potential pain points for Vista as has
been discussed in the ng before. This is a case where dual booting with 2k
is safer.

It takes 256MB to run an XP vm the way I describe and 128MB for 2K.

Colin Barnhorst - MVP Virtual Machine
 
Terrific idea!
Thanks
Where/how does one obtain Virtual PC 2007, and how much does it cost?
What would be the approximate size of the standard setup backup?


| This one is for folks who like to reformat and reinstall Windows
| periodically.
|
| Windows users have pet practices, one common one of which is periodically
| flattening the system and starting over when Windows becomes sluggish or
| problems creep in causing blue screens and other symtoms of a breaking
| system. This has been common practice for some since Win98 and some veteran
| users are tenacious about this. Is there an alternative? The discussion
| about Upgrade Editions makes finding an alternative compelling.
|
| The root cause of a breaking system is usually the accumulation of poorly
| written apps, aplets, activeX controls, and the aftereffects of malware
| (even though removed). Good practices like defragging don't help in these
| cases.
|
| There is a way to avoid a lot of this from touching your new Vista system.
| Use another computer. Yep, that's what I said.
|
| To do this you need a retail copy of Windows to spare. How about that old
| retail Win98, ME, 2K, or XP cd?
|
| Anyone running Vista on a 1GB machine can do this. Install VPC 2007 and
| create a Windows virtual machine. Set up the vm with a standard set of apps
| and then make a copy. Store the copy as a base system. Use the vm to surf
| the web and do downloads as well as run legacy apps that don't like Vista or
| are just plain poorly written. When the vm gets crappy throw it away, copy
| the base system you made, and start over with your fresh Windows computer.
| This is the virtual equivalent of flattening the system and reinstalling,
| but oh so much easier.
|
| If you have a retail Win98 or ME cd, use it. If you have a retail 2K or XP
| cd and were considering using it to take advantage of Vista upgrade pricing,
| consider keeping the legacy cd for a vm and buying a full edition of Vista.
| You can still do an upgrade-in-place with a full edition of Vista if you
| want to without tieing the legacy Windows license to Vista.
|
| There are other advantages. An XP vm is a good alternative to dual booting
| during the transition from XP to Vista. We all know some software vendors
| are going to be a while catching up with Vista. Besides the inconvenience,
| dual booting with XP and Vista has potential pain points for Vista as has
| been discussed in the ng before. This is a case where dual booting with 2k
| is safer.
|
| It takes 256MB to run an XP vm the way I describe and 128MB for 2K.
|
| Colin Barnhorst - MVP Virtual Machine
|
 
You call that easy Colin? How many hours would I have to waste setting
things up the way you described, beside having to have an extra copy of
windows kicking around?
Most people don't have copies of software worth several hundred dollars just
kicking around. At lest I don't and I certainly have no intentions of buying
one just to protect my Vista installation. Microsoft should have thought of
that.
You'd think after years of experience they could have come up with something
a little more user friendly.
I don't periodically reinstall windows, I've got better things to do with my
time, but on several occasions I've HAD to do a reinstall and if Microsoft
has made it harder with Vista that will be really annoying.
Couldn't they come up with something to make life a little easier when one
needs to fix problems in the OS, like the windows repair in XP (not that it's
great).
Can't you just run the Vista upgrade CD over your vista installation? That's
what I did with RC1 when I ran into problems trying to force a driver to
work. I just ran the installation again as an upgrade over top of the
previous Vista installation and everything went back to normal. Just asking
because this other "oh so much easier" method is just out of the question.
Somebody give a better idea for repairing issues with the OS, that don't
include "system restore points" which may be infected with the same Malware
or whatever.
 
VPC 2007 is free. It is in beta but the beta works fine. You should use
VPC 2007 beta on Vista, not VPC 2004. The beta is available on Microsoft
Connect at https://connect.microsoft.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0. Look
under Available Connection. It is a public beta. VPC 2007 final will be
free also. The newgroup for VPC is microsoft.public.virtualpc. An XP
virtual machine takes 2 to 5 GB of storage on your filesystem depending on
what you install and twice that for the running copy and a backup.
 
There are disadvantages of course, like no USB support and no ability to use
specialized add in cards like TV tuners for starters.
 
If your situation doesn't fit, don't worry about it. I don't know who the
"they" are who should be doing these things for you. And I don't know who
the "most people" are.

It takes an hour or so to create an XP vm and a few minutes to copy it.
It's not like your Vista computer is all tied up and you can't check you
email, etc. while this is going on. It is essentially a one-time operation.

And yes, it is easy.
 
So keep the old computer or use the TV tuner in the Vista box. You won't
risk getting many viruses watching tv anyway.

A virtual machine is not designed to incorporate hardware that only your
real PC can support.
 
If your computer has been infected with virus's, worms, rootkits, trojans
etc. just reinstalling from the DVD is NOT, repeat, NOT going to solve your
problems. You have to flatten your system and start from scratch to
eliminate the tenacious remnants of these infections.

I have Windows XP running in a virtual machine on Vista. I do most of my web
surfing from within XP. I download files to XP. Then, after I have run all
my scans and know that the files are clean, I open a shared folder to Vista,
copy them over to Vista and then close the share. I then delete the download
from XP.

As Colin has stated, it takes only about 5 minutes to copy over a saved
"base" file of Windows XP to use as a new virtual machine - if the original
has become infected or is unstable.

With Vista you had best have 2 gig of RAM in your computer to keep
everything running smooth when using virtual machines.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
If you have both 2K and XP disks, then you could save all your important
information off the computer, use the 2K install disk to delete the
partitions and then recreate them and install 2K, then after the fresh
install of 2K perform the Vista upgrade and save the XP disk to install
in VPC 2007 or VMware Workstation.

The one benefit in doing it that way is that if you kill Vista you still
have a perfectly good 2K to begin the process over.
 
Or . . . you could just install Vista and activate it, install your
programs, make an image of that and restore the image on a regular basis.
I've been doing it with XP for years and Vista for months. I also think it
is just as easy for the novice user as setting up a virtual PC, plus you
won't take the huge virtualization performance hit and don't need an extra
OS. My personal choose is Norton Ghost v8.0, but many seem to prefer Acronis
True Image.

-Mike

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