Hodgepodge

I have been using the public beta of Windows 7 for over a month now and so I figured it was time for a progress report.

I am dual booting with XP on my desktop and most of the time I am running W7.

For those of you less geeky readers, W7 is the next version of OS from Microsoft and in simple terms is Vista with a few new interface upgrades and some under the hood improvements.

Things I like:

The new taskbar – it has been dubbed the “superbar” and it is more useful and a bit taller than the old taskbar which has been virtually unchanged since Windows 95. The new version eliminates the quick launch function by putting icons for programs that are running and launch icons all on the bar. A border tells you which apps are running and if you mouse over a running app it will give you a preview of not just the active window of the app like Vista, but all the windows. The non-running apps have a context menu which will allow you to open a recent document or other relevant item. The icons are bigger than the quick launch bar which makes it nice for tired eyes.

Gadgets – In Vista we were introduced to the sidebar – a place to put little applets called gadgets to monitor weather, stocks, and other conveniences. The problem was they were stuck to the sidebar unless you detached them and the only way to see more info was to detach and then re-attach when you wanted them to go back to their cubicle.

In W7 the gadgets are independent and go anywhere on the desktop in the small form. Then you click an arrow next to the gadget and it goes to large mode. Click again and it is small. A nice improvement. To go with the improved gadgets you can drag your mouse to the lower right corner of the screen (next to the clock) and all the open windows will fade and expose the gadgets on your desktop. Cool!

Snappy performance – W7 seems faster than XP and Vista – although this is highly subjective. Benchmarks seem to prove this but MS is trying to keep benchmarking from being published until the final code is released.

Things I don’t like:

Crappy Drivers – To be fair the only driver issue I have is with my Creative SoundBlaster Live card. It is an old card but the supplied driver crackles and is distorted so I had to get a third party driver which is not bad but won’t work in 5.1 surround. I can only blame MS so much on this, because Creative chose not to supply a Vista compatible driver for this very popular card.

Speaking of drivers – MS did a smart thing in W7 by sticking with the Vista driver model. This means if your hardware works with Vista it should work fine with W7. Of course like my soundcard, there is some older hardware that doesn’t work with Vista and until there is a Vista/W7 driver it probably won’t. This is the same problem as the Win98 to XP process was.

Windows Media player 12 – I like the player’s new interface, and I like the new Now Playing window, but the I have two issues; one is excessive CPU loading. The new one uses about 30% of my CPU for the first 20-30 minutes then finally drops to a normal 5-10 %. I can only assume this has something to do with the way it indexes or searches for new media but it does drag down my machine which is an older AMD Athlon single core. On a dual core or better PC it is probably not an issue.

The second is the taskbar toolbar is gone. On previous versions if you minimized the media player you got a the controls on the taskbar. Hopefully it will be back.

New Windows Explorer – This has evolved again from the Vista version and now when you open it it shows you ‘libraries” for documents, music, photos and videos. The idea is to make finding these types of files faster and more organized but I am not sure it is any better than just going to these folders in your documents and settings. The one plus is that other locations will show up if you have pointed to them but it is a so-so feature.

The main problem I have is that it is a little balky and has froze up a few times when trying to move files. I suspect it will be fixed in the final release but it still wipes out certain icons in the system tray portion of the taskbar when it crashes just like every other version prior. You would think in fifteen years or so, they would find a way to restore all the icons after a crash.

 

Overall I like W7 and will certainly upgrade my XP desktop PC with it when it comes out. I don’ think it is enough of an improvement over Vista to upgrade the laptop however.

My guess is that the only Vista people who will upgrade to W7 are those who really like the new interface and want to see the performance improvements. I do think a lot of people who passed on an XP to Vista upgrade will go for W7, because it is a huge improvement as long as your older hardware has a driver. What might prevent an upgrade is some older games don’t run well under W7 (or Vista for that matter) because some support files are not there. Compatibility mode helps with some but others just epic fail.

If you missed the beta, I hear that the release candidate is also supposed to be publicly available when it is ready, so watch the skies! This is my geek mode signing off.

Being the geek I am, I downloaded the Windows 7 beta and installed it as a dual-boot on my XP machine. The process went very smooth except every time a driver changed or some such the XP bootloader ran and I couldn't choose W7.

To fix it I have to put the DVD in and boot from it, do a repair and then it starts the Windows 7 bootloader. I then loaded EasyBDC which is a tool to edit the Vista bootloader that is basically the same as the W7 version. I tried to set up the XP choice but so far don't seem to have it right.

I changed the driver on the sound card and that inexplicably, caused the XP boot to come up. Don't ask me why but it does. So in the morning I am going to once again fix the W7 bootloader and try again to actually be able to dual boot from the W7 bootloader. Yikes!

As for the actual W7 beta it is very nice, a new taskbar, simple icons on the task bar and now the preview shows multiple tabs. The Windows Live suite is also revised with a new look for most of the apps and W7 includes the beta for Internet Explorer 8, which has some nice features and seems to render faster than IE7.

If you have Vista this will seem like a "souped up" version of Vista. TO me it is what Vista could have been if MS would have waited a year and tweaked it more.

It boots up noticeably quicker than either XP or Vista and other than the main issue I have so far is that my older Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 card in distorted and staticy with the built in drivers and Creative has not release and apparently is not going to release Vista drivers so I live with the crappy sound while I play with this beta.

If I do buy W7 when it comes out, I will also upgrade my PC and so use the onboard sound since it is much better than it used to be.

What is neat is that this is so deja vu since I used to be an official MS beta tester, having tested Office 2000 and 2003 along with Windows ME and Windows XP. It is neat to thing you had a hand in something that millions of people use everyday even though the only pay was a free copy of the final release software.

If you really want to try it, you can download the 2.44GB file (took 18 hours on my 300K DSLooow) until January 24th I believe. Just Google Windows 7 beta and you will find the link.

C'mon - suffer with me. It's MS it's fun!

After many months of want - I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360. I love baseball and have lamented the fact that there has been no new baseball game for the PC in 4 or 5 year, and the graphics and game play on the older Xbox was not satisfying. To say a word - WOW! The new baseball is outstanding and quite fun.

The Arcade games are also good and jgaleckas really has enjoyed Portal in the the Orange Box. I picked up a few older games that were on Clearance at Fry's and of course now I can put a couple of the hawt new games like Fallout 3 on the Christmas list.

This move also prompted Janice to finally upgrade her PC. (hardware envy is a regular occurrence here at casa de bosswriter) We raided Micro Center and picked up all the components for a new kick butt machine - quad core, 4GB ram raid drives and a top shelf Nividia Card ( which we already had - long story). She started putting it together last night and once it up and running it should smoke!

What are your fave Xbox 360 games?

Because I am a sucker for new software, I installed the latest entry in the browser wars...Google's Chrome. It is designed to be sleek, slim and fast, especially with web applications like Google docs.

It installed easily on both my XP desktop and my Vista laptop. It is a clean interface, just a bookmark bar a forward/back button, a refresh button and address bar. It has a star like Firefox for quickly bookmarking and the address bar does an admirable job of filling in entries with possibilities. The options are minimal as well.

It does seem faster loading pages but I haven't actually timed any pages.

I don't use any web based apps so I can't comment on that yet.

Surprisingly there is no provision for Google Bookmarks like Gmarks in Firefox or the Google toolbar in IE7. But it is a beta so hopefully some of these things will get worked out.

For now it's fun to play with but my default browser is still Firefox.

This is so cool! I have read about this theory on and off over the years but it appears they final have proven it and now they can start to develop it. I for one can't wait for a computer that comes on instantly. The science of PC's continues to amaze me.

Since IBM is not making PC's anymore (They sold the ThinkPad line to Lenovo) they are trying out MacBook in some offices.

I can see it now - the next time I go through the checkout line at the grocery the National Enquirer will have a picture of Bill Gates using a Mac!

I just got a new laptop today and as almost all new PC's today it has Vista on it. So far it is not bad, although there is a learning curve. It does have a nicer looking interface but file transfer over the network is a little slow. TIme will tell what other issues pop up.

The card is dead, or maybe not, since when I put my old card in I keep getting a message from the "Nvidia system sentinel" that my card is not getting proper power and is throttling back. Interesting since the old card is working (slow as crap but that's why I bought the new one).

Since the newer card requires much more power it may be that the card is OK just my power supply going bad. Looks like a trip to Micro Center for a new PS.

On a separate note, I think I am getting the Harry Dresden disease that affects electronics. While using the laptop yesterday the backlight went out. Fortunately, after powering off and on it came back on. Only time will tell if it goes out again and we go laptop shopping.

I hate hardware.