SAN FRANCISCO – Every operating system needs an occasional repair job, and Windows 7 is no exception. Whether the source of the problem is corrupt data, a particularly brutal piece of malware, or some other serious issue, you’ll occasionally have to reinstall your copy of Windows.

Wiping your hard drive and performing a fresh installation can be a huge headache; but fortunately there’s a way to repair a corrupt Windows 7 installation while keeping all your programs, personal data, and user accounts intact. With Windows 7 you can perform an in-place upgrade installation to repair a flaky existing install. Though technically designed to upgrade older Windows operating systems like Vista, the in-place upgrade installation option can also be used to repair an existing installation of Windows 7.

Note that you must perform the in-place upgrade process from within Windows; if your PC can’t fully boot to the Windows desktop, this repair guide is not for you. A few other limitations come up later in the article, so be sure to read the entire guide thoroughly before attempting to repair your corrupt copy of Windows 7. Performing a repair installation should be your last resort, and you should consider it only if you have already removed spyware from your PC, reinstalled your drivers, and unsuccessfully tried to restore from an earlier (working) version of Windows 7 using System Restore.
Prepare Your PC for Windows 7

Before performing a repair installation, you should take a few precautionary measures to ensure that the process goes smoothly. The first step is to back up all of your critical files to an external storage device. Though the repair process is unlikely to fail or to render any of your files unrecoverable, it’s always a smart idea to back up your data.
After you’ve backed up your system’s important data, we recommend uninstalling any third-party security software such as firewalls or antivirus applications. You can always reinstall them after completing the repair process; but since you’ll be initiating this process from within Windows, you need to remove any security applications that actively scan files. You should also download and store all of the drivers that your system needs to function–especially the network controller, which tells your network adapter how to access the Internet.

After backing up all of your drivers, clean out all of the temporary files and junk data that have accumulated in Windows 7 over the course of prolonged use. To do this, click the Start button, and in the Search field type Folder Options; then press Enter. In the Folder Options window, click the View tab and select Show hidden files, folders and drives; then click OK.

Next, initiate a Disk Cleanup by opening the Start menu and selecting Computer; right-click your primary drive (the C: drive by default) and open the Properties menu. Select the Disk Cleanup utility in the lower-right portion of the menu, and select Clean up system files. The Disk Cleanup utility should take a few moments to rescan the drive. Next, click the More Options tab, and select Clean Up in the ‘System Restore and Shadow Copies’ section at the bottom of the menu. In the dialog box that appears, click the Delete button; then navigate back to the Disk Cleanup tab, confirm that all items in the Files to Delete list are checked, and click OK. The Disk Cleanup utility should clear out outdated system files, temporary data, and other digital detritus. Depending on how much junk data is on your drive, this step may take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.

After running the Disk Cleanup utility, you should clean out a few folders manually. Open the C: drive again, and double-click the Windows folder. Scroll down the list of folders and delete any files in the Prefetch and Temp folders. Be sure to delete only files within those two folders and not the folders themselves. Next, navigate back to the C: drive, and double-click the Users folder. Within the Users folder, double-click first the folder for your particular username, and then the AppData folder (if you don’t see the AppData folder, you must not have selected ‘Show hidden files, folders and drives’ earlier), the Local folder, and finally the Temp folder. Delete all of the files in this Temp folder as well; then restart your system.

Install Windows 7

Having completed the prep work, you can safely begin the Windows 7 repair installation. You’ll need a Windows 7 installation disc that matches the version of Windows already installed on your system, and you’ll need at least 10GB of free space on the drive where you intend to install the new version. The installation media must be able to deploy a clean Windows installation, which means that custom recovery discs from your system manufacturer or another OEM probably won’t work.

To begin the repair installation process, insert the installation media and run Setup (if it doesn’t launch automatically). In the Setup window, click the Install Now button, and you’ll have the choice of continuing the installation with downloadable updates or without them. If your Internet connection is working, you should probably choose to download the updates, but you can choose whichever option suits your fancy. Next you must accept the terms of the license and then choose whether to perform an Upgrade installation or a Custom installation. You’re repairing a corrupt install, so choose Upgrade (the Custom option won’t save your personal files or settings).

After you’ve selected the Upgrade option, the installer will perform a compatibility check; your system should pass with flying colors, since you were already running the same version of Windows 7, but double-check to confirm that there aren’t any red flags. Once the compatibility check is done, press the big Next button, and the Upgrade/Repair installation process will begin.
If the Upgrade option is unavailable for some reason, you can still perform a repair by using a simple workaround: Right-click the Setup file before you run it, and select the Properties menu. From there, navigate to the Compatibility tab, and check Run this program in compatibility mode for:. Then select Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) from the drop-down menu. Be sure to also check the box at the bottom labeled Run this program as an administrator; then click OK. Run the Setup utility again, and the upgrade installation option should be available.

The next few stages of the repair process don’t require any user intervention. The installer will gather information about your system, copy the necessary installation files, and then move any personal files or programs over to the fresh version of Windows 7. This process isn’t especially fast (a typical repair install took about 40 minutes on our test machine), but the amount of time required will vary from system to system depending on how much data needs to be transferred from one Windows 7 installation to the other.

Though most of the data and programs installed on your original copy of Windows 7 should make the move the new copy, a few things (such as custom themes and sounds) will not. You’ll have to reinstall those after completing the fresh install.

Clean Up After the Windows 7 Install

Once the upgrade installation process is complete, you’ll be prompted to activate your fresh install and answer a few basic setup questions (time and date, network settings, and so forth). At the end of this setup process Windows, will assess your machine’s performance to generate an appropriate Windows Experience Index rating, and then perform a few final updates and repairs to complete the installation. Once the entire installation process is complete, you should poke around in your new version of Windows 7 to verify that all of your files are intact and all of your applications are working properly. Run Windows Update to ensure that your fresh copy of Windows 7 is entirely up to date.

To wrap up the installation process, you need to clear out the old junk data left over from your corrupted version of Windows 7. Windows will store this data in two system folders, labeled $INPLACE.~TR and $WINDOWS.~Q. If everything is working properly, you can delete these two folders, along with some other archived data. Follow the steps we outlined earlier to perform a disk cleanup, select Clean up system files, delete the two folders, and you’re done. Congratulations, you’ve successfully brought your Windows 7 PC back from the brink of corruption! Make sure to keep this guide handy, in case you ever need to repair a corrupted copy of Windows 7 again.

SAN FRANCISCO – Reader Ash wants to know if there’s a way to password-protect individual folders in Windows 7:

“I have a PC and I am the main user of it 95% of the time. As such, I don’t have it request a password from me when it boots, and haven’t setup any user accounts. Occasionally, other people will use this PC, but there are a few documents and personal files I’d like to keep hidden with a password.”

Seems logical to me. Alas, Windows lacks any kind of file- or folder-specific protections. You said you wanted to accomplish this without third-party software, but I’m afraid that’s the only real option. (With multiple user accounts, it’s possible to prevent selected users from accessing designated folders–but that’s a hassle to set up. Besides, you said yourself you don’t have multiple accounts.)

If you don’t want to spend any money, consider going the Zip route. Most Zip managers, including popular freebie 7-Zip, give you the option to password-protect any zipped files and folders. Yes, you have to jump through the hoops of compressing and decompressing folders, but perhaps that’s not a big deal for stuff you access infrequently.
No good? Then drop a few bucks on a utility like Folder Lock, which is designed solely for the purpose of, well, locking folders. It’s a little pricey at $40, so you might also want to check out Iobit’s similar Protected Folder, which costs half as much.
Of course, all these options overlook one of my favorite methods: misdirection. You could create a folder with the world’s most boring name–Widget Sales Projections 2007, for example–and nestle it a few folders deep where no one would ever find it. For someone in your situation, with a computer that’s used by you 95 percent of the time, that might be the simplest and most effective solution.

What do you think, readers? What’s the best way for Ash to accomplish his goal?

LONDON – No matter if you’re at home, on the move or in the office, Windows 7 lets you connect and get things done. The trend these days is towards remote and mobile computing, and it’s important for an operating system to provide the tools necessary to keep you connected and productive wherever you may be. So Microsoft has incorporated a variety of new networking features in Windows 7 that simplify connectivity and help users access resources.

Here we’ll take a closer look at some of the innovations. Bear with us if we get a bit technical: this stuff can make all the difference to your work/life balance.

Roaming users generally rely on VPNs (virtual private networks) to provide a secure connection between their computer and the internal company network. You don’t have to know how it works, but it’s the magic technology that convinces IT managers to say yes to working from outside the office.

When you’re sitting in a hotel room, at a customer’s office or in your own study, and you establish a VPN connection, your PC will generally stay logged on without any problems. However, when you’re relying on a Wi-Fi hotspot or mobile broadband dongle to establish a VPN connection while on the move, you may suffer frequent dropped connections and a cumbersome process for re-authenticating and re-establishing the VPN connection each time.

The VPN Reconnect feature allows Windows 7 to automatically re-establish active VPN connections after Internet connectivity is interrupted. As soon as Windows 7 reconnects to the internet, it will also reconnect to the VPN.

Inevitably, the VPN will still be unavailable as long as the internet connection is down, and the process of reconnecting will take a few seconds after access becomes available again, but VPN Reconnect at least ensures that your network resources will pop back up as soon as possible, without you having to fiddle around with anything.

We promised you some technical details, so: VPN Reconnect is basically an IPsec tunnel using the IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange) protocol for key negotiation and for transmission of ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) packets. ESP is part of the industry standard IPsec security architecture, which provides confidentiality, authentication of data origin and connectionless integrity.

In plain English: the system knows where data is coming from and that it hasn’t been seen or modified on the way.

Why all this fuss just to maintain your connection? Well, it’s a trickier job than it might seem. For example, when viewing streaming video over a VPN connection while you’re on a train, you would typically lose all buffered data and have to start the video again every time the connection went down.

The features of the IKEv2 IPSec tunnel and ESP help to ensure a persistent connection, despite wrinkles like the IP address changing during the reconnection (as it well might when you’re connecting to someone else’s server, such as a Wi-Fi hotspot or mobile phone network), and allow the streaming video to resume from the point it was at when VPN connectivity was lost.

See all: Wifi/Networking reviews

What would be even better than a VPN that automatically reconnects and retains its connection state? How about not needing a VPN in the first place?

DirectAccess is a new feature of Windows 7 that’s designed to achieve exactly that. It’s potentially one of the most important features of the operating system, both for business users and for system administrators faced – as they increasingly are – with a remote and roaming workforce.

Aside from the issues mentioned above for users trying to stay connected on a VPN and access internal network resources, roaming users pose all kinds of problems for IT people. Mobile computers that aren’t connected to the network at a given time will miss out on security updates, software patches and group policy updates. They will get the updates when they eventually connect, but as time goes by, missing critical updates can bring unwanted consequences.

The solution is to allow systems to stay connected as much of the time as possible, without users having to think twice about it. DirectAccess provides a persistent and seamless bi-directional connection between the internal network and the user’s Windows 7 system, as long as Windows 7 can connect to the internet. With DirectAccess, remote and roaming users experience the same access to corporate shared resources, intranet sites and internal applications as they would if they were sitting in the office connected directly to the network.

DirectAccess works both ways. Not only can the user’s computer access the network seamlessly and securely across any internet connection, but the IT administrator can also connect to DirectAccess client computers even when the user isn’t logged on. That means they can monitor, manage and deploy updates to the computer just as easily as if it was in the building.

DirectAccess uses split-tunnel routing to intelligently route network traffic based on its intended destination. Only traffic destined for the corporate network is routed through the DirectAccess server, while traffic intended for the public internet is routed directly to its destination. Split-tunnelling ensures that the resources of the DirectAccess server are not consumed by unnecessary traffic.

IPsec is used for authentication and encryption. DirectAccess can also integrate with Network Access Protection (NAP) to require that DirectAccess clients be compliant with system health requirements before being allowed to connect to the network. IT administrators can restrict access through DirectAccess and configure the servers that users and individual applications can access.

Put simply, DirectAccess makes it matter less whether your PC is in the office, on the road or at another location. And the way we’re all working these days, that’s extremely significant.

Computing innovations are often interdependent, and Microsoft’s replacement for VPNs is no exception. For DirectAccess to work, it requires a number of supporting technologies.

First of all, it has to be able to address your particular computer directly. That means you need a ‘globally routable’ IP address, and that in turn depends on IPv6 – the relatively new system that’s set to replace IPv4, the basis of most existing Internet connectivity. IPv6 has been around for a while, and most systems and network devices are IPv6-capable by now, but it’s proved to be a slow process getting people to actually adopt IPv6 and leave IPv4 behind.

When creating DirectAccess, Microsoft was well aware that IPv6 wasn’t yet available to everyone, so it designed DirectAccess to take advantage of IPv6 transition tools such as 6to4, Teredo and ISATAP that IT managers are using to smooth the journey from the old system to the new. Within the network, DirectAccess relies on NAT-PT (Network Address Translation-Protocol Translation) to provide connectivity between DirectAccess and IPv4 resources.

You also need to be aware that DirectAccess can’t function in a vacuum on a Windows 7 system. It requires a DirectAccess server to connect to, and running a DirectAccess server means running Windows Server 2008 R2.

The DirectAccess server must have two network interface cards: one connected to the public internet and one to provide access to the internal intranet resources. DirectAccess also requires at least two consecutive IPv4 addresses on the network interface card that’s connected to the internet.

The IPv6 translation technologies mentioned above (6to4, Teredo and ISATAP) must be implemented on the DirectAccess server. Only a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) environment can issue the necessary certificate for security and authentication, and a DNS server running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 is required as well.

Setting up DirectAccess sounds complex, but Microsoft’s intention is that as the user of a Windows 7 client PC you won’t find it any more complicated to connect via DirectAccess than to other kinds of network. If you experience problems connecting, you can use the appropriate troubleshooting wizard to identify and resolve problems. Open the Network and Sharing Center and click on Troubleshoot problems, then select the Connection to a Workplace Using DirectAccess wizard to begin troubleshooting.

No matter how much network bandwidth an organisation has, it’s safe to assume it is not unlimited. As more users access the network, or more users connect to bandwidth-intensive data such as streaming audio and video, the network’s capacity is nibbled away until it’s gone. It’s then up to the router to queue data, which in turn slows down network communications.

Even when the internal network capacity isn’t maxed out, this type of queueing often takes place where the internal network meets the external network. The internal network may be operating at 1Gbps speeds, but the connection to the public internet might be 10Mbps, for example. So network
packets from the internal network are queued by the router and transmitted on a first-come-first-served basis as bandwidth becomes available on the external connection.

The trick here is to be smart about letting the most important data jump the queue. Not all network destinations are created equal, and they shouldn’t be treated equally. Requests to an application server used to process orders, or data being sent to a mission-critical database, should take precedence over traffic destined for Google or Facebook, for example. The technology that makes these decisions is known as Quality of Service, or QoS.

Administrators can configure QoS to prioritise traffic and ensure that vital communications get preferential treatment. Windows will assign outgoing packets a DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) number that the router uses to determine the priority of the packets. As the network gets bogged down and packets are queued up, the default first-in-first-out functionality is overridden, and high-priority packets are sent first.

QoS functionality has been a part of previous versions of Windows, but it required priority to be assigned based on specific IP addresses and port numbers. The problem with this is that multiple websites may use the same IP address, and one website may have multiple IP addresses, making it impossible to ensure QoS can prioritise the right traffic.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has added an ability to configure QoS based on URLs (Internet addresses). Administrators can ensure that traffic intended for intranet applications or important websites gets processed ahead of lower-priority traffic without having to configure the specific IP addresses and ports of the destination sites.

URL-based QoS can also be used to intentionally downgrade the priority of typically non-business-related sites, such as Facebook or BBC iPlayer. Assigning these URLs a low priority will force those packets to be handled with even less urgency than normal traffic.

In an effort to better serve its growing corporate customers in the Philippines, Lenovo offers leasing options and flexible financing terms for companies looking to get more out of their IT budget as they plan for personal computer (PC) refreshes and Windows 7 adoption this year.

According to industry analyst Gartner, Windows 7 has been getting positive reviews, with many organizations noting that they have plans to start production deployments. Gartner also added that most organizations should be planning and testing Windows 7, and should be moving away from Windows XP by the end of 2012[1].

Lenovo Philippines country general manager Vicky Agorrilla said: “Leasing Lenovo PCs can be the foundation for a smart PC management strategy.  This replaces costly up-front expenses with affordable monthly payments while at the same time reduces total cost of ownership and conserves cash and credit for other core investments.”

Lenovo’s leasing options spell out a comprehensive PC management strategy that not only includes up-front savings but also reductions in lifecycle costs such as asset administration, management, and disposition.

Lyceum of the Philippines University case summary

Prior to 2007, LPU’s procurement of computer hardware caused elevated expenditures and extensive equipment maintenance. Additionally, the accelerated obsolescence of computer equipment made the situation challenging.

Confronted with a dilemma on how to meet the school’s ever-growing IT requirements – such as securing computer units for use in its IT labs and processing extensive data transactions in its system wide operations – while  maintaining an affordable cost within budget, LPU decided to sign up for a three-year leasing contract with Lenovo.

LPU awarded its second leasing project – the largest computer deal for the University to date – in favor of Lenovo even before the university’s existing three-year PC leasing contract with Lenovo expired in 2010. LPU’s second leasing project accounts for 700 PC units, almost a threefold increase from the previous contract[2]. Today, the University has about 1,200 desktop and laptop PCs, all of which are Lenovo products.

“We are happy to be the brand of choice of LPU,” Ms. Agorrilla said.  “This partnership not only allows us to contribute to the cultivation of young minds and development of talent, but also reaffirms Lenovo’s leadership and commitment in the private education sector in the Philippines.”

Lenovo provided the school with a specialized PC leasing solution that included affordable payment terms, minimized the need for manpower while providing high performing IT equipment and professional after-sales support.

“With Lenovo’s solutions in place, we are looking forward to the development of the school’s overall information technology performance,” said Felipe Lorenzo VI, Director of Information Systems Management, LPU. “The staggered payment of Lenovo’s PC leasing solution is also very effective and has translated into savings for the University.”

Today, with the PC leasing program undertaken with Lenovo, the school’s IT system is now able to effectively handle all data processing requirements and operations at all of its five campuses.

Lenovo’s machines and services have become the benchmark for computer acquisition at LPU. The computer brands that the school tried previously were unable to meet LPU’s requirements; and while the use of assembled computers may have enabled LPU to save a few thousand pesos, it was too high a cost to pay for the potential data loss whenever there was a problem with the machines.

“As far as we’re concerned, we are generally satisfied with Lenovo’s after-sales service and their speedy response. I feel that what Lenovo has demonstrated is true, genuine concern for customers like us, and we appreciate that,” said Lorenzo.

Technical support for the duration of the leasing contract runs until 2013 and will be provided by Unison Technologies Inc., one of Lenovo’s distributors in the Philippines.