The Glade 4.0

New PC I built last night:


Innards:

• Antec Performance One Series P183 V3 Black Aluminum / Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
• Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC "compatible with Core i7/Core i5" Power Supply (now there's a mouthful)
• ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 AM3 AMD 880G SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
• AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Deneb 3.5GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Desktop Processor HDZ970FBGMBOX
• Antec Kuhler H2O 620 Liquid Cooling System
• Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT51264BA1339
• DIAMOND A5970PE52G Radeon HD 5970 2GB 512 (256 x 2)-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card - OEM
• SAMSUNG CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-222AB - OEM

Not shown: Harddrive. I'm going to try to take my WDD Caviar Black 500gb HDD out of my current PC and transplant it into the new one without Windows blowing up. If that doesn't work, I'll have to reinstall Win7 and restore from the Easy Transfer file I'm currently creating.

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sweet!

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In time, this too shall pass.

Windows 7 is moderately forgiving with Sysprep. It's able to migrate chipsets and HD controllers much more readily than previous versions.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Cool. I am wondering, why didn't you get 16GB of RAM instead of 8?

The thought never occured to me. I have 4 gigs of memory in my current PC, so the natural progression was 8.

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I've never used sysprep. Every time I've looked into it, it looked like a lot of headache I didn't want to deal with. What exactly do I want sysprep to do?

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Yeah, do this. Specifically with the out-of-box-experience option set. I haven't run into any major problems yet deploying cloned images like this onto dissimilar hardware. The Win 7 boot process is still awfully brittle compared to GRUB and the initrd system, but it's better than it used to be.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

You want sysprep to generalize your Windows installation, so that it can reboot and run the specialize process of the Windows setup again.

Essentially, sysprep is the proper way to strip drivers and other things tied to hardware signatures from your Windows installation, and re-install and reconfigure appropriate ones for a new set of hardware, without damaging the software installations and non-hardware related registy info.

You don't necessarily have to do the oobe that Stathol mentions, but it's probably the most user-friendly way.

Technet info on the generalize and specialize processes.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

So... I just run "sysprep /generalize"?

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Sysprep /oobe will also do it, without requiring you to manually build or modify an answer file. I don't remember if generalize will just be a download and it works thing or not.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Okay I found sysprep in C:\windows\system32\sysprep. I need to run "sysprep /oobe", and it will do some sort of magic. What happens after that? I just turn off the PC and transplant the HDD?

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Yes.

Well, "sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown"; otherwise it'll restart on you.

Then, transplant the HDD, power it on, and it should take you through the Out of Box Experience Windows setup stuff (network configuration, time zone, administrator password setup, etc.).

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ah ok. It doesn't sound like something I want to run right now, as I'll lose access to my PC for the rest of the day. I'll try it out tonight.

Thanks for the info.

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Sounds like something Woody Allen would design, were he a programmer.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Hey Mook, I'd be interested in knowing how the Antec Kuhler H2O 620 Liquid Cooling System works for you.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Will I only built the PC last night, so I haven't had much run time yet. I ran for about an hour, and the cpu stayed at 32C the entire time but I didn't really stress the machine. The system is also incredibly quiet. With both side panels off, barely heard anything.

The installation was kind of annoying because of terrible instructions, but once I deciphered them, it was fairly straightforward.

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Heheh, I understand, I was speaking more about in the future. Although the noise level is good to know, as I'd read differently, and I'd take your word for it over some random review writer any time.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I ran sysprep, transplanted the nds, and now I an stuck in a loop of this message.
Edit: wrong screenshot. The message is " windows could not finish configuring the system"

I can't even boot into safe mode. So... **** sysprep. Piece of ****. I guess I get to reinstall from scratch now.

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If you don't have a backup (didn't read that you did) put the drive back in the old box, see if you can get past that.

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In time, this too shall pass.

After rebooting into and out of safe mode a half dozen times, it randomly started working. Not exactly confidence inspiring.

I don't have a backup, but I ran the easy transfer utility, which I've used in the past to recover my data successfully.

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I think I'm all squared away with the new PC. I didn't have any games installed to tax the new system, since Minecraft doesn't fit the bill and I'm between SWTOR playtimes. So I reinstalled Portal 2 and tried that. Running it at the max settings, 16whateverx14whatever resolution, the card was only 23% loaded.

I spent over an hour trying to figure out why the network was so slow. I installed 2-3 drivers from different sources and played around with the NIC settings. Finally I realized that the file I was trying to copy was 160 gigabytes and not 160 megabytes. Oh... I guess my network is fine.

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Lol on the 160 GB file. =)

Sorry the sysprep thing didn't work smoothly for you. Not sure what went on there.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'm glad you got it going, I'm also glad it's not just us ignoramuses that make "D'oh!" mistakes.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Looks fantastic Mookhow. Liquid cooling too, never tried that.




No Solid State drive? I just made the switch on my latest PC and I'll never go back. NEVER!!!

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Budget was running thin at that point.

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