JKCC Ltd.

Windows 7 Upgrade very slow

Jim Keir (Import) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:01:06 +0000

There's a lot of fairly useless information about this, mainly from deniers who insist that an in-place upgrade will never take more than an hour on any hardware with any amount of files. Sadly, not true.

Two reasons I found during a recent upgrade:

The IP Helper service was disabled

This is only supposed to be used for IP6, but without this on the upgrade will stall frequently. The solution is simply to make sure the service is started. If you're running an upgrade, then Vista is still running in the background. Simply hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard to bring up the start menu, then right-click on Computer, then Manage. Enable the "IP Helper" service.

Gathering files, settings and programs

Even after enabling the IP Helper service, this stage took over 24 hours to get to 44% before I started poking around some more. It seemed that the system registry was being written to a temp file with every change, which in my case was about 180Mb of file written and re-read for every key that got changed. The disk wasn't especially slow - hardware RAID in fact - but that's still a huge amount of I/O.

To fix this, I downloaded and installed the "Dataram RAMDisk" from http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk and created a 512Mb ramdisk. Once partitioned and formatted, I changed the system TMP and TEMP paths to point to the ramdisk. In the time it's taken me to type this, the installation has got to 83%.

Just remember to reset the original values for TMP and TEMP after the installation completes.

XCode's Storyboard doesn't work over VNC

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 18:14:29 +0000

It seems that the "killer feature" of XCode 4.3, the new Storyboard editor, doesn't like VNC. An important feature of this is the ability to hold down control and then just drag objects around to form associations, but over VNC, nothing happens. It's also not possible to move objects around on the storyboard.

I tried this with Lion's "Screen Sharing", RealVNC and Vine Server, all with the same problem. Also tried it with several different VNC clients, all with the same result. I don't have an answer for it except to wait for an update to XCode, but at least knowing that it's not just you might help.

I have to admit that I did give in and buy a Startech KVM...

VNC onto MacOS Lion has no keyboard

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 18:21:00 +0000

Trying to use a Mac Mini over VNC... last time I used it, it was fine. Tried today and got no keyboard response, even though the mouse was fine. Hadn't been restarted, hadn't had any patches applied.

Well, to cut a very long and tedious story short, it turns out that if you have a non-standard keyboard configured then none of the available VNC servers for Lion accept any keyboard input. I tried with built-in Screen Sharing, Vine Server and RealVNC all with the same problem. Also tried all of Vine Server's various keyboard input methods in the "Advanced" tab with no luck, using several different VNC clients.

So, I've had to remove my "GB Windows Standard" keyboard layout on the Mac Mini and revert back to the "Blessed by St. Jobs" one instead. Do that, restart the VNC servers and hey presto, I can type over VNC again (although half the symbols I need for programming are in the wrong place).