Tasgandy

Yes eFeM you are correct, however for those who do not have Win 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise could consider EasyBCD. PS: on my dual boot Win 7 (primary) and XP Pro unit I have just installed "sandboxie" on the XP Pro...run Returnil on the Win 7.......best of both worlds for my testing environment.

Now that's a clever response.............well done.

Nice one Hazelnut & a good warning, reminds me why I do not use things like Facebook, etc, etc, etc.

Copper Wire??? I am sure there was something before copper wire (perhaps lead or PEWTER) and they use it here in the exchange I am attached to. I am only 19 minutes by car from Hobart (bitumen road, mixed 50 / 60 & 80 kph) and I can not get ADSL2!!!!!! they maintain they need to upgrade the exchange, when asked WHEN WILL YOU DO THIS? the answer I get from the various ISP's I talk to is: Ah! gee's Mate were not sure, call back in 6 months will'yer. I currently sit on 512. Admittedly I am across the river and on the other side to Hobart. Never mind there are areas in Tasmania where they still only have dial-up!!!!!!!

Well it's all your fault Hazenut, so many comments about Sandboxie all glowing ones, thought I best give it a go on my newly built dual boot test unit. I have mentioned before that I am a keen user of Returnil on my Win 7 unit, I also have been using use Sun Virtual Box on my main XP Pro unit for a while now. Once installed on the new XP Pro build I must say I was very impressed playing in the "Sandbox", I do like the way one gets to recover (save) documents (in my case PDF's) which I do a lot of. Reason is that I "print to PDF" regurally while on the web and store these documents for future OCR and indexing. So I for one am enjoying this Sandboxie thread and will look forward to more play time with this application. Thank you for the previous kind words of yours re my Dual Boot exercise.

"Redhawk" was responsible for suggesting that I use EasyBCD for this exercise given that I had an existing Win 7 OS installed and wanted to install XP Pro on the same box. He also suggested that I disconnect the Win 7 HD so as to NOT corrupt the Win 7 drive by overwriting it with XP boot loader. I wish to not only thank Redhawk for his advice but also assure others that my wish to dual boot XP from an existing Win 7 PC not be shy about using a great little piece of FREE software.....EasyBCD. As my PC had several physical HD's (Win 7 OS installed on disc 0 - "C") I cleaned off and formatted drive "D" (disc 1) first then powered down. Disc 3 was also disconnected. This PC is a 5 year old Gigabyte P4, 2.8Ghz, 1.5gig RAM - all HD's IDE and 1 SATA DVD/CD, every day AGP 8X VC. I then physically disconnected disc 0 (master) and connected up disc 1 (changed from slave to master) and proceeded to boot and install XP Pro SP2, then update to SP3, install Avast 5.0, all Piriform SW, Macrium Reflect (free version), MS Office 2000 (yes a very old legal copy - only installed Word & XL which is all I need on this XP dual boot box), FireFox 3.6 & Mozilla Thunderbird. Run Defraggler & CCleaner, then power down. Swap disc 0 and disc 1 (master & slave over), boot up Win 7 (fingers crossed), all OK. Install EasyBCD and configure (took all of 10 minutes), went for the big test "RESTART". Well I'll be..........................there it was, I was presented with the promised outcome, I was to choose "Windows 7" OR "XP Pro", I then proceeded to boot Win 7 the primary OS, I then tested and re tested booting into XP then back to Win 7, several times, running SW and connecting to the internet, send and recieve e-mails, and to date no issues or problems at all. My dual boot XP / Win 7 has been up now and working for some 48 hours. Under a Win 7 boot (drive 0 & "C") the XP Pro named drive 1 - still appears as "D" drive. Both physical HD's are partitioned 50/50 so that System & Apps on 1 partition and Data on the 2nd partition on each HD. All I need to do now is to perform a Macrium Reflect Back-up for both OS's, create CD rescue disc for each OS and test them. I feel sure I will not have a problem. So given my first use of EasyBCD software and the above process from "go to wo" only taking about 3 hours whith many cups of coffee during the process I have no hesitation in recommending EasyBCD for a Dual Boot system. PS: EasyBCD is available from Neosmart Technologies

Good question well asked, at my age I am never in a hurry. well that's what everyone around me says.

I to always retain / use desktop icons, however a "uncheck all" option would be handy for some people in a hurry to complete the install. I for one read all that's on the screen during an install, just in case (Murphy's out there somewhere)

Well redhawk mission completed and all is OK thanks to your advice. Downloaded EasyBCD and notes from "Saltgrass" forum member of Neosmart, who has just completed what I was about to embark upon except using 2.0.0.76, he hit a brickwall when trying to boot his XP Pro OS. I downloaded 2.0.0.79. As my unit has 3 HD, 1 with Win7 and 1 data and 1 spare, I disconnected the Win 7 HD, (as you suggested) installed XP Pro SP2 (I'll do SP3 tonight), shut down, reconnected Win 7 HD as primary and the XP HD as slave, boot priority CD, HD (Win7), and fired it up. Once Win 7 was up I installed EasyBCD, performed the configuration, then commenced 4 cold reboots, 2 for Win 7 and 2 for XP.....magic........all works.........I have now installed all of my Apps SW with several reboots, all OK....many thanks.

Bootable: Yes Perform Cold imaging: Sorry I am not sure exactly just what cold imaging is. Perhaps DennisD can help

Three weeks ago I mistakenly installed a boot manager that took my system out on a reboot, all I got was a blue screen with a message..........never mind what the message was, BUT I had backed up, AND I had created a rescue disc, following the back-up and tested it. I was able to restore without a hitch, took about 3 cups of coffee - 45 mins. So create your rescue disc ASAP, you only need to do it once (unless you lose it). You don't even need to have your DVD/CD burner connected, you can create a rescue.iso as I did on my main PC, default save in the root of C. (no room for a DVD/CD burner at present....long story). I then burned the rescue.iso with Nero on my other PC that had a DVD/CD burner on board, burnt across the network. Then test the rescue CD with a loan USB DVD/CD drive plugged into the PC with no DVD/CD drive and "it's all good" the way it should be.

Beg to differ Mike 1025 but MR (Macrium Reflect) does allow you, even reminds you to create a "bootable CD rescue" disc. I have had to use it twice now. I now have MR scheduled to back-up weekly on 2 Units both having their own bootable CD rescue disc's PS: check out DennisD response and link.

Not sure about Visa but with Win 7 a shortcut placed on my desktop had the same "right click" features. I created mine from the "start - all programs" fly out. Why not give it a go Mike 1025 and let us know the result.

Re bandwidth the following I found interesting: The theoretical maximum data rate in USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s) per controller and is shared amongst all attached devices. Some chipset manufacturers overcome this bottleneck by providing multiple USB 2.0 controllers within the southbridge. Big performance gains can be achieved when attaching multiple high bandwidth USB devices such as disk enclosures in different controllers. Every other AMD, Broadcom, Intel southbridge supporting USB 2.0 has only one EHCI controller. All SiS southbridge supporting USB 2.0 have only one EHCI controller. All ULi, VIA southbridge, single chip northbridge/southbridge supporting USB 2.0 have only one EHCI controller. Also all PCI USB 2.0 ICs used for add-in cards have only one EHCI controller. In PCIe, the usual design with multiple USB ports per EHCI controller has changed with the introduction of the MosChip MCS9990 IC. MCS9990 has one EHCI controller per port so all its USB ports can operate simultaneously without any performance limitations. I have noticed that business card scanner I use (no seperate power supply, uses USB for the lot) will not work from the front USB ports but OK from the rear ports. This has happened on several PC's of mine. All Gigabyte MB's.

Not sure on a restoring an icon (short of a full restore, a bit drastic) all I can think of is locate the .exe file and create a shortcut.

Not exactly marmite, all you really need is MS Word stand-a-lone installed. All I have on my test unit is an old MS Word XP and Open Office Suite (latest version) configured to save documents as .doc so that when I run PDF to Word converter the resultant document.doc will open in Open Office. Still, I should have pointed that fact out, so thank you for doing so.

The "US" does a "U Turn" "U Butey" (Aussie slang for - you bloody butey)

Thanks to both ident & marmite for the advice I shall try Avast to take care of the lot and see what happens.

Since using Avast 5.0 I keep getting the following message: Please disable SSL/TLS in your mail client so that the Mail Scanner can scan your mail. The Mail Scanner will provide the SSL/TLS security itself. Now whilst I know how to turn this off, is it a good idea? safe? OR should I turn off the Mail Shield in Avast 5.0? PS: I am using Thunderbird as mail client on my Test Win 7 32bit PC.

URGENT, URGENT, do not let him throw the HD away. I have repaired / recovered many a HD's data etc. by using a IDE / SATA to USB cable Kit which also includes it's own power supply and power cable as in the standard white 5 pin IDE power plug (also the SATA power plug). This allows you to connect / power up and inspect / recover the data from the HD that will not start. Once you have done this you can them also perform a low level format, you may be able to rescue the drive at the end of the day. My success rate with this $45.00 AUS Kit 4 years ago has seen me save 80% of my customers HD's and data. PS: The brand on my unit is- Jentec Technology Co. LTD. model No. JTA0202Y They just call it a AC Adaptor. when I purchased it I just ordered a "IDE to USB powered Cable Kit". Hope this helps.

I took someone's advice on this forum did a "custom" install of Avast 5.0, selected 5 of the 7 shields available, all working fine, many re boots, all still OK, only the 5 selected shields running. No reminders from the tray icon either. As a matter of interest following the install (Windows 7 32bit) a re boot was not called for. Several hours in I did a manual "update" that then did require a re boot. PS: I find myself these days performing a Macrium Reflect back up every time I do a serious application install when not electing to install / test in the virtual world.

Every now and then I need to convert a PDF (possibly a brochure) to MS Word (or Open office that's configured to save / open MS .doc) and until now this has been reasonably successful but not always. A friend of mine suggested I try PDF to Word from AnyBizSoft; AnyBizSoft PDF to Word I have just downloaded this software, put it through it's paces, particularly on some PDF documents that Adobe Acrobat Ver 7.0 Professional where the results were not all that great. (can not afford the upgrade to version 9.0 or where ever it is now). The results with the AnyBizSoft PDF to Word were excellent, you really need to give it a go should you have the need for such a conversion. Now the best bit, version 2.5.3 is FREE, but only till the 1st of March 2010. PDF to Word Converter 2.5.3 Deutsch>>FREE Offer Expires on Mar. 1, 2010 Support encrypted PDF files conversion Support Microsoft Office 2010 and Windows 7 3 conversion modes?Batch, Partial, Right-click conversion modes Preserve text, layouts, images and hyperlinks in an editable Word document Note: Free Keycode is available for this version permanently! But Free offer cannot be used for commercial usage! So get your skate's on folks.

Tom AZ I normally "manual verify" following the successful back up, where does one turn on auto verify? I have just found the answer when I went to edit the XML definition file. It produced this message: Auto verify must be "N" for the Free version. Given another good month I am going to purchase a FULL copy, it's a great application. Saved my bacon once so far.

Now DennisD go to device manager again, USB controller list, properties, advanced Tab to see which USB (enhanced and universal) controller has the greatest % bandwidth. My PC has 8 USB controllers, 2 enhanced (1 @ 15% bandwidth & 1 with 10% bandwidth) all the other universal controllers have 10% bandwidth. Question: which UBS port is the 15% bandwidth one? They all have location and function numbers but I have not been able to identify which is which. Except that to back up my 30gig HD to my USB HD using Macrium Reflect takes about the same time as yours does. Maybe the next time I shall select a different USB port just in case the one I am using is only the 10% bandwidth allocation. I wonder if one can increase the bandwidth?