Microsoft disables a lot of commonly used device drivers once you’ve successfully booted Windows 7 on “your hardware”, and so changing the disk controller to SAS from IDE?

You have to know how to do that in the registry, and Microsoft doesn’t provide a UI way to do this.

The magic keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SAS
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SAS2

May as well hit this as well:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SCSI

Because why not? [shrug]

Now here’s the hilarious part.

There’s a DWORD subkey in there called “Start” that determines whether to load the driver.

You have to set it to 0 for the driver to load.

Yes, 0 is on, not off. Anything other than 0 (such as the default 3) is off.

If you forget to do this, you get to switch your virtual disk controller back to IDE for a while and then tolerate the systems change bollocking you’ll get later.

Inevitably doing this results in a call to the Microsoft activation centre to unscrew your Windows 7 licence plus the licence of every Microsoft product on your system, because using the online activation centre doesn’t work because of a flat refusal to reactivate your already activated installation.

And THAT is where this becomes like dentistry performed like sadists.

My words to the developer: YOU SICK LITTLE MONKEY! 🙂

That’s… just… I mean…

Wow. There are no words. I thought Microsoft’s OS was stupid in an OEM state, but I’ve only ever fooled around with it in a VM state for very light stuff, like running Internet Exploder through a VM in order to connect to a company VPN. (I still can’t get over the fact that my last banking job required Exploder to login remotely to my thin-client sessions. No wonder those guys got fined billions of dollars for sheer stupidity.)

But what YOU went through sounds like a visit to the dentist without anaesthesia.

Really looking forward to Windows 10 Pro in a VM here — I gutted the OEM install of Windows 10 Pro and started out with a recently upgraded version of Linux for the host OS, and so I get to experience this fresh hell again sometime soon.

I will say one good thing in favour of Win10: you can download and install it without a product key and it will still run and update and work. (More or less.) No more of that “OEM Key Required” BS.

I make no claims as to whether it works WELL as a VM. I really, REALLY hate Windows, so I try to avoid using it if at all possible. But the day may come wherein I have to install the full-fat version of MS Office 365 (groans) on a WinDOZE VM in order to get things done. So I may have to poke around at it a bit to figure out whether it works or not.

I like the idea of getting more laptops out of my laptop, and so, there’s VirtualBox.

Installing Windows 7 or anything after it aside from a server version within a VM yields the same annoying dance of mediocre or just plain awful disk performance.

It seems the consumer grade versions of Windows from 7 onward do this absurd dance routine involving processor core parking that effectively gives you even less CPU than you’ve allocated to the virtual machine.

And so I wound up with sub 10MB/sec disk speeds because of processor core dorking on a Getac B360 Pro which is no slouch of a laptop even when it’s idling, at least until I hammered around inside the registry to fix this and a bunch of other stuff that I shouldn’t need to fix.

I especially enjoyed the long call to Microsoft’s activation centre to reactivate my system after changing the virtual disk controller from IDE to SAS.

But the best workaround was to tell Windows 7 that I’m running on an i7-5000 series so I don’t have problems downloading system updates. Microsoft now wants to force people running on older CPUs to “upgrade” to Windows 10. The workaround is relatively straightforward to do once you learn how to set the CPU settings registers within VirtualBox so it simulates the “correct” hardware on VM startup.

Now my Windows 7 VM just pretends to be my old laptop’s hardware and it works.

Really looking forward to Windows 10 Pro in a VM here — I gutted the OEM install of Windows 10 Pro and started out with a recently upgraded version of Linux for the host OS, and so I get to experience this fresh hell again sometime soon.

If it were up to me, some Microsoft people would be in Interrogation Room 3 with some Irish people I know who are good at Benjamin Franklin-like experiments with electricity.

Q: What do a computer and an air conditioner have in common?
A: Both stop working when you open windows.

I have not tried linux, but I would not be against selling non DRM software with thorough instructions. They have to get some momentum and it can’t be done without profit.

You would be shocked at how far Linux has come, and how easy it is to try. All you need is a USB stick and an internet connection. Hell, you can even try Linux inside of Windows if you know how to setup a virtual machine. The process is very straightforward – just grab a USB stick, burn a disc image onto it, and boot into that stick image. You can then try everything without worries.

And it’s simply not true that great software needs a profit motive behind it. Linux comes with more free software than you can shake a stick at, and if you don’t use your PC for anything more complex than watching videos, listening to music, and surfing the web, then Linux is a complete replacement.

How hard is it to just not fix what is not broken? Is it too much to ask?

Oh and I haven’t forgot about the windows 10 update Microsoft was trying to jam up my throat years ago. I had Windows 8 and it was and works just fine.

I have not tried linux, but I would not be against selling non DRM software with thorough instructions. They have to get some momentum and it can’t be done without profit.

I admit, I have not switched because I don’t use windows for very complex tasks and (perceived?) complexity.

It’s quite funny how the situations have thoroughly reversed. Linux used to be the huge time-sink because doing simple things like hooking up a printer or installing device drivers was difficult and required a lot of annoying technical hacks. These days, though, Linux pretty much “just works” out of the box with some very beautiful and impressive graphics and features. And WinDOZE is just… AWFUL to use.

1.The attitude that you don’t buy the software, they let you use it.
2. Treating you like an imbecile. Updating endlessly, removing functionality that one uses under the guide they could hurt themselves.

I have a perfectly good SAN appliance. It has 2TB of my stuff. Which I can’t get to easily. Windows updated away SMB 1.X. So I re-enabled it. Now, it can’t find the SAN with a name, only an IP, even though the name is fine. All sorts are complaining in forums, not one fix works. They.Don’t.Think.You.Need.It.

Worse yet, browsers have been updated. I can’t get to a device from my browser from my lab web servers. You can’t use a device on a browser without HTTPS, Even though the setting says “ask”. So I have to get a cert for a lab server that sits in it’s own ecosystem.

Self cert, you say? heh…try it in windows. Oh, you’ll get the cert. You just can’t break it to a cert and a key without researching, downloading, and testing.

All that from a few updates. None of it – not one thing – can I not do on my linux box. That cert issue is a few commands on linux, not more than a few on powershell arglebargle on Windows.

It’s all a time sink. An hour or so to discover WTF it’s doing and why. Another hour searching the web to see who else has been screwed by this and trying this or that, followed by another hour on a teams call with my peers all because some nob won’t keep their shit updated and configured properly.