Windows 7 Upgrade Complete (x64 Woes)

by Eric on November 2, 2009

It has been a few days now on Windows 7. The upgrade went fairly smooth. Only a minor issue with my hard drives. If you were following my Twitter feed, you would have only heard about all the bad stuff that happened. Really, things went pretty well. Most of my issues are related to the lack of real 64 bit support. Even the 64 bit version of iTunes isn’t really 64 bit. Only a couple drivers are, iTunes.exe isn’t.

I wonder how long it will take for true 64 bit applications to be the norm?  Unfortunately, the demand really isn’t there yet. And because 32 bit applications still work fine, it will be a slow conversion. I am assuming the average computer user doesn’t even really know what 64 bit means, let alone be able to distinguish between the two. Really, I could see another 3 years before it becomes mainstream.

So far I haven’t had any showstopping issues with x64. I just bugs me that I have to install “inferior” 32 bit applications in my crisp clean 64 bit environment. Here is some of the programs I have installed that are 32 bit.

  • Adobe Reader
  • ffdshow (there is a 64 bit version, but I didn’t use it)
  • Haali Media Splitter
  • iTunes (the iPod service is x64, the rest is 32 bit)
  • KeyPass
  • Medieval CUE Splitter
  • Games for Windows LIVE Client
  • Microsoft Office
  • Windows Live Photo Gallery
  • Sliverlight
  • FireFox (there is 3rd party complied 64 bit binaries out there, but I heard that extensions and plugins don’t work)
  • Picard
  • QuickTime
  • Steam
  • uTorrent

This is a majority. And every game I have installed through Steam has been 32 bit. In fact, the only application that I use that is truly 64 bit is 7-Zip. At this point I am not too upset. Everything works at least.

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Windows 7 Upgrade Prep

by Eric on October 24, 2009

To prepare for upgrading to Windows 7 I thought I would make a list of all the programs, not including any games, I use on my PC. This first group is the stuff I use pretty frequently.

  • FireFox
  • iTunes
  • Steam
  • uTorrent
  • Office 2007
  • Picasa
  • KeePass
  • Picard Tagger
  • Ventrilo
  • 7zip
  • Bionic
  • Video Codecs
    • ffdshow tryouts
    • Haali Media Splitter
    • Media Player Classic
    • Divx

The following things I use less frequently.

  • Amazon MP3 Downloader
  • CDisplay
  • Curl RTE (for Puerto Rico Online)
  • FileZilla
  • Medievil CUE Splitter
  • ImgBurn
  • Audacity
  • Paint.NET
  • DAEMON Tools Lite
  • CCCleaner
  • Java
  • HighPoint RAID Management Software

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MSDB Indexes

October 15, 2009

I thought I would post this quick for the community benefit. Here are some indexes that I create on all my SQL Server machines to speed up some default purging routines. The default indexes that come in msdb just don’t cut it.

– To speed up execution of sp_delete_backuphistory
IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.sysindexes WHERE id=object_id(’msdb.dbo.backupset’) [...]

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Manually Set iTunes for Windows Playcount

August 29, 2009

Every once and a while I will replace a track in my music library with a better quality one. This little VB script that I wrote allows me to manually set the playcount of a track so that the new one has the same playcount as the old one. Enjoy.

Dim iTunesApp, currTrack, newPlayCount
Dim prompt, title, [...]

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