The wedding is now over, and the honeymoon taken, so it’s time to get back to work.  Part of that means getting back to work on my blogs and other things that have languished in the past few months as my attention has been directed elsewhere.

As part of that, last night I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the windows drive on my home office workstation from an aging Windows XP installation to the Windows 7 RC.

Since there’s no real upgrade path from XP to Windows 7,  and since I really had no desire to KEEP Windows XP,  I decided to reformat the XP drive and do a fresh install.

The installer was inexplicably slow,   especially since it was running on a Intel Core 2 Quad with 4 gigs of ram – certainly a beefy enough system to run it, and fast.  It took several minutes to get to a point where I could even start the install, and then the installer would hang at some points for absurd amounts of time spinning it’s wheels and appearing to do nothing ( it may be that it was processing in the background, but it honestly gave no indication that it was doing so).

After reading online that some people have had absurdly long install times (measured in hours) I got worried.    Especially since they indicated that after the install finished Windows failed to even start.    Thankfully, after the install completed Windows started just fine and everything seems to be working without any issues.  It would appear Microsoft needs to polish the installation a little bit more, but they’ve got some time to do that before the general release in October.

For me, the next (and last) gotcha was that this was  a dual boot windows/linux system,  and now the Grub bootloader stopped working.

This wasn’t a surprise to me – I actually expected it.   Typically, when you install a dual boot system you want to install windows first, THEN install Linux.   That’s not always feasible though, as seen in my case where I was upgrading to a new version of Windows.     Once you install windows, the bootloader no longer shows up and you can’t boot into Linux.

All is not lost!   The reason this happens is because Windows inserts it’s bootloader into the Master Boot Record (MBR), and set’s it as the priority after POST,  so instead of GRUB (or LILO, etc) loading first, the Windows bootloader does – and it doesn’t know about (or care about) Linux.

Luckily, this is ridiculously easy to fix.

The first thing you need to do is find a Linux Live CD,    in my case since I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 x64, I downloaded an ISO of the Install CD from Ubuntu.  Burn the ISO to cd, and boot to it.

Once you’re booted into the Live CD, open a terminal and type the following:

Sudo grub

This launches the grub prompt, and you should see “grub>” on your screen.   Once you see “grub>” , enter the following commands, pressing enter after each command.

Find /boot/grub/stage1

setup (hd0)

quit

In the above commands,  the first one will tell you the location of the stage1 file that Grub needs to determine where all of it’s files are.   It will return a location in the format of something like (hd0,1) use that value that it returns in the second command.   Continuing my example that would be root (hd0,1).

The second command tells grub that it’s files  are on a particular partition of a particular drive (in the example it’s partition 1 of drive 0).

The third command tells grub to set itself up on hd0, and when given without a value for partition grub then installs itself on the MBR.  hd0 is the label grub uses for the first drive’s MBR.

Quit is self explanatory

After you’ve finished that you can reboot the computer, remove the live cd and enjoy a working grub bootloader.

The problem I have is that while they gave me a Blackberry,  they don’t have a Blackberry enterprise server, and thus no push email,  or over-the-air sync of data from exchange.  Why is this important?  Simple: I get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day.  If I read them on my computer, my phone has no idea.  Since I read from my computer ALL THE TIME, my phone annoyingly shows several hundred unread messages.  To get rid of them?  I have to delete them one at a time, or reset my phone.  Removing the mail account they came in on leaves all of the messages.

Yes, you could call that “annoying”.

Yesterday I got so fed up with the Blackberry and decided to see how the iPhone (2g, 2.0 software) would fare paired up with Exchange and ActiveSync.  Turns out it fares surprisingly well.

Hooking it up wasn’t a problem – I put in my user info and let it auto discover the details.  Since we’re using the latest version of Exchange auto-discovery worked like a champ.  Older Exchange versions don’t have this issue.   

Once hooked up it was only a matter of a few seconds for the sync to start up and all of my data was pushed to the iPhone.  I could see ALL of my mail (not just my inbox, as on my Blackberry),  see my calendar and my contacts.

It pulls data from exchange, including the whole of the company directory – available in the contacts app.   

It supports multiple (color coded) calendars as well, helping me keep home and work separate – but also seeing both at the same time.

OTA push works like you’d expect – emails, calendar and contacts are all synced as they should be.

Overall I’m fairly impressed – it works well and manages to look polished and highly usable – something my Blackberry just isn’t capable of pulling off.