About time I get this started… if Windows Vista will let me.

The Holidays are over, book is out, and I’m out of excuses.  It’s about time I get this rolling.

Honestly I sat down today to kick off the first post here at vmcoder.com with a look at a VMware Workstation 6 Beta 1 install on Windows Vista.  Three hours in now and I can’t stop fighting with Vista long enough to even get to the install.

By far the biggest problem is copying and moving files between hard disks.  Oh dear Lord what a slow and painful process.  In XP you drag a file, or group of files, and drop them in a new location like a second hard disk.  XP would just take off copying the files like crazy.  Well… not Vista.  I literally sat for 15 minutes watching Vista calculate the time remaining on a file copy before anything ever happened.  Then, once it started, it’s moving at a snails pace.  I could tap out the binary in morse code quicker than Vista is copying the files.

“Calculating time remaining…”  *sigh*

Oh… 20 minutes, yes I said 20 minutes, I now have 10 hours and 34 minutes remaining.  It’s a 900MB file being moved between two SATA drives on the same adapter.

Now, this problem is rather simple but might be harder to detect if you are unfamiliar with your machine setup.  It all boils down to drivers.  Vista by default did not install the proper driver for my Intel RAID/SATA card.  The driver it installed worked… kind of.

Quick fix (Temporary):  By default my Dell BIOS is setup to Autodetect RAID / AHCI.  This is found in the drives section of the BIOS.  My transfer speeds, according to the BIOS, were supposed to be 3.0GB/s.  So, I switched the BIOS to Autodetect RAID / ATA and rebooted.  Once Vista started up it started installing new drivers for the SATA devices, the controller, and the drives.  Once the drivers updated and I rebooted once again, at Vista’s request, the transfer speeds and file copy issues were gone.  This is a TEMPORARY fix.  You should use the better fix below.

Better fix: Jump on Intel’s site and use their ChipID utility to determine the chipset you have.  Once you have that information download the newest driver for the SATA chipset from Intel, install, and away you go.  This is by far the best solution but the above will work if you are in a pinch.

Now I can move on to the business at hand, VMware Workstation 6 Beta 1 on Windows Vista.  More to come.