Windows 7 image for Foxconn a3700

[mayamaniac]

seeding both here.

[drewg]

So, on a lark, I bought this last night http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138365 ($70 for an AMD fusion MB w/8GB ram thrown in for free, $60 if you bother to fill out the rebate & they bother to honor it). The main reason I got it is that I desperately need another crash box for 10GbE driver work & this has an x4 Gen2 PCIe slot.

Anyway, if it doesn't pan out (because there is not enough PCIe bandwidth), I was thinking to use it as a client. It looks like roughly the same hardware as the
Foxconn, any chance the Foxconn specific image would work on it? How gracefully will the fallback from the Broadcom crystal hd card be handled if I don't have one? If I really do use it as a client, I can get a PCIe -> mini-PCIe converter, and get the crystal HD card..

Drew

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by drewg

So, on a lark, I bought this last night http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138365 ($70 for an AMD fusion MB w/8GB ram thrown in for free, $60 if you bother to fill out the rebate & they bother to honor it). The main reason I got it is that I desperately need another crash box for 10GbE driver work & this has an x4 Gen2 PCIe slot.

Anyway, if it doesn't pan out (because there is not enough PCIe bandwidth), I was thinking to use it as a client. It looks like roughly the same hardware as the
Foxconn, any chance the Foxconn specific image would work on it? How gracefully will the fallback from the Broadcom crystal hd card be handled if I don't have one? If I really do use it as a client, I can get a PCIe -> mini-PCIe converter, and get the crystal HD card..

Drew

The foxconn image won't work due to the hardware differences. Just use the generic image. It still has the working driver installation files so all you have to do is run the install.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

The foxconn image won't work due to the hardware differences. Just use the generic image. It still has the working driver installation files so all you have to do is run the install.

Cool, thanks.

Drew

[18Scoobz]

To be clear I need to use the torrents at the beginning of the fourm. That is what I used and it downloaded 16mb of the a3700 and none of the generic. Any suggestions? Also I see you use a different player for certain media. Does it perform better than sage?

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by 18Scoobz

To be clear I need to use the torrents at the beginning of the fourm. That is what I used and it downloaded 16mb of the a3700 and none of the generic. Any suggestions?

Is your firewall allowing torrent traffic? Does your ISP block torrent traffic? Are you able to download anything else via your torrent client?

(Who is your ISP and what torrent client are you using?)

[18Scoobz]

It is downloading other files fine. I am using utorrent. I have the port forwarding set up. I checked it with the speed test on utorrent. I am using centurylink dsl.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by 18Scoobz

To be clear I need to use the torrents at the beginning of the fourm. That is what I used and it downloaded 16mb of the a3700 and none of the generic. Any suggestions? Also I see you use a different player for certain media. Does it perform better than sage?

I use MPC-HC for blu-ray's. It will play subtitles where sage can't. That's really the only reason.

[18Scoobz]

I checked and I almost have a3700 completely downloaded and quite a bit of the generic also. So if somone did somthing thanks or the magic kicked in...

[Evil_Attorney]

Thanks again for this image. Yesterday I purchased the Windows 8 upgrade DVD with the hope of using that on my A3700. The upgrade process is a nightmare...you NEED to have a previous version already installed on the computer. Once I finally got it installed and activated, the screen was letterboxed or bordered on all sides by several inches in 1080P on my TV. Even with the latest graphics drivers, I couldn't fix this issue. Beside that, Windows 8 is much more schizophrenic and therefore much more difficult to navigate and set things up. I finally gave up on it last night and decided to start downloading this Win 7 image.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

Thanks again for this image. Yesterday I purchased the Windows 8 upgrade DVD with the hope of using that on my A3700. The upgrade process is a nightmare...you NEED to have a previous version already installed on the computer. Once I finally got it installed and activated, the screen was letterboxed or bordered on all sides by several inches in 1080P on my TV. Even with the latest graphics drivers, I couldn't fix this issue. Beside that, Windows 8 is much more schizophrenic and therefore much more difficult to navigate and set things up. I finally gave up on it last night and decided to start downloading this Win 7 image.

There should be a setting in the AMD control center to adjust the image scaling. By default, it is always on for DTV's, and needs to be turned off for HTPC use. I believe it is under My Digital Flat Panels -> Scaling Options. Drag the slider to 0%.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

The upgrade process is a nightmare...you NEED to have a previous version already installed on the computer.

That's why it's called an Upgrade Version and not a Full Version. If you had purchased a Full Version, you could do a clean install from scratch without a previous version/install.

[Fuzzy]

Yeah, it used to be (winxp and prior) that you could purchase an upgrade license, and it would allow fresh installs. Now, you can still do a fresh install, but you have to have a valid previous version installed, and then once windows setup sees the previous version, you can then to a custom install and wipe the partitions off the drive, and start from 'scratch'. Makes it worth having a VERY plain windows installed image that can be restored onto a blank drive, just to install an upgrade version quicker.

[Evil_Attorney]

Thanks Fuzzy, your AMD advice worked, so I kept Win 8 on there for now. BTW, the XBMC Win version works great on Win 8 on the A3700. It will bitstream HD audio AND change refresh rates to whatever your video is. Blu-ray rips seem to play back perfectly.

Yea, I remember the old-style way windows upgrade worked. It's even worse because on a clean install, you can enter you key and install it. But when you enter the key again to activate once you install, it simply says that you have entered an incorrect key. It's extremely unintuitive and poorly thought out. How about just giving an error message that you can't activate because there was no prior OS on the hard drive or prevent you from even taking the time to install the OS in the first place until it recognizes the prior OS. I was really rooting for MS with Win 8, but its seeming to be more like Vista than Win 7.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

BTW, the XBMC Win version works great on Win 8 on the A3700. It will bitstream HD audio AND change refresh rates to whatever your video is. Blu-ray rips seem to play back perfectly.

The way I have MPC-HC set up it will do the same. Using fuzzy's external player plugin launches MPC-HC, refresh rate changes, movie plays perfectly. Normal users wouldn't even know it was happening if the MPC log didn't appear before the movie played.

[dstanley]

I had a few experiences with the Windows 8 upgrade as well - I had a nightmare with partitions on my laptop and had to end up blowing them away - thus 'losing' my Windows 7 installation. I had to repartition my hard drive in a laptop several times due to the MBR and GPT crap on an EFI bios.I got to the point where I was not able to activate as it said it was the upgrade version once I had Windows 8 installed.
Anyways - I was able to reinstall the 'upgrade' version and activate the system just by having a USB hard drive plugged in with an old image of Windows XP on it.
As long as the Win8 installer 'sees' a partition somewhere with an old Windows on it then it will chug along merrily.
I was able to remove all the partitions on the internal laptop drive and install the Windows 8 upgrade with the USB drive attached. This install activated perfectly - just unpluggged the USB after the install and all was good.
I did some searching after this nightmare and I found the following suggestion (although I have NOT tried this):

Windows 8 can’t be activated after the installation:

Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
Reboot Windows now.
Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows.

Hope this helps someone!

[Evil_Attorney]

I ended up finding the same Win 8 registry hack and decided to use it. It seems to have worked, though I'm not sure if that will change at a later date.

I'll have to check out MPC-HC.

I still don't have Sage installed on this system yet. I was under the impression that the Windows decoder isn't present on Win 8 unless you install the WMC addon (can anyone confirm this?). Although it is supposed to only take 24 hours to get a WMC key, it's been over 48 hours without getting anything (despite requesting via two different emails). Yet another point of Win 8 frustration.

[panteragstk]

Don't know anything about included codecs in W8 sorry.

[drewg]

I tried to recover "Generic Image.tib.torrent.txt" using a True Image recovery cd that I made. It tells me "The Archive is Corrupted" and aborts the installation when I try to verify or restore the image from a network share.

My torrent client claims the image is OK (but seems to verify it so quickly that I don't really trust it). What is the md5sum of the image? I have:

bba3bad77095c9bfd63959a1ecf04938

Thanks,

Drew

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by drewg

I tried to recover "Generic Image.tib.torrent.txt" using a True Image recovery cd that I made. It tells me "The Archive is Corrupted" and aborts the installation when I try to verify or restore the image from a network share.

My torrent client claims the image is OK (but seems to verify it so quickly that I don't really trust it). What is the md5sum of the image? I have:

bba3bad77095c9bfd63959a1ecf04938

Thanks,

Drew

If I have time I'll check when I get home. Family is in town today so no promises.