A Two-Computers-Per-User Desktop Arrangement

I was spending a lot of time at my desk, doing word processing and other typical desktop work.  For this purpose I was using a customized Windows 7 installation on two networked computers for maximum productivity.  This post describes that setup.

I had previously thought that, ideally, I would have four computers:  one laptop; one test machine to hook up the occasional hard drive or other component for wiping, testing, etc.; and two desktop machines running side-by-side.  Since then, however, I had switched from Ubuntu back to Windows and had found this to be a good move.  So now I was doing very little testing and tinkering with hardware.  Therefore, I dismantled and sold the parts from the fourth computer.

With almost all of my work happening on just two computers, and with a stable Win7 installation on each, the focus now was on getting the most out of them.  I was using two desktop computers instead of one because there were still many occasions when a computer would experience downtime.  I would be doing drive maintenance or imaging, or would still have to reboot Windows now and then to clear its head or to complete a program installation or upgrade, or Win7 would be running just fine but there would be some scanning or something else going on that would tend to monopolize the machine for practical purposes.  I was not yet very impressed with multiple desktop software and was considering a return to VMware or some other virtual machine software, perhaps in a virtual appliance, though I wasn't sure I wanted to get back into the performance issues that had prompted me to try to use a native and/or bootable virtual hard disk or RAID array to improve the really bad performance I had started getting in VMware.  So the second computer was also useful as a simple way of having a pretty solid alternate desktop.  I could start up a project or leave a set of folders open there and just visit it occasionally, when the primary computer was doing its own maintenance or was otherwise unavailable for a while.

The starting point for this two-computer arrangement was to set up two machines that were almost identical in terms of hardware and software.  In previous years, I had thought it was best to have dissimilar machines, so as to maximize resources.  One machine or the other would have the right hardware or software to deal with almost any kind of system problem.  That belief was probably justified for some purposes.  Now, however, I was less patient with that, and it also seemed less necessary.  A lot of the old problems had gone away.  Meanwhile, it was much easier to learn how to maintain and troubleshoot just one set of problems, rather than have to learn the whys and wherefores of divergent sets of hardware and software.  For purposes of getting my work done, Windows 7 was a significant improvement over operating systems I had used previously, including Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10, in terms of networking and other capabilities.

The customized Win7 installation (see link above) was not as easy as a canned, plain-vanilla installation, but once I had it set up, it had some advantages.  One important step was to make my work files available on both computers.  My first attempt in this regard was to use a Synology network-attached storage (NAS) unit as a simplified file server, but that hadn't worked so well for me.  In the second attempt, I used my home network (basically, just a router and cables to the two computers, though possibly a crossover cable would have sufficed even without the router).  After some contemplation, I went with GoodSync to keep the two computers directly synchronized with one another.  This was an important development.  When combined with appropriate program settings (e.g., setting Microsoft Word to AutoRecover files every minute), it meant that, if the computer I was working on suddenly crashed or otherwise became unavailable, I could usually switch over to the other machine and pick up right where I left off.

I used GoodSync to synchronize my data partition (drive D), not the program partition (drive C).  I also used it to synchronize parts of the INSTALL partition, including particularly the funky but advantageous shared Start menu.  GoodSync did not need to be running on both computers, so I installed it on computer A.  As the installation evolved, I found that computer A was handling most of my computer maintenance and other functions, while I did more of my moment-by-moment productivity stuff on computer B.  In particular, computer A was becoming my backup hub.  I would save a file on computer B; GoodSync would copy it to computer A; and then my backup software would copy it to other drives.  After a variety of unpleasant backup surprises, I had evolved to two distinct backup systems running on computer A.  In the first backup system, I was using Robocopy, as part of my customized installation (above), to make frequent, incremental backups to a separate partition on computer A.  This was one of the few regards in which computer A differed from computer B in terms of hardware:  it had three hard drives rather than two, so as to speed this internal copying (since it was faster to copy from one hard drive to another, rather than between partitions on the same drive) and make it safer (since a failure of one drive would usually not affect the other).  In the second backup system, I was using Beyond Compare to do daily manual backups to an external drive that I could carry or store offsite as needed.  These were manual in the sense that I had to click things to make them happen, and could therefore examine or at least spot-check what was going to be changed, if I wanted to.

Again, I could still use either computer to do my work, since they both had the same synchronized files and nearly identical software installations.  Nonetheless, as the functions of the two computers diverged, I found that I was not really utilizing both monitors most of the time.  On computer B, I tended to be opening PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Windows Explorer sessions, and webpages, among which I would copy text, links, and other materials.  I could open some of that stuff on computer A instead, but it was cumbersome to have this happening on two different computers, and for the most part it actually was not happening on computer A.  That computer, and its associated monitor, were mostly just sitting there, working up a file comparison in Beyond Compare or otherwise doing things that did not really need to be watched constantly.

What I really wanted was to make monitor A available for computer A, when I wanted to see what was happening on computer A, but to have monitor A also available for computer B, when I was doing my ongoing work on computer B.  This called for a keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch.  The PS/2 type of KVM was better for purposes of providing keyboard and mouse input during BIOS setup and in programs that would boot from a CD (e.g., Acronis Drive Image) and would therefore be at least partly unresponsive to a USB mouse and/or keyboard.  Unfortunately, I did not realize that the type of motherboard I had installed in both computers did not have two PS/2 ports, so I had to use a USB KVM.  It also seemed that I might have to spring for a more expensive DVI-compatible KVM, since I'd gotten some poor video performance when I had connected the monitor to the computer using the older D-Sub rather than the newer DVI kind of cable.  In recent months I had been using the KVM only for the keyboard, while leaving each monitor dedicated to one computer and experimenting with having a separate mouse for each computer, so that I could click without having to transfer keyboard (and, optionally, monitor) focus between computers.  It had lately occurred to me, though, that the D-Sub video quality problems might just be due to the quality of the video circuits on the motherboard.  So at this point I was planning to get a dedicated video card for each computer and see whether its D-Sub connection would work acceptably, in which case I could use the USB/D-Sub KVM for the keyboard and for D-Sub video with monitor A.  In other words, monitor B would continue to be dedicated to computer B, but monitor A would run to the KVM and could thus toggle between computers A and B.

This left the problem that, as I had discovered, when I was not seeing events on computer A, I tended not to use that computer.  That was not terrible -- it would still be there as a running backup, ready to jump into service when I needed it, unless it hibernated itself in the meantime -- but experience suggested that, if I could not just glance to see what was happening on computer A, I would tend not to toggle over there on the KVM and take a peek.  I thought of two solutions to this.  One was to set up a reminder that would prompt me, every hour or two, to interrupt what I was doing on computer B, toggle the KVM, and look at events on computer A as displayed on monitor A.  I suspected I might tend to disregard that kind of reminder, but I decided to give it a try.  An alternative was to get a small, dedicated monitor that would just always be displaying events on computer A, though I realized its tiny resolution would not very well display all the stuff that would tend to appear on my widescreen monitor A.  It looked like I could get a monochrome 10-inch Miracle Business MT209A CRT on eBay for $25 including shipping, but I didn't want the clutter or the extra power consumption.  What seemed like a more practical option was rather to go with a full-sized monitor dedicated to computer A.

That's where this matter rested for the time being.

Acronis True Image Home 2011: Restoring Windows 7 to RAID 0: FAIL

I had installed Windows 7 on a regular hard drive -- what Win7 calls a "basic" drive.  I had made an image using Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH).  Now I was trying to restore that image -- using the ATIH Universal Restore feature installed by the Acronis Plus Pack -- to a new, empty software RAID0 array that I had just created in Windows 7.  This post describes my efforts.

For perspective, I could perhaps restore an image of a Windows 7 installation onto a hardware RAID0 array, and I might be able to restore an Acronis image of a RAID0 array to a non-RAID partition.  Acronis promised that the Plus Pack would enable me to restore to a striped software RAID0 array.  But now that I had made the purchase, a search led to a thread suggesting that the promise was false.

Here's how the effort unfolded.  After booting the ATIH CD, I went into Recover My Disks > Browse (wait) > select the .tib file to restore (or, in my case, the first of the five DVD-sized files comprising the backup).  I went on, OK, Next, and came to "Recover whole disks and partitions" and "Use Acronis Universal Restore."  It gave me the option of adding device drivers.  On the assumption, at that point, that drivers were not necessary in a software array, I clicked Next.  I indicated the partition I wanted to recover, and specified New Location as the dynamic volume that I had created for this purpose.  (Dynamic volumes were listed at the bottom of the screen -- I had to scroll to see them all.)  I clicked Next, and here is the message I got:

You are about to recover a partition containing OS files.  If the recovery destination is an existing non-active dynamic volume, then the system will be unbootable because activation of dynamic volumes is not supported.  Are you sure you want to continue?

I searched and found only a few links containing that statement about activation.  A post by an Acronis employee in an Acronis forum said, "The issue will be resolved in a future update of our software."  To see if the most recent update had resolved it, I went to the Acronis site and downloaded the latest build of ATIH.  I was doing this from an Ubuntu live CD, so I had to save the download (an .exe file) to a USB drive and jump it over to my laptop, running Vista, to install the .exe so I could burn an updated CD that would hopefully have better news for me in terms of restoring to a Win7 RAID0 array.  This was a lot of fooling around.

While that was happening, I went ahead with the next step, using my present copy of ATIH.  Alas, a new error:

There may not be enough free space on the system partition to boot up your operating system after recovery.

This was an odd message.  I had two 50GB partitions in my new RAID0 array.  The backup I had made was from just one partition of either 40GB or 50GB.  I clicked OK there and Acronis stopped.  It didn't try to see whether the restore would fit.  Evidently it was not set up to think in terms of RAID0 arrays.

I guessed that even the updated ATIH would not try to fix this.  But it was going to be a while before I could find out for sure.  The installation on the laptop was taking its sweet time.  After seemingly completing most of the installation, it aborted with this message:

Installation Incomplete

The installation was interrupted before Acronis True Image Home 2011 could be installed.

I didn't know who or what interrupted it.  The laptop was just sitting off to the side, doing its own thing.  I wasn't touching it.  I tried again.  Now I got a new error message:

The error was encountered while the installation.

That's really it.  That was what the message said.  It provided technical details that I didn't understand.  Toward the bottom, it said, "A possible reason might be that you do not have enough privileges."  OK, Vista.  Even though I was running as Administrator on the laptop, that was not enough, and possibly the good people at ATIH couldn't have noticed that until we were at the end of the installation process.  I was unfortunately not knowledgeable enough about the solution and was quite tired and not very patient with the idea of researching that question in order to resolve this tangent from a tangent.

I gave up on that Vista errand and just installed the upgraded ATIH on a Windows XP machine.  No permissions issues.  The upgrade took a while, but then it was successful.  Now I needed to remember how to install the Plus Pack.  My previous post about Plus Pack led me to an Acronis instructions webpage.  The basic process seemed to be to install ATIH, install the Plus Pack, and then go into the new Start Menu entry for Plus Pack and click on Acronis WinPE ISO Builder.  That required me to "Specify a path to the folder with the WinPE files."  A search for that exact statement yielded only a post where someone was trying to combine ATIH and Acronis Disk Director on one CD.  A different search led to an Acronis page instructing me to download the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK) from Microsoft.  This was a 1.7GB download.  Was this really what people had to do if they wanted to use Acronis Universal Restore?

I went back to the search and tried a different Acronis page.  This page said that Plus Pack had three benefits, and it pointed me to three separate webpages describing those benefits:  it would support dynamic drives and GUID partition tables (GPT); it would facilitate Universal Restore between dissimilar hardware, including virtual machines; and the WinPE part would create bootable rescue media.  The page on dynamic drives led to a page on RAID support, cited above, that led in turn to a table, summarizing the kinds of RAID support provided by various versions of Windows.  It said that ATIH Plus Pack supported restoring to RAID0.

The page regarding Universal Restore said that it would work only if "You have created Acronis Bootable Media (standard, WinPE, or BartPE) after the installation of Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack."  So apparently there were three different kinds of Acronis bootable media.  To see more about that, I went back into the Start Menu, on the XP machine where I had just installed ATIH, and chose the option to start up ATIH.  In its main screen, I went to "Create bootable media."  So this was going to give me the standard variety.  I burned it to a CD.  Much easier than creating WinPE media.

With that CD, I was ready for the next step.  Acronis said that I would need drivers for the hard drive controller or the chipset, in .inf, .sys, or .oem forms -- extracted, if necessary, from .exe, .cab, or .zip files.  The last time I had played with Acronis Universal Restore, I hadn't understood this driver situation and, as I dimly recalled, part of the problem was that I didn't know which drivers I should get and how I should extract them.  It was clearer to me, now, that there was no getting around it:  I had to have exactly the right drivers.  I have written up that pursuit in a separate post, for those whom it puzzles as it puzzled me.

Not to say that I came to a clear understanding.  I just made a stab at it.

With the drivers collected in a folder, I booted the Universal Restore CD.  When I got to the Drivers Manager step, I clicked Add Search Path and pointed to that folder.  Oddly, when I did, Acronis reported, "No items to display," even though I had just put 16 driver files in there.  I guessed that this meant it had not refreshed its view at that point.  It did not have an option to do so.  I proceeded to designate what I wanted to restore and where I wanted to restore it.  Once again, sadly, I got that error message indicating that "activation of dynamic volumes is not supported," followed by that error indicating that there might not be enough space to boot the operating system after recovery, and once again that was the end.

The working conclusion, at this point, was that ATIH did not support Windows 7 programs partitions in RAID0.  I could install Win7 manually in that kind of partition, and perhaps I could use ATIH to back up a manual installation, but I could not use ATIH to restore any such backup to that location.

I clicked on the Help button in Acronis and browsed its contents, to see if I could get a clearer idea about all this.  They didn't seem to have any information on it.  I posted a question about this on an Acronis forum.  Responses to that question tentatively supported the working conclusion that ATIH does not restore images to Win7 software RAID0 arrays.

VMware Workstation 7 in Windows 7: Error Moving File or Folder

I had just started using Windows XP SP3 as a guest in VMware Workstation 7.1 on a Windows 7 host.  It seemed that I was getting a certain error every time I tried to move files from one folder to another.  Both the target and source drives were on network drives, in the VMware sense:  they were local drives on that computer, but they were not part of the actual virtual machine (VM) as drive C was, so Workstation considered them network drives.  When I attempted to paste these files into a folder on that other drive, I got this error message:

Error Moving File or Folder

Cannot move [filename]: It is being used by another person or program.

Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

These files were not in use anywhere, as far as I could tell.  I was using a utility called Unlocker.  When this kind of error would occur, Unlocker would pop up, provide relevant information, and offer to help.  In this case, Unlocker's message was, "No locking handle found."  This was not absolutely the last word on the subject, but I had found Unlocker to be pretty reliable.

This was happening every time I tried to move files.  It was not a problem with one particular troublesome file.  It happened with moving files, not with deleting them.  I was able to delete files, and copy files; I just couldn't move files.  I had done a global change of file properties so that none were read-only.  This inability to move files occurred on all network drives.

I did a search on this error.  Very few results turned up.  I posted a question on it in a VMware forum.  One of the results from the search led to a lot of instances where people were getting the same or a similar error message in non-VM contexts.  Some of the advice offered in those kinds of situations involved one-off solutions, where there was a particularly troublesome file.  Someone suggested trying to do this as administrator, but I was already running as administrator.

That last person remarked that the errors s/he was experiencing may have resulted from changing the host name on the computer.  This was not a newly created VM.  I had used it in Workstation for Linux, to run WinXP on an Ubuntu host on a separate computer.  When I brought it over to this computer and fired it up, Workstation asked whether I had copied or moved it.  I said I moved it.  So possibly what was happening was that Workstation remained confused about some aspect of the machine due to the fact that it was not a virgin WinXP creation.

To explore this possibility, I closed down this VM and started up another.  I didn't want to spend the time to create a whole new WinXP installation in a VM.  What I did instead was to choose a preexisting VM that had different origins.  So now I felt that I should clarify the genealogy of this thing.  This troublesome VM was not actually created in Workstation.  It was created by VMware Converter.  I had used Converter to convert a native WinXP installation into a VM that I then used in Workstation for Linux.

I did have another WinXP VM that I had created in Workstation for Linux -- installing Windows XP from scratch inside a virtual machine, that is, rather than installing it on a regular computer and then converting it.  So that was the one I tried using now.  The problem did not occur there.  These differences in origins may have explained the difference in behavior.  It may also have had something to do with the differences in size.  The converted native machine was twice the size of the born-in-virtual machine.  Its size itself may have been an issue, or there may have been a problem with some program that I had installed within that larger machine.

Security Update: Windows 7

I was installing Windows 7, and decided to review the current situation in the area of security software.  This post summarizes what I found.

I was concerned about the possibility that some reviewers would be influenced by advertisers, so I started with About.com.  From their list of security software reviews, I went to the most recent AV-Test report.  Its top five antivirus offerings for Windows 7 in terms of protection, in descending order, were AVG Internet Security 9.0, G Data Internet Security 2010/2011, Panda Internet Security 2010, Norton Internet Security 2010, and F-Secure Internet Security 2010/2011.  The top five in terms of repair were Avira Premium Security Suite 10.0, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, Panda Internet Security 2010, Eset Smart Security 4.2, and F-Secure Internet Security 2010/2011.  The top five in terms of usability (which presumably included interference with other programs and other hassles) were BitDefender Internet Security Suite 2010/2011, F-Secure Internet Security 2010/2011, G Data Internet Security 2011, Kaspersky Internet Security 2010, and Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0.

I decided to treat protection and repair as two parts of the larger issue of effectiveness.  In terms of effectiveness, then, the programs appearing on both of those lists were Panda Internet Security 2010 and F-Secure Internet Security 2010/2011.  Of those two, only F-Secure also appeared among the usability top five.

The AV-Test report was cited by reviewers at various commercial sites, which nevertheless came up with somewhat different lists.  At TopTenReviews, the top five were BitDefender Antivirus, Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Webroot AntiVirus, Norton AntiVirus, and Eset Nod32 Antivirus.  The only one not having a perfect score on the three criteria considered by AV-Test (above) was Eset, on protection.  I also looked at CNET, which offered lengthy reviews of each program.  From their list of kinds of antivirus and filtering programs, I looked particularly at the Antivirus and Desktop Firewall categories.  The most recent review in either category was about 15 months old, which seemed ancient in antivirus terms.  Ranked by editors, the antivirus programs to which they gave four out of five stars (leaving out duplicates from earlier years) were Norton AntiVirus 2010, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6, McAfee VirusScan Professional 8.0, and McAfee Internet Security Suite 6.0.  At PCMag, the antivirus programs scoring at least 4.5 stars (excluding previous years' versions of the same programs) were Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9.0, Ad-Aware Pro Internet Security 9.0, Norton AntiVirus 2011, Norton 360 Version 4.0, and Webroot AntiVirus with Spy Sweeper 2011.  Security suites (drawn from an apparently overlapping list) getting that score were Norton Internet Security 2011, Norton 360 Version 4.0, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, and Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware 6.0.

I decided to treat PCMag as authoritative among commercial sites.  Their list diverged almost completely from the AV-Test list shown above.  I decided to rely on AV-Test above PCMag.  From their list, F-Secure Internet Security 2011 seemed to be the best program.  I wondered what would have happened if AV-Test had tested Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9.0.  CNET's review noted that the free version was not able to scan networked drives, a killer for my purposes.  It looked like I would be shopping around for a copy of F-Secure Internet Security 2011, available from their website for $40.