I’ve been beta testing Windows 7 (64 bit) since it’s release and my verdict is that it is very good, and quite an improvement. I’m not going to rehash all the reviews that are available out there, however despite the naysayers (“Vista owners should be angry”/”It’s a Vista Service Pack!” ) I’m quite happy with the improvements. You never hear people complaining that the 2008 Honda Civic owners got ripped off because the 2009 Honda Civic has a sleeker design, a tweaked engine, bigger tires and better traction control. It is what it is!
Windows 7 is my first foray into a 64 bit Windows OS, although I’ve used various 64 bit Linux distributions. Sadly, I discovered that a favorite application of mine,Sandboxie, will not work in Windows 7 64 bit, or Windows Vista 64 bit. For technical reasons, it is effectively blocked from interacting with the kernel. Sandboxie provides a valuable tool for anyone who is trying out new software or doing anything else that may cause negative interactions with the operating or file system by effectively isolating (Sandboxing) whatever application you wish it to. It intercepts all read and write calls for that sandboxed application and will only commit those changes if you specifically want it to.
Anyone who’s used Windows is familiar with the bloated slow down that occurs over time, and sandboxie is an excellent tool to help manage and prevent this. PC Safeguard is a cool new feature in Windows 7 that provides sandboxing of user accounts, although it isn’t as comprehensive and the sandboxed changes are lost upon reboot. The sandboxed user is also a standard account, so installing software prompts for Administrative access, and Administrative access changes are not sandboxed, so it is not effective at all for testing new software.
What to do, what to do. I’ve got Virtual PCs that I use that are great, but I wanted a tool to be able to maintain a baseline of performance for my main system. In my search I discovered Rollback RX by Horizon Datasys. It peaked my interest as it’s a very mature application at v9.0, and it claimed to be able to rollback almost instantly to previous ‘baselines’ of your system. Although my interest was peaked, I was quite skeptical. How can this be? Voodoo? In the past I’ve used TrueImage to create a baseline, and then on a semi-regular basis create update images so I could recover my system quickly if needed. Quickly like 20-30 minutes quickly.
Well, I’ve been using RollBack RX for a week now, and I must say it is absolutely -brilliant-. I’m not sure how I could not have discovered this application before now. It works by creating a layer between your operating system and the hard disk drive. It circumvents any Windows interference by loading up before operating system is even called (Not wanting to get too technical, it replaces the bootloader). It then intercepts all read and write calls to the hard drive and redirects them as required. Again, it’s quite technical and I don’t want to delve too deep into that, but it works on a sector basis rather than cluster (Windows) basis for accessing the hard drive. When making changes to the system and then taking a snapshot, it basically protects those sectors that are in the snapshot, and any attempts by windows to write to that sector are redirected to another sector. It takes a snapshot in literally seconds, and restoring is as simple as selecting the snapshot you want and rebooting.
I highly recommend trying it out–it will cleanly uninstall if you want to remove it.
The question is, is there any performance hit? I’d say that yes, I’ve noticed a (very) slight performance hit as I get more and more snapshots in the system, because the hard drive is jumping around a lot more for reads and writes. This is due to the one drawback that I’ve found with the software. Defragmenting your hard drive through Windows is completely useless, and the Rollback RX system will see these as significant changes to the system, creating a much larger snapshot file. The underlying data that has been defragmented will not really be defragmented at all, but windows will think it is. Is this negative enough to not use the software? Not a chance. Just do a full defragmentation before you install it. It does have a built in degramenter for the snapshots that will organize them and free up space from deleted snapshots, but it’s not quite them same.