I had a pretty low power machine with an i3, integrated video, etc. It’s life long dream was of course to be our new file server so that I could start shutting off my sauna-in-a-case rig that was serving files 24/7 while out-performing our home furnace in heat output.

The i3 got it’s wish. It’s serving files, the other one’s off, and my room’s 10 degrees colder.

-

Enough blathering though.

-

Here’s what I like about FreeNAS:

1. ZFS – If you don’t know what the ZFS file system is, it’s pretty bloody amazing – look it up. Look up RAIDZ in particular (the RAID5 of ZFS). Yes, FreeNAS supports the other junk (FAT/32, NTFS, HFS+, EXT#, UFS, etc), but ZFS is just… well… so good. It’s not *all* roses, but I’ll explain that later.
2. Installs to a USB memory stick – This is pretty key. One less hard drive to power, less heat, more room in the case. It’s got a small memory footprint which it also pops into RAM.
3. Headless administration – once installed, it can be administered through your browser (just like a router). No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor required.
4. E-mail alerts – This is a biggie. If you decide to run it headless and a hard drive fails… how will you know? I suppose if you’re running a single drive you’ll figure it out when you can’t access it, but when you’re running a headless RAID5/6/etc, a dead drive in your array might be a good thing to know about. You can up FreeNAS to email you alerts (as long as you’ve got an internet connection of course).
5. Graphical interface (ties in to #3). It does fall short here sometimes, but I’ll rag on it a little further down.
6. A pile of protocols/services. You’ve got the regular networking options (CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS), the techie stuff (FTP, SSH, RSync, etc), the fun stuff (iTunes server, BitTorrent), and a few others.

There’s more when you get into the details, but in terms of comparing the major overall features, the above is what really helped it stand out for me (except for #6, many others have a whole slew of services too).

As I said earlier though, it’s not all roses.

-

FreeNAS ZFS

ZFS, for all it’s sheer awesomeness isn’t perfect. For starters (and this is a FreeNAS thing), only the more recent versions of ZFS have data deduplication. What’s data de-duplication? Well, Windows Home Server has a feature where if you have 2 copies of the exact same file, it’ll only physically store one of them to save space. ZFS goes beyond that, and in addition to that, if you have *parts* of a file that are the same, it’ll only physically store one copy of those parts. All automatically in the background (assuming it’s turned on of course). FreeNAS from what I gather will eventually get this, but it could be a while yet, while other NAS’s like Nexenta and EON already have it.

ZFS also has it’s own issues (unrelated to FreeNAS).

For instance, you can enable various compression levels through gzip, or use lzjb. Depending on your processor power, amount of RAM, and hard drive speeds, this can actually speed up file transfers in addition to saving you space. Sounds good, right? Well… not completely. Enabling compression caused FreeNAS to restart on certain files in my case. If you don’t have enough RAM, you can have problems with ZFS. If you haven’t configured something you needed to, you can have problems.

What this really boils down to is that as powerful and awesome as ZFS is, it’s not always an out-of-the-box-stable-and-it-works sort of thing. You’re supposed to configure different settings for ZFS, first to make it stable with your configuration, and then to tweak it. A 32-bit install may need different settings than a 64-bit install. Compare this to the other file systems that are generally rock-solid out of the box even without a lick of configuration.

For those who’ve run servers, it’s similar to tweaking MySQL. You have to learn, do a little trial and error, and in the end you can have a pretty amazing set-up, utilizing all the power you can harness. It’s not beginner friendly though. It would help if FreeNAS had some built-in GUI goodness to help with this, but it doesn’t.

-

Installation

As long as you’re comfortable setting up your network configuration (really not much more than your IP address and subnet mask), you’re fine there. The only real issue I had here was that you need to burn a CD first, then use it to install on the memory stick. Since the CD-ROM will presumably never see use again, you’ll end up wanting to take it out again until the next upgrade, when you’ll have to burn a new disk.

There is a way to just download the image, but you can’t install it through the Mac’s Disk Utility (I believe they linked some software to do it with).

It’s not the end of the world, and might seem like a nitpick, but it’s really just an annoyance. I thought we started using USB sticks so we didn’t have to touch CD’s anymore!

-

Learning Curve and Lack of GUI stuff

Earlier I compared the headless aspect (and GUI) to setting up a router, but someone who’s *just* figured out how to set up their router is in for a bit of a learning curve. To be completely fair, most of the other stuff that acts as a NAS requires you to do just about everything through the command line (ZFS being a big one). FreeNAS does let you do 90% of the stuff through the GUI, but there are a few things there that will completely lose some people. ZFS configuration being one. Another being setting permissions for things that need it (like AFS). The GUI does so well that it’s easy to see the places where it does fall short right now. Someone who’s never had to look at a command prompt / terminal /etc is going to have a really easy time with most things, and then a painfully brutal time with others.

-

Conclusion

All-in-all, FreeNAS is arguably one of the best solutions out there right now. It does have it’s flaws, but as time goes on it’s almost certain to improve dramatically.

I could get guests to read.

I could get users to read.

I couldn’t get anyone to write.

-

For whatever reason, it took a few searches before I came across the mac section of the FreeNAS documentation here. In any case, I’m going to guess that not everyone who uses FreeNAS is an SSH guru (although if you are you can just read the above link and skip the rest). Here’s the somewhat-easy-but-I’m-still-not-happy-about-it-way of doing it…

-

1) Hopefully you got to the point where you made users and put them in the same group.
a) If not, find Access/Users_And_Groups in the menu;
b) create a group (name it something easy)
c) create users (at least one for you!) and add them to your new group
It should look something like this afterwards:

In the above example, "family" is the group. Since my name is Matt, "Matt" is the user we'll be focusing on for the rest. The actual UID numbers used for the user and groups don't really matter - just use the defaults.

d) Make sure you’ve also set up an AFP share (Services/AFP/Shares). The next part here might not matter, but may as well do it anyway just in case – stick your username in the Read/Write access part (may be case sensitive, so be sure to capitalize if necessary).

2) Assuming you got everything in #1 done, it’s time to get you some read/write access. Here’s how we do it:
a) First you need the location of the folder. Easiest way to get this is to navigate to Services/AFP/Shares (just like in the step above), and find the Path. Look below to see what mine looked like:

The part we're interested is highlighted. Select it and copy it to the clipboard (Apple-C on your keyboard or right-click and choose "Copy").

In my case it was /mnt/SeagateZFS/MainStorage/ – select whatever yours is and copy it to the keyboard.

3) Next (and finally), we’re going to issue a couple commands, similar to what’s on the page linked at the very beginning. Head to the Advanced/Command menu.
a) Type in:

chown  macuser:macgroup  /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder

Replace macuser and macgroup with your name and group from step#1. Use the stuff from step#2 as /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder (you can either Apple-V or right-click paste to get that part in). I used double-spaces in the above to make it easier to read, but just using single spaces. As an example, mine was:

Hit execute. Not much will happen, except that it’ll display the command you just sent.

b) Type in:

chmod 2775 /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder

Again, similar to the above, except that where it says /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder, you’re pasting the stuff from your clipboard (from step#2) again.

Mine looked something like this:

Hit execute.

You’re done. Hopefully things should work. At the very least, you should be able to disconnect/reconnect and start copying files or create folders through your own account. Hopefully other people in your group will have access too, but verify to make sure they have the limited (or unlimited as the case may be) access you want them to have.

If you’re completely lost as to what exactly you just did, you basically just took ownership of the folder with your user account, and assigned it to your group on the filesystem / operating system level.

Hopefully in the future, someone makes changes to make things a little less cumbersome. Granted, there’s not a lot that can be done, but if the FreeNAS GUI automated the permissions setttings (or at least presented a GUI to do it), it would make it a little easier for people. A *very* good place for this would be a new item in the Access Menu called “file and folder permissions” or something to that effect. The menu item could list the shares or the dataset and have a “choose owner”, “choose group”, and “set owner/group/user permissions” section for each share. Worst case scenerio, giving the file manager a facelift and doing it there would help too.

3 hours later….

(warning: before going any further, this is for a clean installation – if you’ve got data on those drives, it’s gonna be gone if you keep reading…)

-

What you need to do to fix it is:

-

0) pre-step: Delete all your entries in the ZFS section. You’ve probably got entries in the Virtual Device (Pools), Management (Pools), and Dataset (Datasets) sections. Remove them all, and don’t forget to update/save. We’re trying to get things in a clean state here.
-
1) Click Disks/Management from the main menu.
2) Delete all the entries for your current drives (then save the changes).
3) Create new entries. HOWEVER, this time for the formatting you’re going to LEAVE ALL THE DEFAULTS and choose NTFS for the “Preformatted File System” (don’t worry, we’ll be changing it back to “ZFS Storage Pool Device” later). Do this for every drive you’re using, and save/apply the changes.
4) Click Disks/Format from the main menu.
5) One at a time, select each disk, choose ZFS Storage Pool Device as the File System, then hit Format disk.
-
6) Now you should be able to create the Virtual Device, and the actual Management Pool. Once the pool’s added, you should be seeing proper numbers instead of “UNKNOWN”, and ideally everything should be working from here on in.

-

-

-

So what causes this behavior?

In the past I’ve run into issues where FileSystem B will not install properly on a drive that currently has FileSystem A on it. In those cases, I’ve either had to do a low-level format first to completely zero everything out, or try to do an intermediate partition/format with a FileSystem C, then try B again. Presumably, a similar thing happened here.

Now, this hasn’t happened for years before now (although the Mac OS X bootloader likes to resist being installed to drives that had other partition types sometimes), but I seem to recall it being an NTFS-FAT-EXT# circle that had issues in the past. As far as the hard drives I was using for this FreeNAS install, one had a Mac HFS+ partition, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the culprit that ZFS didn’t like.

In any case, what we’ve done above is essentially partition/format the drives as NTFS first, which ZFS didn’t have a problem overwriting. In the event you don’t have luck with NTFS as your intermediate file system, try the other partition types. If all else fails, I’d recommend grabbing the diagnostic tool from your hard drive manufacturer (SeaTools for Seagate drives for example), and use it to do a low level format and try again.

gzip: stdout: Broken pip
Error: Failed to dd image on ‘/dev/da0′
Unmount CDROM.
There was a problem while copying files.

Fortunately, the fix is easy.

Step 1: Restart the computer WITHOUT the USB drive plugged in.
Step 2: Let the Live CD boot completely until you’re back at the same menu.
Step 3: Plug the USB drive in, then choose the option to install. It should now work.

From what I read when looking around, it looks like while the CD boots it installs some temporary files of some sort to the USB drive if it’s plugged in at the time, which causes the above error. Just wait until it’s finished booting – the installer’s smart enough to find your USB drive once it’s plugged in.

There are significantly fewer Macs than Windows machines, so hackers don’t bother making viruses for them. Macs are just as insecure as Windows, they just don’t get targetted.

This is of course, incorrect.

Here’s the real reason (don’t worry, I’ll elaborate):

Mac:	Windows:
You will see something like this when updating a typical Mac program.	You will see something like this when updating a typical Windows program.

Woah. Wait. Both are updating a program. What’s the difference?

-

In short, every time you install or update a Windows program, you’re forced to give it full access to your computer. Every. Single. Time. Firefox needs an update? Grant full access. Java needs an update? Grant full access. Some other random program needs to update? Grant full… you get the idea.

Now you might be thinking, “I have to grant every program full access to my computer for it to update itself? That seems silly”. And you’d be right. There’s no reason that every random program should be given full access to your machine. That would be like a bank giving keys to the vault to every customer that walked in.

If Microsoft ran a bank, the vault would be empty.

-

Things are different on the Mac. If a program needs to update, it just asks you, and then updates itself. All without needing full access. It makes sense.

To be fair, there are a few Mac exceptions. Generally, they’re programs that need to touch system files, interact directly with drivers, or embed themselves in the system for another reason.

Some actually need access to the whole system:
-Mac OS X software updates
-Virtual Machine software (Parallels, VMWare, etc)
-Anti-virus programs
-A few edge-case programs (things that add themselves to the System Preferences panel for example)

Others don’t need access to the whole system, but request it because they’re either poorly programmed or contain DRM:
-Microsoft Office for Mac (poorly programmed)
-Microsoft Messenger for Mac (poorly programmed)
-all other microsoft products for the mac (poorly programmed)
-Adobe Photoshop (DRM)
-few others

The way the Mac goes about dealing with these is that it asks for your username and password. If you supply that info, it’ll allow the program that’s installing/updating to have full access to the system.

-

So wait!? How is this different? Why does this matter?

Most Windows users are greeted with UAC prompts multiple times per week (multiple times per day in some cases). What’s worse is that many don’t know what they’re for. Something says it needs to update, so they click OK. If they don’t, it often keeps bugging them until they do.

On the Mac, it’s very seldom that the prompt comes up asking for the username + password. The few times they do pop up, there’s generally a good indication as to what it’s there for.

From a virus writer’s standpoint, who are you going to target? The lost Windows users who have already hit “Allow” a dozen times in the last week? Or the Mac user who’s going to have alarm bells going off in their head when they unexpectedly see a prompt asking for their password?

-

So, why do Windows machines get more viruses than Macs…?

It’s the design.

Windows was designed around the philosophy that everything can and should have full access to your system. This worked well in the past, but the deficiencies in the design have become all too apparent and are now being exploited at every opportunity. There’s a problem when your OS expects dad/grandma/junior to click “Allow” multiple times throughout the day to keep current with various program updates, when they’re not going to have any clue what is actually being “allowed” most of the time.

Mac OS X on the other hand is based on a solid foundation from a security standpoint (Unix). The philosophy around it is the user doesn’t get full access the the system, so programs won’t either. The OS is designed so that a typical program will never need full access, whether it’s installing or being updated. Dad/grandma/junior aren’t bombarded with prompts they know nothing about. The few times they’re actually asked to authorize a program to do something, they generally have a good notion as to why they’re being prompted, and in the event they don’t, they’re much more likely to hit Cancel, or at least ask someone for some guidance.

-

Granted, if Macs had higher market share, they’d be more of a target for virus writers than they are today. However, regardless of the market share, Windows will always be the prime target. After all, why would someone write a virus for the Mac when Windows so readily hands you the keys to the castle?

-

Disclaimer: I do not work for Apple or Microsoft. I do however use both Mac OS X, and the Windows 7 operating system on a regular basis.

I’ll try to walk through the steps it took. Much of this is done by memory, but I just finished, so it’s fairly fresh in my mind (although I’m rather sleep deprived at the moment so bear with me).

It’s worth noting that I used an ATI 4850 video card. If you go with an nVidia card, it may be a lot easier (try it on your own before paining yourself with this process).

Network, video, sound (at least 2-channel anyway), microphone are working. Sleep isn’t (so disable it in the Energy Saver section in System Preferences)

The stuff you might need:
-Retail Snow Leopard disk (hopefully you’ve bought it already)
-An existing install, or Rebel EFI otherwise (it’s a free download).
-USB hard drive or USB memory stick
-the MyHack installer
-Netkas’s PC EFI v10.5
-Voodoo HDA
-Kext Helper

Huge thanks to each of the sites/owners mentioned above. It’s their contributions that made this all possible (and resulted in what seems to be a perfectly flawless system so far).

This isn’t a step-by-step walkthrough. I’ll assume you’ve tried many things, beat your head against the wall, and hopefully made a little headway on your own (in which case hopefully something here will fill in the blanks where you got stuck).

-

Before you get started:
If your hard drive is 1GB or larger, you might want to consider creating a small partition. I had a boot0 error (on the 4th line) over and over once I got to the point where I was trying to boot from the hard drive because I had a 1.5TB partition.

AHCI must be selected in the bios (NOT RAID). IDE may work as well, but I didn’t try it – AHCI is probably your best bet.

Most of the other stuff in the BIOS didn’t seem to have any effect. Enhanced Halt and EIST didn’t make any difference whether they were enabled or disabled (it’s often recommended to disable them). Really, the AHCI thing was the only hiccup that ever hit me.

If you’re using an ATI video card, you’ll probably need to be booting in safe mode until the very end.

-

Getting started:
If you don’t have an existing installation on the hard drive, and only have the retail Snow Leopard disc, the ONLY bootloader that worked for me in the beginning was the Rebel EFI one (which you download and then burn to a disc). I also had to run it in Safe Mode (when the bootloader starts, press the “down” arrow key and then the spacebar to check the box for safe mode).

Other bootloaders *should* work, but I tried a few without success. It’s worth noting that for the graphical ones, you can press the “tab” key to get the command line options, and then just type -x for safe mode (I didn’t realize tab was the hotkey at first).

In any case, you’re basically starting the bootloader, then inserting the Leopard disc to install.

-

If you’re at the point where you’ve got an install on the hard drive, but it’s not the final one you want (or is regular Leopard or something):
You may or may not have to use the Rebel EFI CD to actually boot the hard drive. If so, when the CD boots, choose the hard drive, and start in SAFE MODE.

Assuming it then starts from the hard drive, next we’re creating a USB boot disk. Either an external USB hard drive, or a USB memory stick (it must be large enough though! An 8GB one is fine) is what you’ll need. It’s basically our Leopard install disk + our desired bootloader (the MyHack installer mentioned above).

You’re using Disk Utility for all of this.

First, create a disk image. The default settings are fine (I think it’s compressed by default).

Next, Partition the USB drive. Make sure you go into Options and select GUID. It’ll partition/format it.

Next, click Restore, and you’re basically restoring the image you created to the newly formatted USB drive (unselect the “erase” box). ***if it gives you an error message of sorts, you may have to select the disk image, and then click “Images/ScanImagesForRestore” from the top menu bar, and THEN do the restore.

Once the restore is done, you can exit Disk Utility. Next, you’re going to run the MyHack installer (which you hopefully downloaded already), keep all the default options, and make sure you choose the USB drive as the destination during the install.

Once that’s finished, you should now have a bootable USB drive that also contains the Leopard installer. Time to restart the computer, and boot from the USB drive.

-

Booting/Installing from the USB drive:
You may have to start it in Safe Mode (you can try without the first time – if the graphics just freeze for about 10 minutes, you’ll have to try safe mode). To do it, when the loader starts, hit a key to get to the drive list, and then press “TAB” to get to the command line. Select the USB drive from there with the arrow keys, and type “-x” (no quotes) to boot in safe mode.

The install is pretty basic – partition as GUID. You may want to choose “Customize” and turn off printer drivers, languages, fonts, etc. Some things can cause the installer to think it’s failed at the end (not positive whether it matters though).

-

Once installed, you need to get the bootloader on the hard drive itself.
The hard drive won’t boot on it’s own yet, and it still needs help from the USB drive. Use it to get booted onto the hard drive.

Next, you’ll find that the MyHack installer is located on the USB drive (if for some reason it isn’t, you’ll have to redownload it).

Run it to install, and make sure you’ve got the hard drive selected.

This time, you may want to Customize the installation. In my case, I turned on the graphics enabler, and turned off the FrameBufferDisabler.

The system’s about ready to boot on it’s own, except I also needed to add the stuff for the ATI 4850 video card. I downloaded the Netkas PC EFI 10.5 (it’s just a file called “boot”), and put it in the root directory of the hard drive (I deleted the old one and copied the new one in place). Next, I had to edit the ATI4800Controller.kext file and find the section that looks like this:

<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0×94401002 0×944a1002</string>

and change it to this

<key>IOPCIMatch</key>
<string>0×94421002 0×94401002 0×944a1002</string>

To edit the file, I had to copy it to the desktop first (from System/Library/Extensions), then right-click, choose “Show Package Contents”, browse into “Contents” and edit the “Info.plist” file. Once that was done, I sent the original kext to the trash, and copied the edited kext from the desktop back to the System/Library/Extensions location.

To be sure that the cache was fine, I then followed the steps at http://osx86.sojugarden.com/2009/09/permissions-kext-caches/ . Alternately, you could probably just use KextHelper to put the new kext in – I didn’t, but just realize it would have been a lot easier.

I restarted the computer, unplugged the USB drive, and Snow Leopard loaded up, video working and all!  Well almost all…

-

Sound

Last thing to take care of was the sound. Just grab the VoodooHDA kext (link from the beginning), and use Kext Helper to install it. Restart again, and you should have sound.

Note that to get the microphone working, you’ll have to go into System Preferences, and then in the “Output” section, you’ll have to turn up the recording level. You’ll then have to play with the microphone level settings (possibly in both output and input). It will take a while, but just do some trial and error until it’s working the way you want.

-

DONE!

I apologize that it isn’t more detailed, but the way I went about it would probably fill a novel if I went step-by-step (and it’s very possible there’s a faster way out there). If anyone’s stuck at a certain part, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to get back to you within a day or two.

Update: If you decide to install the 10.6.1 update, it adds new 4850 drivers. If you’re using that card, you’ll have to boot into safe-mode after the restart and re-edit the Info.plist in the ATI4800Controller.kext file.

Unfortunately, as great as the GT735 is, MSI doesn’t offer up 64-bit drivers on their website – so even if you get Vista/7 x64 to take available of all 4GB of RAM, you may be worried about the driver issue.

Well worry no more. But first a small video for anyone interested – there aren’t instructions in the video (scroll down for the write-up) but it shows Windows 7 x64 running on the GT 735.

——

For the install, Windows 7 64-bit was used. For those without a Technet/MSDN subscription it’ll be available on Oct 22 2009. Until then feel free to use Vista 64-bit – the driver’s will be using are actually Vista x64 drivers anyway.

Warning: You should be fairly experienced when it comes to installing drivers from within Device Manager before continuing. If not, I’ve tried to explain driver installation thoroughly but you’re probably going to have a very difficult time if it’s something you’re not familiar with! If you think you may not be up to the task you may want to hire someone who’s done this sort of thing before.

——

Installing Win 7 x64

1) First of all, you’re going to want to create factory restore disks from the default Vista installation on the GT735. It should ask you to create them when you first start the machine, although there’s also a link on the desktop to do so as well. It would be a good idea to make a couple copies in case a disk gets scratched. This is very important! If things don’t quite work out (or if you decide to sell your computer in the future), it may be your only way to get things back to factory!

2) Next, pop in your Windows 7 x64 install DVD and restart the computer. It’ll ask you to press a key to boot from the CD/DVD. Do it.

3) The install’s very straightforward EXCEPT for choosing a hard drive / partition to install on.

There are 3 partitions…

You want to go into the advanced options and delete / erase the 3rd partition shown (the largest – around 250GB). Note that this will erase anything you may have installed/saved.

Next you can optionally delete the 2nd partion (the 2nd largest – around 40GB). This contains the Windows installation. If you don’t delete it, a menu will come up every time you start the computer asking if you want to boot into Vista (your old install), or Windows 7 (your new install), and you’ll be able to access both drives from within Windows 7 (this is called dual-boot). If you delete it, Vista will be completely wiped, and you’ll simply have more free space for your new install of Windows 7.

Do not delete the 1st partion (Recovery Partition – about 8GB). I repeat, DO NOT delete the first partition. This partition is like your newly-burned factory restore disks. It uses very little space, you’ll probably never see it, and it makes it as easy as pressing/holding the F3 key during startup to restore everything back to factory. If you decide to erase it, you can still use your recovery disks to restore to factory, but if your drive has any hiccups by that time or if the disks have degraded, you’re only option to restore to factory will be to contact MSI and hope they take some mercy on you by sending some disks. Again, don’t delete it!

In any case, regardless of which partition(s) you erased, you should now have an empty/unused partition with a lot of free space – somewhere in the neighbourhood of 250-300GB. Choose that partition, and continue the install.

4) Once the install’s completed, and you’ve set everything up, it’s time for the drivers.

The key thing to note is that while MSI does not have 64-bit drivers available on the website, they DO have the 64-bit drivers on the driver CD. The drivers are a little hidden away, but they’re there. You’ll find them deep within the Vista32 folder on the CD. For example, E:\Vista32\JMirco CardReader\Driver\amd64 contains the 64-bit drivers for the JMicro Card Reader. Others are similar, you’re simply looking for amd64 or Vista64 at the end. If you’re a Guru when it comes to this stuff, you can probably figure out the rest on your own in which case, stop reading and have a nice day! Otherwise, continue on.

A note for those who are new to Device Manager. To get to it, the easiest way is to click the Start button and then type “device manager” (no quotes). Then click on the result, a warning should pop up, and then you should be in Device Manager. To update a driver, you’ll be looking for the device, right-clicking on it, and choosing “Update Driver Software”. In the following section when I say to go to Device Manager, that’s how you do it. AGAIN, IF YOU’RE NOT COMFORTABLE IN DEVICE MANAGER, YOU MAY WANT TO GET SOMEBODY ELSE TO HELP YOU!

5) The first hiccup is that the wireless drivers included with Windows 7 won’t work, even when you press the “wireless” icon on the MSI GT 735 o light it up (above the keyboard – looks like a little satellite dish). UPDATE: If you make sure the wireless is turned on during install (light lit up), the drivers will be installed during Windows installation and the wireless will work fine. You can then skip the steps below.
-If you have a wired connection, simply plug it in to the laptop and then connect to Windows Update. It’s got a new, working wireless driver it’ll install.
-If you do NOT have a wired connection, you’ll have to pop into Device Manger, find the wireless controller under “Network adapters”, update the driver, and BROWSE/LET ME PICK FROM A LIST for it. You then choose “Have Disk”, browse to Vista32/WirelessLAN on the CD, and it becomes a guessing game from here. Depending on what adapter MSI installed, it’ll either be in AW-GE780/ndis5×64 or in MSI6890/x64 . For me it was the MSI6890/x64 and it was the one with 1T2R in the name after choosing “Open/OK”.

Make sure the wireless icon is lit up above your keyboard (press it if not to enable it) and connect to the wireless network to make sure it’s working – if it isn’t, you may have to try another driver.

6) Next is simply finding drivers for all the “Unknown Devices” in Device Manager. This is much easier.

-Right click an Unknown Device and choose “Update Driver Software”
-Choose “Browse my computer for driver software” (2nd option)
-Browse to the Vista32 folder on your CD (for example E:\Vista32\). Make sure “Include Subfolders” has a checkmark in the box, and then hit “Next”.
-It should search the CD and find drivers.

Do the above for EACH unknown device. Simple! You may want to go to ATI/AMD’s website to get the latest video card drivers (particularly if you play games), but everything should be at least working by this point.

Drivers are now done!

7a) Last thing left is the “extra” stuff. You’ll notice the Eco and Turbo buttons aren’t doing anything right now. The MSI System Control Manager has to be installed for this to work. If you don’t plan to use those buttons, you can stop here. Otherwise, you’ll have to grab the program from MSI’s website, as the version on the driver CD does not work. Head to MSI’s website, find the MSI735, and go to the Download/Utilities section. Right now, they don’t have a 64-bit version offered, but the newest 32-bit one they have happens to work on 64-bit Windows 7 anyway. Simply download, install, restart computer and your buttons should be functional.

7b) Dolby Control Center’s on the driver CD, but it doesn’t work in 64-bit. It doesn’t appear to be in the stock installation, but if it’s something you want/need, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find a working versionn out there.

7c)  The Webcam viewer/recorder is next.  It’s optional – unless you want to record short audio-less clips of yourself on the cam, you probably won’t need/use it. You can simply install from the CD since it’s just an application (not a driver), and doesn’t care if it’s running under 32 or 64 bit. You’ll find it at E:\AP\VISTA32\Simple Camera (where E is your CD/DVD drive). Don’t forget to turn the Webcam on before running the program itself! To turn it on, it’s the button/light above the keyboard to the right of the “Turbo” button.

7d) There’s no need to bother with the other programs on the driver CD.

• The version of AdobeReader on the CD is old (grab the newest from Adobe’s website).
• 7zip is both free and superior to Corel Winzip & WinRAR.
• Norton Internet Security’s a little bloated, and it’s only the 60 day trial. Avast! or AVG are good free anti-virus solutions, or, if you’re looking for a full anti-virus/firewall suite you should check out Kaspersky (though it’s not free).
• The other programs (Dolby Control Center, SCM, and Simple Camera) you already have if you did the steps in 7a-c.

7e) There are other programs installed by default from factory, but they’re not included on the driver CD.

—–

—–

That’s it! If you have comments/questions/suggestions, or found an easier way to get everything working under Windows 7 (or Vista) 64-bit, feel free to leave a comment below!

With the final version of Windows 7 finally being released by Microsoft on Technet, and having a subscription, I decided it was time to grab a copy and start playing with some anti-virus programs to see what the ideal paid anti-virus program might be.

The most commonly talked about AV’s tend to be the offerings from Symantec (Norton), Kaspersky, and NOD32. They all offer free 30-day trials, so away I went. I grabbed the following:

• Kaspersky 2010 (not as easily found on the site, but they have a link stickied in the forums which installs as a trial just fine for those who want to do their own checking)
• Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.0
• NOD32 v4.0

Now a few may be wondering what the heck Symantec’s Endpoint is doing with the other 2. After all, the others are cost-effective consumer versions, while Endpoint Protection is a pricey business option. The reason is simple – I was looking for AV’s that aren’t terribly resource-intensive. Endpoint Protection is the successor to Symantec AV Corporate Edition which was known for being light on resources, and hence why I chose it.

In any case, neither of the 3 are claiming full Windows 7 compatibility in their products yet since we’ve still got a while to go before Win 7 is publicly available. That said, I encountered no issues in my limited testing, which means all 3 of these AV-makers have done a pretty good job so far of preparing.

Enough of that! On to the testing!

I searched around to find a couple files – the first being a keygen that had so many “VIRUS!!!” claims that I figured every scanner should probably flag it. The second actually had “trojan” in the file name and looked to be a poorly made custom program to zombify another computer.

For testing, I attempted the following with each:

• Download from the web
• Run the program

Before installing each anti-virus program, I made sure I had a RAR as well as an extracted copy available in case the AV program stopped it in it’s tracks at the download point.

Kaspersky 2010

Download from the web: Kaspersky detected both, and offered the options to either block the download, or allow it

Run the program: Kaspersky didn’t want to let me get that far. As soon as the containing folder was opened, Kaspersky detected each, and forced me to “delete” or “block” the program. Any time I chose to simply “block”, it would pop up the message again the next time the folder was opened. Finally, I tried running the program. The program errored out and Kaspersky again forced me to block or delete.

NOD32 4.0

NOD32 let me download the first keygen, unRAR it, and run it. It’s remotely possible that the keygen was simply a false positive, but something odd happened a little later on (which I’ll get to).

NOD32 detected the 2nd file (trojan) during the download and automatically quarantined it. I disabled the scanner long enough to let me download and unRAR it, then re-enabled NOD32. To my surprise, it let me run it without a peep!

Something pretty fishy was going on here. It let me do everything with the first keygen. It then wouldn’t let me download the 2nd file (trojan), but would let me run it?!

I peaked through the options in NOD32, and turned on “Advanced heuristics on file execution”, which is disabled by default because it hurts performance (NOD32 actually warns you about this when you enable it). Now it detected both files but with a huge performance penalty (5-7 seconds!) when trying to run them. The most unfortunate part was that the programs seemed to run anyway. Sure it detected them, but if it lets them run and do some damage before it actually does something about it… what’s the point?

One final oddity… after disabling the advanced heuristics on file execution, it still continued to detect both – I would have expected it to only continue detecting the 2nd.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.0

I can sum Endpoint Protection up fairly quickly. It doesn’t seem to actively scan within compressed folders (not RAR’s anyway). So both downloaded without being flagged. Once extracted, it did catch the first file immediately upon extraction. I disabled the AV long enough to extract a few copies, re-enabled it, and tried running them – each time the file was removed before I could run it.

Sadly, Endpoint Protection didn’t catch the 2nd file (trojan) at all and was quite content to let me extract and run it. A downside of Endpoint seems to be the limited options available. I looked through for something equivilant to NOD32’s “advanced heuristics”, but didn’t find anything. Perhaps I just missed something? I’m not sure.

Thoughts/Verdict

In these tests, Kaspersky clearly came out ahead. It nailed both files at every opportunity. In my opinion, Kaspersky has the absolute worst, most complicated and complex interface, but when it came to the detection it was miles ahead.

NOD was odd. Quite a few things happened that just didn’t make sense. I may do a retest again in the future because things really didn’t add up. The fact that it let me run a program even as it was detecting the baddies within it really soured things for me.

Symantec Endpoint handled the baddie it found very well. I would have tied it with Kaspersky (despite not scanning within the RAR) if it didn’t miss the 2nd baddie.

As far as interfaces go, I had screenshots I took all along the way, but they got destroyed during one of the reformats. Symantec has the simpliest, although when it detects something the window can get lost in the background. I’d rate NOD32’s interface as the best – a few options shown with the ability to go into further detail in a relatively clean sort of way.  Kaspersky’s is bloated and complicated in too many ways – I suppose some may like it, but I find it an annoyance (and I’d never dare to try to explain to someone over the phone how to find something in the log).

A few odds and ends….

• Kaspersky has a “Gaming Mode” that can be enabled which amongst other benefits keeps notifications from bugging you during your game (for those who’ve had that happen to you – I know I sure have).
• Symantec also has a “Gaming Edition” in their consumer-line (worth a mention simply because I mentioned the above).
• NOD32 installs extremely fast. Really. It’s uncanny.
• Symantec Endpoint is huge. As in almost 500 megs for the zipped installer (compared to under 40 for NOD32 and under 60 for Kaspersky). At least it didn’t feel that bloated
• NOD32 is awesome when it comes to submitting new files you feel may be infected. You can simply right-click the file from within Windows to submit it, or if the scanner finds a file which is suspect, you can just click the notification message to submit to NOD32 to be checked out.
• Symantec Endpoint does not have a right-click context menu option to scan a file. That means if you download something and want to scan it, you’ll have to enter the program and do a custom scan.

Before anyone comes screaming, these are all thoughts and opinions based on my own testing. Feel free to do your own testing – all the AV programs I mentioned have free trials, so do some checking and tell me which AV you prefer and why.

It installed fine. Problem was that when running it, the screen was black. There was sound, but that was it. Did a little searching… and not a lot of luck. I found that alt-enter (or applekey-enter) sometimes worked for people having full screen issues. I tried it, and noticed the monitor continually bouncing to power-saving mode, then normal again. I decided to do a little guessing and deductive reasoning, and the solution was……

Solution: Plug your monitor into the other output on your video card!

See, the Mac version of Spore uses something called “Cider” from Transgaming. Think of it as something of a miniature windows-emulator, or for those familiar with Linux… WINE. In fact, in your preferences, you’ll have a spore folder with a config file made for wine.

In any case, it looks like it Spore/Cider defaults to the first video card output it finds. This works fine for iMacs etc because the first output is the built-in display! For those using OSX86 (and thus a discrete video card), it may not be the one you happen to have your monitor plugged into. Try changing it and see if it works.

Initial observations (aka what anyone would notice within 5 minutes)

Installation is similar to Vista. It’s a little more polished, but no major changes there. Vista was already a right step in the direction away from XP.

Once everything’s said and done and you’re at the desktop though, things are noticably different.

TASKBAR – revamped.

The start menu is the same. Different Start button (just a logo) but that’s it.

The notification area is mildly changed, pretty much the same but rather than choosing to hide un-used icons, you can choose which ones to always display, which to only display actual notifications about, and which to hide completely. You can also check a box to simply display them all. Any that are hidden are accessed in a similar way to Vista except that instead of the arrows unhiding them all temporarily, the arrow just brings up a submenu. This is arguably a slight improvement from the previous way, although if you’re already hiding new icons, there’s no indication from what I can tell when a new one pops up unless it gives a notification at the same time – it just goes into the list.

The rest of the taskbar is completely changed. There’s no more Quick-launch bar. Instead, you can *pin* an application to the dock either by dragging it, or right-clicking a running app and choosing to pin it that way. For those who have used Mac OS X, this is basically the new “dock”, except it’s worse in a few ways:

1. It’s hard to tell what’s what. There are no labels. Yes, you can turn labels on, but it really messes things up (if you have more than a few things on the taskbar all the names will be cut off anyway, and it un-combines icons). Depending on your theme, it’s either hard or nearly-impossible to tell the difference between a running program, and one that isn’t. Apple had a nice distinct arrow in OS X. Microsoft just shows it as something of a highlighted box which you may or may not see easily. Basically, you just have icons to go by, and it’s hard to tell what’s running. Not great.
2. If there’s only 1 Window open with the application, clicking the program in the dock brings it up. However if there’s 2 or more (say for example 2 Internet Explorer windows), nothing comes up until you choose which Window. They do have PREVIEWS now, but it’s really annoying and takes more time than the old method – a good example is Firefox and the Download window. You always have to choose which one you want. It really should pop up ALL the windows on click (or at least the most recent), and leave the choose option to mouseover. If people would rather not pull everything up, mouseover already brings up the previews.
3. Not necessarily Microsoft’s fault, but many “always on” programs are still throwing themselves in the System Tray. I’m fine with a virus scanner doing this with it’s background scanner, but AIM, Steam, etc should really be keeping themselves in the dock. Err.. taskbar. There’s little need for them to put themselves in BOTH. Any program run often enough to warrant a spot there is going to end up pinned to the taskbar anyway. Microsoft finally took Messenger out of there (way to set a bad example in the first place), but others really have to follow suit.

Finally, the search (right after you click the start button). I don’t know if it’s always been this way, or if it was just improved, but it’s quite useful. Type in “hidden” and one of the results that pop up will be settings for changing the view options for hidden files and folders. Type in the partial name of a program, and it’ll show up. A nice fast way of getting to stuff quickly.

Speed

There have been a few posts/tests made public (despite the NDA about benchmarks), and many show minor improvements in speed. I will say that navigating does *feel* a lot faster – whether it’s just visual modifications, prefetches, or just plain speed they’ve made improvements here.

Home Networking

Microsoft’s introduced the concept of “Homegroups”. Short version is that if you’ve spent hours setting up permissions for various folders so you can share them with people at home, it’s way easier now. Right-click on the folder you want to share, and you can easily grant people with your Homegroup password Read, or Read/Write access to them.

Sadly, Homegroups only works with other Windows 7 computers. You’ll still have to do the painstaking regular sharing if you keep other Vista/XP/etc computers on your network. It would be lovely if they found a way to work around this (even if it required running a homegroup update on older versions of Windows), or simply made regular sharing just as easy.

Other apps

I won’t pretend I’ve tried them all, but the ones I have tried are pretty decent. It started when I went to grab Messenger, and they had a pretty nifty page with all the Windows Live programs I could install.

Windows Live Mail: I got it running, set up my e-mail accounts, and am now using it for both my Hotmail as well as the others. Messenger (presumably since I installed Live Mail) also defaults to this program now (instead of the hotmail site). The only hiccup I’ve found is that I can’t add folders to my mail servers through IMAP. It also doesn’t use an IMAP trash folder or anything. Since this is my first time using IMAP instead of POP3, it could be a limitation of my mail server itself though.

Windows Live Writer: Actually, an awesome program. I don’t know how long it’s been available, but it’s the first time I’ve used it. In fact I’m using it to write this up now! It makes it *extremely* easy to add blog posts – at least with Wordpress (although quite a few others are supported). Really once it’s set up, open the program, type away, and hit Publish. Much easier than logging in to the website, waiting for pages to load, refreshing to make sure my session doesn’t time out, etc.

That’s about it for now – really just a quick overview. Windows 7 isn’t groundbreaking by any means, but with a few changes (particularly to the taskbar), it has the potential to become what Vista should have been.

Maybe one day Microsoft will pull off an entire revamp. Compared to something like OS X, the Windows OS is still very flawed in many ways. Since they’re so content on clinging to built-in backwards compatibility though (seriously, start fresh and use an emulator..), Windows 7 is a healthy step in the right direction.