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How nice would it be to have the view out of your windows be, well, anything? I’d have something with the ocean in it I think. The Golden Gate bridge bit looked really nice & that’s got water, so it’d be a good start. The train journey one would prolly make me a bit nauseous though!

Where or what would you have?

I went to clone a USB hard-drive onto another last night, and because VirtualBox USB throughput is pretty slow, and there was a couple of hundred GB to copy, I booted into Windows to do it. So far, so good. Only at some point during the night Windows decided to install some petty IE fix or some shit, and then proceeded to restart my box. Mid-clone. It probably put up a 15 minute warning saying I’m going to reboot your box unless you stop me, and then without any further input just did it.

That is just some of the most wrong-headed thinking I can possibly imagine. It’s basically saying: I don’t give a shit about anything you’re doing. I don’t care if you haven’t saved your files or you’re in the middle of something. I’m just gonna reboot. Because I want to. And I’m in charge, not you.

You can fix this default, and frankly rage-inducing, behavior as follows:

1.) Fire up the Group Policy Editor by going Start | Run | gpedit.msc

2.) Go to: Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update and modify the No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations to Enabled

3.) Reboot for it to take effect. (How ironic )

It should be noted that if you’re on a domain, domain-level settings can override group policy ones, and that after the restart window will still pop up after updating Windows – it’ll just never reboot the machine without user confirmation that it’s okay to do so.

Oh, and if you’re on Vista Home Edition, you don’t even get group policy tools in the first place, in which case you can get busy with the registry as per this article – or use the registry file they provide, or just use this Auto Reboot Remover tool.

By default, any Hard Drives you create for your Virtual Machines use a virtual IDE controller, which takes more CPU to operate and is slower in operation than a virtual SATA controller. So, it’d be nice to just flick a switch and say Use a virtual SATA controller instead and get instantly higher disk performance, right? Only Windows will BSOD on you if you try that, so you have to do a bit of tweaking first for it to work.

1.) While Vista and Windows 7 come pre-installed with SATA drivers, XP does not – so if your virtual guest OS is XP you’ll need to go get the Intel Matrix Storage Driver from here. Note: Please see the bottom of this article for Windows 7 IDE to SATA instructions.

Update: Some people have reported that Intel have changed the version of the Matrix Manager and it no longer works with VirtualBox (see comments), so instead, why not try this, which is the version of the Intel SATA Matrix Manager driver I used when I did this originally. Launch the installer and slap Next/Next/Finish until it’s installed.

2.) Next we need to remove our current IDE/ATAPI Drive Controllers from the Device Manager, so right click on My Computer and select Manage from the pop-up menu, then click on Device Manager in the left pane of the Computer Management window and expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section in the right pane.

3.) You should see Primary and Secondary IDE Channels, plus some other bits as pieces as shown in the screenshot above – now it’s time to delete them by selecting each one in turn and then pressing the delete key on the keyboard. It might look like a dodgy thing to do, but trust me – I found this trick out while working as a Subsystem Integration bod. If you’ve got one build running on one piece of hardware, and you want to transfer the entire build (via ghost or whatever you want) to another piece of hardware with different controllers, you’ll get a BSOD unless you first delete the drive controllers like this, backup your build, and then ghost it to your new hardware setup.

After you delete each one Windows will say you need to reboot for changes to take effect – don’t. Get rid of as many device controllers as you can, and don’t worry if the Primary IDE controller comes back on its own as soon as you’ve removed it, it’s just there to keep things ticking over until you finally do reboot.

4.) Power off (not suspend) your Virtual Machine then click on the Settings button with the machine you’re working on selected. Then, under the Storage item of the left pane remove your virtual machines hard drive from the IDE Controllers section, add a New Controller and choose SATA Controller, then add your virtual hard drive to the new SATA Controllers section as shown below:

5.) Boot up your virtual machine and once logged in let it thrash around setting up your new devices. Once it’s done that, it’s gonna be rather keen to reboot. Let it.

6.) After you’ve rebooted from the above step, hover your mouse cursor over the drive activity icon and you’ll see it’s running under a SATA controller; lower cpu usage and faster disk throughput is deservedly yours

Note: VirtualBox will set SATA Controllers 0 through 4 to work in IDE compatibility mode by default, so you might want to switch to SATA Controller port 5, or anything higher than 4 to run in true SATA mode, only when I tried this (after first leaving it as port 0 and booting, admittedly) the machine couldn’t find the drive if I switched it to 5. Could be try that before rebooting after IDE -> SATA controller change, but I’m not in the mood to go through all that again.

If you want more info, try: Understanding and Configuring Virtual Box Hard Disks

Cheers!

Credits: Article based on and adapted from Matt Bottrell‘s IDE -> SATA changeover technique found here.

Update for Windows 7 IDE to SATA migration: If you want to switch a drive from a IDE controller to a SATA controller in Windows 7, then you need to perform the following steps:

1. Make sure that both a SATA and your current controller are being presented to Windows. The SATA controller doesn’t need to have any disks attached to it. Once you have done so boot up Windows.
2. Remove the IDE controller as described in the above URL [which is Step 2 in this article -r3dux]. Shutdown Windows from inside the guest.
3. Move the image over to the SATA controller by removing it from your current controller and adding it to the SATA controller
4. Boot up Windows again and it should boot into Windows, detect the changes and prompt you to restart when done as per the above instructions

Props to NetMusician.org for the Win 7 adaptation!

Think 25% CPU usage is unacceptable for a software firewall? You’d be right.

Steps to fix:
- Ctrl + Shift + Right Click on Zone Alarm icon in the system tray and select Set debug level from the pop-up menu
- Set Debug Level to Off by clicking the appropriate radio button in the Set debug level window
- Click [OK]
- Restart Zone Alarm (i.e. quit then restart it)

Works on:
ZoneAlarm version:9.1.007.002
TrueVector version:9.1.007.002

Feel free to delete the stupendous amount of logging dirge left behind by Zone Alarm’s “writing phase” in C:\Windows\Internet Logs while you’re at it.

When you connect to a NAS in Windows, it will often helpfully remember the username and password of the NAS account it got access through. Forever. So, if you want to log into the NAS as a different user, well – tough. Windows already has a working set of credentials, and by jingo it’s gonna use them. The fix? From the command prompt, enter:

net use * /delete /yes

This will get rid of all connected share credentials, however you may want to just get rid of the credentials for a specific share. If so, you can use:

net use \\YOUR-SHARE-LOCATION /delete /yes

For example, the get rid of the credentials for the “Code” share on my NAS:

net use \\ETHERNET_BD\Code /delete /yes

Now, to map the share to a drive and give it the credentials YOU want Windows to use, go with:

net use DRIVE-LETTER: \\YOUR-SHARE-LOCATION NAS-USER-PASSWORD /user:NAS-USER-NAME

So, if I wanted to map the Code share of my NAS to the Z: drive, and access it with a user called bob who has a password MyClevahPass123, I’d use:

net use Z: \\ETHERNET_BD\Code MyClevahPass123 /user:bob

Done & dusted.

Please Note: The credentials you supply must be the username/password of the user the SHARE knows to grant access to, not just your own Windows username/password. Just clarifying =D