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Notes on Windows 7, Win7 compatible software and hardware, reviews, tips and more.

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Windows gadgets

Samsung UFDs Muddle Through the Middle

October 30, 2015 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In early September, I agreed to live with and review some Samsung USB 3.0 flash drives (to which I’ll refer from here on out as UFDs). Around the second week of the month, they arrived, and I was allowed until early December to play with and keep them for purposes of sharing my impressions and observations. Alas, I have dithered long enough that these items have already been reviewed at a number of sites, including one of my personal faves: Les Tokar’s The SSD Review which featured some pretty comprehensive coverage on September 18 in a story entitled “Samsung’s Newest Flash Drives Reviewed.”

Samsung FIT at front center; Samsung Bar at right rear.

My own observations of these Samsung devices are consistent with his, but not quite as flattering. These drives are neither exceptionally cheap (for that kind of thing, check out the Mushkin Atom drives in capacities from 8 to 64 GB at Newegg, at $7 to $25) nor exceptionally fast (there are many options of this kind available, including devices that actually use SSD controllers to access their Flash RAM, but I am fond of the Mushkin Ventura Pro line, at Newegg for $25 for 32 GB and $34 for 64 GB).

What I have from Samsung is a 32GB Fit drive ($16 for 32GB, $27 for 64 GB, Newegg) and a 16 GB Bar drive ($13 for 16 GB, $28 for 64 GB, Newegg). The performance is somewhat better than the Atom models, but not enough to offset the price difference between them. And the performance difference between the Samsung and the Ventura Pro models inclines me to to favor spending somewhat more to get a nice jump in performance (particularly on the write site of the read/write action that is file I/O).

This is a tough product niche with a lot of different products from which to choose, many at each rung of the price performance ladder. I will say that Samsung’s 5-year-warranty on its UFDs is better than most other vendors’ warranties (the Atom and Ventura Pro drives get 2 years, by way of contrast, and 1-2 years seems typical for most such products I’ve seen). It seems to me that Samsung will either need to lower its prices further, or find some way to bump its UFDs’ performance, if it wants to grab major market share in this crowded field.

My final assessment of these products is: if you can get a better-than-Newegg deal (especially if it’s cheaper than for Mushkin Atom items of similar capacity), jump on it. If not, you may be better served by looking around for something faster at the same or a slightly higher price (Nir Sofer’s USB Flash Drive Speed Tests are a great source for such data, BTW).

Hardware Reviews, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows 8.*

Unraveling a USB Mystery

January 20, 2015 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

About two months ago, I finally got a break in my schedule and used part of that time to replace the motherboard in my ailing production PC with a newer, more capable one. The “new” mobo is actually about two-three years old in technology, if still brand-new for the unit I rebuilt my system upon. It’s a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H and it features more USB 3 ports than its predecessor, and support for an mSATA slot that now houses a dandy Samsung EVO 512 GB SSD. I was all ready to go off to the races, and my initial impression of the system was overall pretty positive.

The specs looked good and I saw uniformly positive reviews, so I bought it.

About 5-6 days after the rebuild, right when I started moving my 1 TB of music files from older smaller drives to the newer bigger ones, I started losing USB 3 devices: first a couple of big drives (2 TB and 3 TB) connected to an Eagle dual-drive caddy, various plug-in ports on the case (from interior on-board USB3 header), and once my keyboard went away and didn’t come back. This motherboard features 4 Intel USB 3 ports, and an equal number of VIA USB 3 ports. Somewhere in those ports (and it looks like the Intel chipset is the culprit) one of those ports seems to jump in and out of failure mode. The big drives in my caddy seem particularly likely to go off-line, the more so when I’m doing huge file transfers over an extended period of time, which makes me suspect something heat related might be involved, or perhaps some of the circuitry that supplies those ports with power is flaking out under higher loads.

It took me quite a while to get to the bottom of this problem, not because the problem was especially difficult: the symptoms were obvious and the devices involved rather more consistently failing than mysteriously flaking out only every now and then. I just haven’t had a lot of time for troubleshooting research lately, and it took me a long time to find the right search string to get confirmation that this is a known problem (I ended up using the mobo designator and “USB port fail” and finally found reports from others of the same problem I’ve been having).

At long last, I finally stumbled upon some forum posts up on Toms Hardware where other buyers reported similar USB 3 problems and seemed to indicate that this is a known defect of this particular motherboard. I don’t want to replace it once again, so it looks like I will install one or two (I have a LOT of USB 3 devices on this machine, mostly for external storage) 4 port USB 3 cards that connect via PCI-Express x4 lanes and feature a separate controller chip for each connection so as to support max bandwidth for each one. The make and model is HighPoint RocketU 1144C 4-port USB 3 Controller card (here’s a Newegg link for this somewhat pricey item, that gets good reviews, on the site and at AnandTech). At $108 and change, I’m going to try one first and see how it goes. If I like the results, I’ll consider buying another one.

Something about the potential for less-than-optimal results, in the wake of this modest but nevertheless frustrating motherboard flake-out has me feeling more wary and chary of new technology purchases than usual right now. Wish me luck!

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity

A Tale of Tablet Storage: USB 3 vs micro-SDXC

June 6, 2014 Ed Tittel 5 Comments

One thing I’ve noticed lately when it comes to breathless hype about Windows tablet storage is the fairly blithe assumption that by adding a micro-SDXC memory card, problems can be staved off or avoided. With a 64 GB (fairly affordable at around $35 to 60, depending on speed) or 128 GB (not yet affordable, with only one SanDisk model at around $120 currently available) card one can indeed extend the storage available to most Windows tablets (including the recently-announced Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft, plus countless others). But there’s something else about this form of storage that savvy buyers will wish to ponder as well, as illustrated in this side-by-side set of screen caps from the CrystalDiskMark disk speed analysis tool

USB 3 on the left, microSD card on the right: which would you prefer?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe that speeds from the Mushkin 32 GB USB 3 Atom flash drive on the left vastly outstrip those from the SanDisk Ultra 64 micro-SDXC USH-1 card on the right, even though the SDXC card is rated at about as fast as such cards get, while the Mushkin Atom is by no means near the top of USB 3.0 UFD speed ratings. Methinks the interface for the card reader plays a significant role here on the Fujitsu Q704 tablet where I ran the test, and on other tablets as well.

There are two interesting take-aways from these speed measurements — namely

1. If you are going to use a micro-SDXC card to extend storage on a tablet, you’d better not expect it to run anywhere near as fast as the built-in SSD does, nor even as fast as plugging in an external USB 3 UFD. This also suggests that spending extra $$$ on faster SDXC cards may not be worth the added expense (though I’d want to test slower models to see how much slower they wind up going to be doubly-darn sure about that).

But then again, the SSD is oodles faster than either USB or micro-SD.

2. If you have to choose between a bigger UFD (size-wise that is, as anything over 32 GB requires a bigger “stick” in which to store the necessary memory chips) and a micro-SDXC card, the UFD clearly comes out ahead on performance, while the micro-SDXC card comes out ahead in compactness and lack of added external protrusions to carry and keep track of. Only you can decide which of those trade-offs is most worth making in your particular circumstances.

As for me, I’m opting for performance and capacity by using fast UFDs like the Mushkin Ventura Pro or the ADATA S102. Sure, they stick out from the side of the tablet, but they rock the speed and provide plenty of capacity. Then again, something like the newly-minted Corsair Flash Voyager GTX (just announced this week at Computex in Taipei) which includes an SSD-level flash controller and high-speed flash circuitry, might be just the ticket (for other options in this class of expensive peripherals check out Les Tokar’s USB 3.0 Archives at The SSD Review).

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Win7View

What I Don’t Like About the Fujitsu Stylistic Q704 Tablet Convertible

March 31, 2014 Ed Tittel 37 Comments

OK, it’s been a couple of months since my brand-new Fujitsu Q704 tablet with oodles of add-ons and appurtenances showed up at my door. I’m learning to live with the $165 monthly payment that my “let’s experiment with a business lease” ends up costing me. But I’m not as enamored of the machine as I’d hoped to be, and it hasn’t yet graduated to the status of “production traveling machine.” In fact, I’ve been using my older Lenovo i7 X220 Tablet and T420 notebooks more or less interchangeably on the road for the last two years, and am still happy to work with them.

As this image from the Fujitsu site shows, the Q704 is available with a battery-powered keyboard dock (center) and a plain dock with video and three USB 3.0 ports.

But now that I’ve been working with and using the Q704 unit for a while, here are my gripes:

1. The battery-powered keyboard dock is heavy, and turns the unit into a 4.75 lb notebook (it’s not even really an ultrabook, at that weight). Battery life is under 8 hours, too. By contrast my older Dell XPS-12 weighs 3.375 lbs, and gets 5 hours from a single battery.
2. When detaching the tablet from the keyboard dock, I’ve learned that it’s best to shut down. Mode switching from tablet to notebook by docking the unit, and from notebook to tablet by undocking same, is not as easy or trouble-free as I would like it to be.
3. As you might expect, an i7 (even a Haswell U4600) gets pretty warm, if not hot, when busy in the tablet, which can make it a little uncomfortable to hold in the hand or on the lap.
4. The touchpad on the keyboard dock, while sizable, is nowhere as nice to use as the one on the XPS-12, and the bottom buttons only click when pushed toward the center of the touchpad, not on the outside edges (as my fingers seem to want to do, to avoid pushing the right button when seeking the left, and vice-versa). For the kind of money Fujitsu charges for its gear, I’d expect them to use absolute top-of-the-line components, including the touchpad.
5. Given the presence of a U4600, the performance is less than you’d expect, and lower than even some higher-end i5 machines. See the Geekbench results at Tablet PC Review for more details. Read the whole thread to get the overall “nerd-view” of the Q704: it’s not pretty. Apparently, waterproofing perforce means less efficient ventilation and lower performance because of thermal inefficiencies. Sigh.

All in all, I’m hopeful that a combination of BIOS fixes and “best use practices” will help me extract a more acceptable experience from my Q704. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out.

Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Software Reviews, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows OS Musings

Machine Crash Prompts Lots of Learning, Especially for Intel Rapid Start

March 7, 2014 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

OK, so I’m on the phone last Friday, and I’ve just installed Service Pack 1 for MS Office 2013. After the obligatory post-install reboot, I discover the system won’t boot because it can’t find a boot drive. A long bout of troubleshooting ensues, after which I reluctantly conclude my motherboard’s gone south. My immediate efforts concentrate on moving over to my back-up desktop system, and I put an order into Newegg for a new Z87 motherboard, with a i7 4770K processor.

By the time I got my standby system promoted to production status, and prepared my T520 notebook for backup status (which means it’s got all the apps I use installed, and is ready to play host to my Outlook PSTs and all my usual data files and stuff), the parts arrived from Newegg. Wednesday, I started putting pieces together, and managed to get all the way through the build process for my first shot at a new backup system. But that’s where my first lesson of this adventure came into play: I struggled mightily to get the Corsair CWCH cooler to mate properly with the MSI Z87-G45 mobo I’d selected (good price, with mSATA drive slot), but ended up having to switch for the stock Intel cooler because I had to keep fiddling with the CPU to get it to work.

Turns out my #10 Torx screwdriver came in really handy, because torqueing down the front screw to clamp down more tightly onto the processor was the only way to get things working. This necessitated three tries before I was able to boot into the BIOS. Getting the Corsair cooler in place ONCE was more than enough for me, so I’m using the stock cooler now, watching temps, and plan to drop in a Zalman CNPS95 (had good luck with these before in various earlier builds) if the stock cooler doesn’t cut it. At present, CPU temps mostly fall in the range from 40-50 degrees Celsius (about 10 degrees hotter than on the i7 930 CPU I just replaced, but I think that’s normal when scaling down from 45 to 22 nm technology). The Antec 902 case in which the build is housed is well ventilated, with four 120 mm fans, plus a 200mm venting warm air out the top.

My next big challenge came from a Windows licensing snafu. MS didn’t inform me until one day after the initial install that my key was a duplicate (why couldn’t they check that at initial validation, I wonder?). I wasn’t able to get tech support to issue me a new key (even though I’ve got an MSDN subscription and two unused Windows 8.1 keys, the activation utility would accept neither one of them). After trying every trick I know of, I elected to re-install, as much because I wanted to switch to RAID drivers and try out the Intel Rapid Start Technology, as because I got tired of trying to fix the licensing snafu I’d caught myself in.

The GUI doesn’t show much, but it takes several contortions to get it working.

That’s where my next big learning adventure began. I quickly learned that I needed an SSD “hibernation partition” in which to shadow memory contents to make Rapid Start work, and I chewed through several sets of instructions before I figured out how to make it work on my MSI-based system:

0. I number this step zero because it occurs when Windows isn’t running (yet): you must get into your system BIOS to enable Intel Rapid Start Technology (and set the hibernation value to “Immediate” if present) before you can get the Rapid Start installer to work properly. You’ll have to catch and set this at an opportune reboot before attempting to install the software.

1. I set up the Intel mSATA 80GB SSD (nominal size; 76.29 GB actual) with a 42 GB partition, to leave 34 GB for the hibernation partition that Rapid Start uses to snapshot or copy memory contents. I used Disk Manager to set up a 42 GB GPT partition, leaving 34 GB unformatted for the series of diskpart commands I figured out I would need. Any SSD will do for the snapshot, and you should leave slightly more space in the hibernation partition than you have memory installed on your PC (mine has 32 GB; hence, a 34 GB partition). Interestingly, while the hibernation partition is visible in Disk Management, it is invisible to Windows Explorer (aka “File Explorer” or explorer.exe in Windows 8.*).

2. Next, I fired up diskpart following the instructions in the Intel Rapid Start Technology Guide for UEFI Mode, with special emphasis on the section entitled “Create a Primary Store Partition on a non-OS drive SSD.”

3. I skipped the convert gpt step, because the format I created in diskmgmt.msc was already GPT-formatted (in Step 12). I followed the create partition step as shown, using 34816 as the size of the hibernation partition in megabytes (34 GB * 1024 (megabytes per gigabyte) = 34816).

4. I jumped over into Intel Rapid Storage Technology, clicked the Performance tab, and made sure the acceleration features were enabled (this turns out to be an essential step in the process, though not very well documented).

5. I cut-and-pasted the exact value for the set id command from the documentation, namely “D3BFE2DE-3DAF-11DF-BA40-E3A556D89593” as shown in the Intel User Guide, then exited diskpart as directed.

6. Before you can get the Intel Rapid Start installer to work, you need to reboot the PC. After that, provided your chipset (Intel 8-series chipsets or better, with spotty 7-series coverage) and setup are copascetic, the program should install nicely and do its thing. One more observation: I had to reboot my machine two more times after installing Rapid Start to start observing the effects that the software promises — that is, a more rapid start. Apparently, it takes two reboots before the hibernation file gets set up and starts working properly, so be patient, please!

My PC now boots to the login prompt in under 10 seconds, which is at least 10 seconds faster than it used to boot before installing the Rapid Start stuff. Is it worth it? The real answer is that it depends on how often you reboot your PC. I mess around with mine all the time, so I think it’s worth giving up 34 GB of SSD space for this purpose. If you don’t reboot often, or you don’t have the SSD space to spare, you may not feel the same way.

But now, at least, I’ve figured out how to install and use Rapid Start on a home-brew PC, and I’ve got a RAID-based disk setup going for this UEFI Windows 8.1 install. The machine currently clocks at 8.1 in the WinAero version of WEI (Windows Experience Index, with the Intel 530 SSD the slowest link in the collection of subsystems measured) so I can’t be too unhappy with the results. By a slim margin (8.10 to 8.05 for my other desktop’s SSD), it’s now the fastest system I’ve got.

EdFiles, Hardware Reviews, Recent Activity, Windows OS Musings

Interesting USB Access Issue on Fujitsu Q704 Worked Around

February 10, 2014 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

I’m still breaking in — or rather, getting to know in depth — my latest Windows 8.1 tablet. Somewhat annoyingly, the Fujitsu Q704 stops “seeing” a USB flash drive (UFD for short) plugged into the keyboard dock once the machine has been idle for half an hour or longer. Continue reading Interesting USB Access Issue on Fujitsu Q704 Worked Around →

EdFiles, Hardware Reviews, Recent Activity, Windows OS Musings

Interesting Adventures with New Fujitsu Q704 Tablet/Convertible

January 29, 2014 Ed Tittel 68 Comments

Having secured permission from the Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka, “The Boss” — namely, my wife Dina) I recently purchased a new Fujitsu Windows tablet convertible, model Stylistic Q704 Hybrid Tablet PC with the keyboard dock/extra battery option. The price came in at over $2K, which is kinda painful for a 12.5″ tablet, but when the Boss said I could go for it, go for it I did. Now I’m learning to live with it. Here’s a snazzy publicity still:

Continue reading Interesting Adventures with New Fujitsu Q704 Tablet/Convertible →

Letters from the Ed, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows OS Musings

Customization and Control: Does the OS Really Matter Anymore?

December 31, 2013 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ve got 4 laptops, 1 all-in-one, and three desktop computers on the roster at home, and another couple of laptops, a mini-ITX desktop, and a Chromebook on my “school loan” program right now. At this point, all but one of those machines — the Chromebook — is running Windows 8.1. I have added either Classic Shell or Start8 to all of the Windows machines, to make using and working from the desktop easier and faster, but otherwise I haven’t really mucked with the OS itself all that much. Many of those machines boast a “perfect score” in DriverAgent (no drivers out of date, that is) with the “worst score” on any machine showing three drivers outdated (two of which are bogus in each case, the other sufficiently mysterious and apocryphal to resist my occasional efforts at update/repair).

Windows 8.1 shows a plain Windows 8 logo in the system info widget from control panel.

In short, everything is humming along nicely and all but one of the machines is rock-solid stable with a perfect 10 score in the Windows Reliability Monitor (and even the odd PC out — my production desktop, ironically enough — is sufficiently stable in day-to-day working practice that I don’t worry about losing work or productivity on that machine). All of this adds up to an interesting observation or realization on my part — namely, that the OS running on those machines doesn’t really matter all that much any more. By hook or by crook, I’m able to keep things working, and I’m not being stymied or feeling overly frustrated about maintaining my computers, and keeping them working properly over time.

Windows 7 was (and remains) great, but Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have also done right by me, too. Does this mean I’ve been lucky? Perhaps so, as I read about and hear from others who’ve run into snags with Windows 8, or the 8.1 update/upgrade, or who are struggling with hardware and driver issues. But I’m also inclined to observe that both hardware and software seem exceptionally stable and troublefree of late, and to have experienced fewer Windows headaches in the past four years or so, starting with the release of Windows 7 in October 2009. I’m not even terribly inclined to knock on wood so as not to tempt fate overmuch with my words, though that thought immediately crossed my mind as soon as I wrote them!

Here’s hoping that 2014 will continue humming along, as 2013 did for me, to my great surprise and delight. May your experiences be the same, too, if not better than that!

Letters from the Ed, Recent Activity, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks

Whoa! Strange (and I mean StR@NgE) contortions required to resolve Window device issue

September 18, 2013 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s a list of instructions that I had to follow on my Lenovo X200 Tablet, to remove an issue with the WAN miniport (#2 and #3) drivers on that machine, whose failure to load up and register properly also rendered Bluetooth inoperable on that machine when running Windows 8 (or 8.1, as you might expect; this material is fully documented in KB article 2871372):

Who came up with this mysterious fix, and how they did figure this out? Wowie-zowie!

Open Device Manager.

Right-click the WAN miniport (Network monitor) device, and then click Update Driver Software.

Click Browse my computer for driver software.

Click Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.

Clear the Show compatible hardware check box.

In the column on the left side, select Microsoft, and in the column on the right side, select Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter.

In the Update Driver Warning dialog box, click Yes to continue installing this driver.

After the driver is installed, right-click the device, and then click Uninstall.

After the device is uninstalled, right-click the computer name in Device Manager, and then click Scan for hardware changes.

On the View menu, click Show hidden devices.

The WAN Miniport (Network monitor) device should now be started and no longer have a yellow exclamation mark next to it.

For reasons that go way beyond my ken but that I find egregiously irritating, this bit of mumbo-jumbo actually worked! To me, it seems almost like turning widdershins thrice, hopping on one foot, while making an incantation, to try to make something happen. Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and I’m damned if I can really tell what’s up here, other than the bizarre reality that installing and then uninstalling a nugatory driver actually results in proper recognition of the underlying hardware, and automatic installation of the correct driver when the next hardware rescan occurs.

There is just a glimmer of a suggestion of what’s really going on here in the “Resolution” section of the related KB article. It says that MS Update 2822241 must be “integrated with” (which I believe means slipstreamed into) the installation image (WIM file, probably) used during setup of Windows 8 for target hardware to avoid these contortions. That tells me that the update rollup in that particular update file somehow fixes the issues discussed in 2871372, even though it’s not specifically called out in the “Issues that this update fixes” in its supporting documentation.

What galls me about this fix (which I’m very grateful to have found, and am now able to use Bluetooth devices on the X220 Tablet) is that it’s so very arcane and non-intuitive. I’m able to address most driver issues in Windows on my own, with a bit of elbow grease, and lots of odd and interesting techniques for extracting driver files from installers for software that won’t run on my systems. I’m OK with that, and have learned how to cope. But installing a loopback driver, and then removing it, to provoke a proper hardware scan for device recognition? The mind reels…

Letters from the Ed, Software Reviews, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Win7View

Get the iPhone/Pad/Pod (iOS) Windrivers without installing iTunes

February 28, 2013 Ed Tittel 3 Comments

I’ve got numerous PCs around here and there — I can see two desktops and two laptops as I sit here in my office, and there are two more laptops and one SFF desktop elsewhere in our domicile at this moment; I’ve also got four laptops out on loan right now to various friends and relations. My wife and I both use iPhones (both are 4S models), and we’ve got a family iPad, plus a 32 GB iPod that Gregory used to play on a lot before he got a Nook for his birthday earlier this month. That means we have no shortage of machines into which we might plug one of these iDevices, but there’s an issue in working with them that I wanted to avoid on those machines where I don’t usually play iTunes music or watch much video.

The conundrum pretty much boils down to this: the iPhone driver that Windows loads on its own is pretty ancient, but unless you want to install iTunes, it’s a tricky business to get a more up-to-date driver without carrying all the extra iTunes baggage along with it. Believing there had to be a way to get the drivers without the full-blown package, I searched Google using this string “install iPhone drivers without installing iTunes.” And sure enough, up pops a free utility named CopyTrans Drivers Installer that will do the job for you (here’s a C|Net download link for the 3.35 MB utility in ZIP form, just like the afore-linked product page itself proffers). Download the file, unzip to a directory, then run CopyTransDriversInstaller.exe (version 1.024 as I write this post), and you’re done. Not much to it, really.

The initial run screen requires you to agree to the licensing terms.

There is one catch, however: the program will download iTunes in its entirety, then extract the drivers from that download and install them for you. That’s what the Automatic install option at the lower right of the installer window above is about: it’s well worth using, because it does all the grunt work for you. It also works with the latest and greatest iTunes download available from the Apple site on your behalf — that was version 11.0.2.26 as I wrote this post — so you don’t have to check or worry about version numbers, either. The iTunes download (it’s nearly 86 MB in size) took far longer than any other parts of the installation activity. Though the whole operation took about 8 minutes or so on my Lenovo T520 laptop, more than half that time was devoted to downloading iTunes so the program could extract the drivers contained therein for installation (which took well under a minute, when it finally got underway).

If you want to dock your iDevice to a Windows PC without installing iTunes, it’s probably worth grabbing a copy of the CopyTrans Drivers Installer. Put it through its paces, and you’ll have the latest and greatest iDevice drivers at your disposal without having to shoulder the burden of iTunes (and the Bonjour protocol, iTunesHelper.exe, and anything else Apple decides to throw into the iTunes mix — see this fascinating and horrifying list of background processes that can show up when you use iTunes on a Windows PC, straight from Apple Support).

[Querelous and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with apologies to Kierkegaard: I’d love to know what tool or technique the CopyTrans Drivers Installer uses to access the contents of the 32- or 64-bit iTunes installer files. I attacked them with both 7Zip (which is suprisingly capable at taking .exe files apart) and Legroom Software’s Universal Extractor (which is a good tool, but hit or miss, and crashed when trying to unpack this file’s contents) without any luck. Knowing how they did their thing would help me do it with other installers, which is sometimes the only way to get access to Windows drivers that may not otherwise be accessible on some PCs, particularly when, for example, trying to snag a Dell driver for use on an HP machine, or vice-versa.]

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