Timing of building a new system

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Based on the frustrations I've experienced procuring parts for the now-shelved new PC, perhaps there's a business opportunity to set up a local 'Egg!
Do you have a lot of money on the side? If not, forget about a retail store. To run a store, you need to keep a lot of inventory. Inventory = frozen money. You buy a lot of stuff that you pay upfront, hoping you'll make money on it sometime in the future. In the meanwhile, the invoices keep coming and you need to pay them even if haven't sold as much as you thought you would. When you're starting, you need to advertise to let people know that you exist. I don't know about you neck of the woods, but here advertisement isn't cheap and you're rolling the dice every time you try it without knowing if it will pay off. Sometimes, most of the time in fact, you end up missing your targeted customers pool.

Also, you do not start a store alone. It worked in the eighties and nineties (when Tony and perhaps Buck began), but it certainly doesn't work nowadays.

My advice : find a new job. Now.
 

Handruin

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Also sorry to hear f the job troubles. I hope things work out for you.
 

mubs

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Thanks all, for the concern and best wishes. That's what makes this a swell place.

Coug, I was only half serious about starting a business. If I ever do go that route, it most certainly will not be a physical store, but a web based one. And you're absolutely right about not doing it alone; I couldn't. And I certainly don't have that kind of money lying around. I'm going to look for a job first of course.

I'm going to get the Crucial 64 GB SSD to be the Win7 boot drive. Will use my present system for a while and see how it fares. I'll bump up the 2 GB RAM to 4 by using the 2 sticks I bought from Clocker in fall 2007 but haven't yet put in the system! Using 4 sticks will slow down the timing somewhat, but I guess 4 GB is better than 2 for Win 7. My work laptop has 2 GB and is running Win 7 Enterprise, but I think lags are because of the Seagate Momentus drive: 120 GB 7200 RPM, but 8 MB cache and only 59 MB sustained transfer rates.
 

mubs

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I decided to be prudent and skip the SSD for now. I do have a spare 250GB HDD I can make the boot drive for Win 7, but fitting it in to the case with the other drives already in there would be a pain.

Prob is I can't afford any downtime. If I was building a whole new system, I could have kept my current system as is while I gradually installed apps on the new one till it was complete and then decommissioned the present one. Now I'll have to dual boot on the same machine.

My current XP boot drive already has about 50GB space at the beginning that I had left when I last organized the disk. Win 7 was intended to go there. According to this thread, dual booting XP and Win7 on the same drive is fairly easy.

I'm not an entire noob as far as dual booting goes; have done it with W98/W3.1, W2k/W98.

I'll image the current XP boot partition before I touch it, of course. I understand W7 may put its files on other partitions (I'll disconnect the other drives), but that shouldn't be a problem because this system will continue as is till I am able to build the new m/c in 6 months or a year.

What do y'all think?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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A Windows 7 install that is regularly updated will eventually grow larger than 50GB thanks to the WinSXS folder. It will certainly fit in that space initially, but over the course of a year or so, maybe not.
 

mubs

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Thanks for the heads up. I can repartition now to make more room; not a problem.

My work laptop has been running Win 7 Enterprise for about 18 months, and the 'C' drive is now using 22.4 GB. It has MS Office Enterprise 2007, Visio Pro 2007, Project Pro 2007, VC++ Redistributable, Acrobat, and a bunch of stuff.

It gets updated regularly through WUS internally. SP1 was installed much after the original installation.

WINSXS is 4.36 GB.

Maybe there's a setting that keeps it in check?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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WinSXS on the notebook I'm using at the moment is 12GB. This install is perhaps 15 months old.

But I've seen Vista machines with 70GB WinSXS directories, which makes me think that the potential for massive directory bloat exists.
 

ddrueding

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As an interesting aside to this, if you have installed 7 SP1 and are OK with making it permanent you can get some space back by clearing the uninstall files:

Press the "Windows" key, type "CMD"
Right-click on the "CMD" and choose "Run as Administrator"
In the Admin command line, type the following without quotes:
"dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded"

This should take several minutes and clear 3-5GB.

I've tried it twice with success both times.
 

BingBangBop

Storage is cool
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I tried it. Got an error:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 6.1.7600.16385

Image Version: 6.1.7600.16385


Error: 87

The spsuperseded option is not recognized in this context.
For more information, refer to the help.

The DISM log file can be found at C:\Windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log

I looked at the log, lots of text (about 26KB) but I didn't see an error there.
WinSxS Folder size before 106MB after 106MB

Now mind you, this Win7 install does not auto-update. I tend to do it manually and only very occasionally.
 

Handruin

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I tried it. Got an error:



I looked at the log, lots of text (about 26KB) but I didn't see an error there.
WinSxS Folder size before 106MB after 106MB

Now mind you, this Win7 install does not auto-update. I tend to do it manually and only very occasionally.

I get the same error. I'm running Win 7 64-bit and there is no 'spsuperseded' argument to this tool listed in the help.

My WinSxS folder is 13GB on my work machine.
 

Handruin

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Yeah, if SP1 isn't installed then the tool to remove the SP1 uninstall information should probably fail ;)

That was stupid of me. I thought I was at SP1 on my work machine, but you're correct...I did not have SP1 installed.
 
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