Thursday, April 2, 2009

Windows 7 beta build 7068 on ASUS R2H

I haven’t noticed much change since build 7057 aside from a few small things. People using P2P TVs and torrents will be glad to know the new limit for half-open connections was raised to 120 where before it was as low as 10 connections, no need to use 3rd party tools to hack the tcpip.sys. This also the first leaked build that allows to choose which Windows 7 edition to install (see the feature list comparison here) – keep in mind that the key you got when downloading the build 7000 is for Ultimate edition - I found it complained when I chose to validate it with Professional edition, there might be some upgrade feature somewhere. There’s also a new build of Windows Media Player, 12.0.7068.0. Windows Experience Index is same as build 7057.

A few small performance tips, if you haven’t got a lot of those already :-)

  • Choose No Sounds scheme – that might speed things up a bit when moving about in Explorer;
  • Also for Explorer, in Folder Options choose Always show icons, never thumbnails.
    Since already there you might want to deselect the Hide extensions for known file types (I always found that one creating more confusion than being actually helpful);
  • Go to Device Manager > Disk Drives > HTCxxxxx ATA Device > Policies (tab) and select the Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device, see if it helps with I/O performance:

w7_write_cache_flush

6 comments :

  1. Hey Dan, i found your blog by doing a Search for R2H upgrade. I just got ahold of an R2H for £85 with no accessories except the battery from a wholesaler. I know im going to have trouble collecting the drivers and getting XP on there.

    Is there anyway you could give me a hand? I would really appreciate it, even pay if you could help. I'm probably going to have to install XP via a USB install.. which ive only done once on a small Dell laptop. Any help would be appreciated, if you happen to have a custom XP install with drivers i would paypal you $10-20 for that upload but any help would be appreciated.

    skalami@revenue.com

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  2. (Sorry for duplicate post, didn't know if you monitored old blogs...)

    Please help,,,, Like a fool I didn't see your warning (on 7057 blog) until it's too late.

    My R2H hangs on bootup now, I've got bios version 207.

    If the HDD is connected it gets to Ultra DMA Mode-5, SMART Capable and Status OK. but no further. If I press F2 or Esc, it will tell me that it's either Loading Setup or Boot Selection Popup menu has been selected, but doesn't do anything else.....

    If I disconnect the HDD, boot it on mains, I can get to BIOS, it can detect CD etc, but as there's no HDD I can't do much else...

    I've just ordered a ZIF / IDE converter to connect the HDD up to my other computer... is there something I can do to the HDD? I'm assuming it's that that's dead...

    It was all booting fine with Vista before... put Win7 (7077), went through setup after clearing partitions... but then on restart....???

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  3. Sorry I couldn't help more Dave, let us know if you get this fixed somehow. I hope it was just a coincidence and wasn't build 7077 fault, or if it was hope they get it fixed till the RC...

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  4. Thanks for trying though Dan!

    The ZIF/IDE converter should arrive midweek, so I'll try and connect the HDD to another machine and completely repartition it.

    I think (and hope) it's because of the system partition that Win7 makes...

    Thanks again!

    Dave

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  5. Does the R2H still lock up when you try to bring it out of sleep, or has that been fixed?

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  6. No problem there, I believe that's been fixed since build 7058.

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