From the Engineering Windows 7 blog from the post Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation:

From a design perspective, we know that the visual presentation of a feature plays a key role in the user’s perception of performance and quality.  Our objective was to make Windows boot beautiful and was inspired by our Windows 7 personality of light and energy; and the way these forms reveal themselves in nature became our design palette.

What does this mean? It means it’s spruced up a bit.

Here’s the Vista boot screen:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:76ad5217-d5f5-482a-85c1-2c84e14e178d&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Windows Vista boot animation">Video: Windows Vista boot animation</a>

And now the potential Windows 7 boot screen (no sound as of yet):

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6b58ad0b-c45e-425e-b2f9-4bb2953f9420&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Windows 7 boot animation">Video: Windows 7 boot animation</a>

To note, the blog article specifically states that the Win7 boot anim is absolutely not the same ol’ 640×480 schtick that’s present in Vista. It will be 32 bpp along with better resolution and optimized performance code.

This is just a glimpse into the fact that Microsoft is taking the user experience very seriously, even when you first start your computer.

Said honestly, this does look better than Apple’s Mac OS X boot screen which is nothing but a plain Apple logo on white background. While that may not be a big deal for most people, bear in mind that Apple puts a very large effort into design and style. To have Microsoft actually have something that looks better than Apple is rare. The current revision of the Win7 boot screen as seen above makes OS X’s look old and obsolete.

If you happen to own a 1TB or 500GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, you’re most likely familiar with the firmware error at boot. So, naturally, what people will do is download the latest firmware update from Seagate to fix the problem.

The only problem with that is that when applied it seems to be bricking the 500GB versions of the drive.

Seagate is very aware of this issue, has taken down the update and is investigating it currently. And I’m quite certain a fix for it will be posted in short order.

See source link below for more information on what’s happening (this is really upsetting a lot of people for obvious reasons).

[Source: Channel Register]

Dumprep.exe is a non-essential (according to Microsoft) process that may be in your system startup. It is OK to remove this but obviously it’s not done by deleting dumprep.exe (that would be bad).

Instead we follow these steps:

1. Go to the Control Panel.

2. Double-click the System icon.

3. Click the Advanced tab.

4. Next to Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button. (Note: There are three buttons labeled as this – click the one specifically next to Startup and Recovery).

5. Under Write debugging information, click the drop-down menu and select (none).

It looks similar to this:

Click OK after that. You’re done here.

Next we have to check to see if this is listed in the System Configuration Utility.

6. Click the Start button.

7. Click Run.

8. Type msconfig in the field and then click OK.

9. From the window that appears, click the Startup tab.

10. Look to see if dumprep 0 -k exists. If it does, it would look like this:

You can safely uncheck this as it is not a vital system process (again, that’s according to Microsoft).

Once done you exit the utility.

Why do any of this?

Anything Windows doesn’t have to load on boot (especially that stuff that’s not required like dumprep.exe) will make it start up faster. Every little bit helps!

For those of you out there that run a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu, you’ve noticed that Ubuntu is the default OS that loads on each system startup. There is a way to change this so that XP is the default OS instead.

Full documentation:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto/ChangeDefaultOS

What that documentation instructs you to do:

The boot order list is in a text file called menu.lst. You can edit this using a terminal text editor or by using gedit (a GUI-based text editor).

The OS choice in menu.lst is defined by the default line and title.

If for example the default num is set to 0 and you have the following in your grub.lst:

title      Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-27-amd64-generic
...
title      Ubuntu, memtest86+
...
title      Other operating systems:
...
title      Microsoft Windows XP Home

“0″ is representative of the first title (it starts from 0, not 1), so you would want the default num to be 4 to start Windows XP first.

For those asking “Um.. okay, so Other operating systems: is technically treated as an OS choice?” Yes it is. That’s the way it’s done in order to display it in the menu on boot.

On my personal system, Windows XP Professional is listed as title 6.

This may sound confusing but it isn’t. All you have to do is when counting the title entries, find the first one (which is 0) then count down until you find the Windows XP entry. Change default num to that number, save the file and reboot. If successful, XP will start first on boot.

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one.

I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.

1. It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space).
2. I wanted to try out a "full" Linux distribution booted off USB installed via UNetbootin.

Last week I tried this out with smaller distros, but now that I had a full 2GB at my disposal I could try the CD-sized distributions. So of course I installed Linux Mint "live" mode on the stick and gave it a go.

Here’s what I have to report:

Now that I’ve experienced what it’s like to run a CD-sized distro off a USB stick, I can honestly say that this beats the ever-lovin’ crap out of using an optical disc. It is faster and smoother all around in operation, and quiet. No annoying spin-up/spin-down noises whatsoever.

If given the option I will always use this method of booting a live Linux distro over using the disc. No question. I highly recommend that if your computer has the ability to boot off USB, are curious about Linux and hate running anything off the optical drive, use this method.

Side note about UNetbootin: If you’re asking "can I make my USB an emergency bootable repair tool?" Absolutely. It supports NTPasswd, FreeDOS, Smart Boot Manager and several others. Like I said, if you can boot off USB, use the stick instead. See the UNetbootin web site for details on that.

If you have multiple boot options (i.e. XP, Linux, etc.) configured on your Windows Vista installation, or you just want to tweak some of the options available, you could use the command line tool BCDEdit or the much more user friendly EasyBCD.

From EasyBCD’s web site:

EasyBCD is NeoSmart Technologies’ multiple award-winning answer to tweaking the new Windows Vista bootloader. With EasyBCD, almost anything is possible. Setting up and configuring Windows boot entries is simple, and there is no easier way to quickly boot right into Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD straight from the Windows Vista bootloader – on the fly, no expert knowledge needed!

Since a lot of users who load Linux on their machines complain that the installation overwrites the Windows boot loader, this utility can be a great way to get the configuration back the way you want it (disclaimer: I have not tried to do this, but it makes logical sense that you could). There is an extensive screenshot gallery available to view and you can’t beat the price (free).

Vista users may want to make a bookmark of this page since you never know when it might come in handy.