Friday, December 21, 2007

Installing Vista Language Packs Take a Long Time

I've been doing some locale testing on Vista and needed to install a language or two. Rather than just install the languages I needed for the test, I decided to choose all the language packes available from Windows Update. Big mistake as it turns out. Unfortunately, I didn't run across this until I'd let the system run overnight (and still not finish).

From now on, I'll take the advice -- install one language at a time.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Deleting VMWare workstation snapshot faster

VWMare workstation is a product I use everyday in my development activities. I use it to create isolated debugging and testing environments. I tend take many snapshots so that I can easily rollback any changes I've made to the environment. As a result I often end up with a snapshot manager that often looks something like this:


I find that when deleting a snapshot and it's children VMWare often spends a great deal of time "cleaning up deleted files". Recently, however, I noticed that if I "Go to" a snapshot that isn't included in the set of snapshots that I want to delete things go much faster.
So in the example above, if I wanted to delete "snap 3" and its children (that is, "snap 4" and "snap 6", it will be faster to first go to "Snap 1", "Snap 2" or "Snap 5" before the delete.