Booting Windows 7 Installation From USB Drive

Windows 7 gives us possibility to install itself from USB drive (yes, you can do it with Windows Vista also). This is, at least in my eyes, great option since USB is much faster and comfortable option to work with. It is much easier to take USB than to burn DVD each time I need to install Windows on some computer.

Procedure to make USB proper boot drive is done with DISKPART utility.

DISKPART

LIST DISK

SELECT DISK 

CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
FORMAT FS=FAT32 QUICK
ACTIVE
EXIT

Please take great care which disk you select (my USB is marked red). If you select wrong one, you WILL lose your data.

If format gives you error that file system is unsuitable for formatting just unplug USB and repeat whole procedure. For some reason that solves all formatting problems. You can also format it from Explorer window and continue with next diskpart command if that is more convenient.

After everything is done, mount/insert Windows 7 (or Vista) installation DVD. Notice which drive letter is it (mine is F:) and which drive letter is your USB (mine is W:). Then copy all files from one to another using xcopy:

XCOPY ^^F:^^*.* /e /f ^^W:^^\

After everything is copied, your drive is ready.

If booting does not work, be sure to enable Legacy USB support in BIOS. It worked for me.

Color Combination Thou Shalt Not Use

Currently there is handball world championship in Croatia. I am not such a big handball fan so I don’t even plan to visit any game (played some 20 minutes of walking distance) but I do plan to watch it on TV few times.

I was at my parents place yesterday doing some unrelated work, but with TV near it was difficult not to scan a result from time to time. I cannot help it if I am curious person. But my curiosity had huge problem (or small one) - font and coloring of part that was displaying game result. Somebody - I can only assume professional designer - decided that red numbers on light red background should be used.

I do wear glasses when I work on computer but my vision is good enough to be able to do all other tasks without them (those who are familiar with my habit of loosing glasses everywhere know that I also do programming for few days without them). If I cannot be sure what numbers do I see on it on 72cm TV from other side of room, my father had no fighting (seeing) chance.

I give you enlarged part of that (captured and cropped from RTL’s own video at resolution of 1280x1024). On this picture you can see how really close colors are.

I am angry when vision of some designer (or even worse - designer comity) decides that need for fire theme is more important than actual readability of final solution. I can partly understand their (probable) excuse. They were all doing work on high-resolution, high-fidelity monitors and that problem was not visible there. What was missing was that final testing phase: looking at whole thing from user perspective. User perspective in Croatia is still CRT TV and HD is rarely to be found.

There is real lesson to be learned here even for application development. Always test your program in your user’s environment. “It works on my system” is a poor excuse for user.

Races

I am of course speaking about Starcraft races. I am very lousy player with all of them so take this post as a advice to worst players out there.

Terran

Nice race with great defense possibilities. If you like turtleing they are great and once you reach 200/200 your army is most powerful thing there is.

Protoss

Really powerful race with great units for offensive play. Real problem is when you need to defend. There is not too much special abilities out there so there are not trouble to manage when you have a big army.

Zerg

Insects that reproduce really fast. Their abilities are something not seen in any other game so playing with them is a really good fun. Units tend to get very specialized in late game so you may have a problems with deducing proper ratio of them.

Which one do I use?

I haven’t decided yet. :)

Since all races are somewhat same (in regards with power, unit-wise they are totally different) once you get to know them, it all comes to personal preference. In that light, terran does not suit me - they are just too plain.

I played with zerg a lot and they definitely have nice air units but somehow I never use their special abilities to full extend so defence from terran army is a huge problem to me. Especially when terran goes around hunting my overlords and then attacking me with invisible wraiths. Although they are not meant for that, defense is (for me) much easier with them than attacking. But if you can attack early there is no force that can resist.

Protoss is my current favorite since it allows me great land and air army. Detectors are fragile as zerg’s but my economy is not hurting as much when I lose them. There are also invisible units there so harassing other players just comes naturally. With successful harassing, there comes a victory also.

[2010-02-15: I decided. I will be the Protoss. :)]

Process Explorer

I am using various Sysinternals’ tools from time when they were still called Winternals. Among all those tools there is one I use every day - Process Explorer. It is replacement for Task Manager and you can even configure it to use it’s shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-Escape). However there are few problems.

Selecting a program

Task Manager allowed you to select program by typing first few letters. Typing EXP (fast) would select explorer.exe. In Process Explorer there was same feature but somehow it got lost during updates. If you type EXP there you will end up with P*.exe selected. This caused me to kill wrong program few times. This is fixed in Process Explorer 14.

x64

Although Process Explorer does support 64-bit windows it does it by packing 64-bit executable within his 32-bit executable. Solution is definitely strange and has one awful consequence - it needs write rights to his directory in 64-bit Vista.

Good things

Everything else :). My favorite would be search for open handle - it solves that problem when one process is holding file open and you cannot delete it (or eject usb drive) because of it. Also useful is option to track memory usage history per application. Total control over what exactly is displayed is just a cherry on top.

Great Archivement

What is my great archivement for today?

Few minutes ago I have beaten computer in Starcraft for the first time. I was playing Protoss, computer was playing Terran and map in question was Chupung-Ryeong.