Mar 1, 2009 | blog
Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.
So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week. In the end, I had to come back to Windows. It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.
Instead, it was the little things – very little things. Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player. Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.
I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention. Any one of them nothing at all a real problem. All the really important things just simply worked. For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box. My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected. Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.
No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows. I’m less a “techy†person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with. I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.
So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.
Jan 11, 2009 | blog
So, with the first public beta of Windows 7, I thought I’d share a few of my initial observations and opinions on the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. My testing of Windows 7 is taking place on my production laptop – an Acer Aspire with a Intel Core Duo 1.8GHz, with 3GB RAM based on the Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset that many “average” laptops are built around.
Having been a user, advocate, and professional using Microsoft’s operating systems for the last 20 years, I do have to admit that I can come across as a “fan boy” at times. These observations may be just another example of this tendency, but I do try to be as impartial as I can (Vista rocks), er… sorry.
😉
Performance
I’ve only been running the Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview for about 32hrs at the time of this post, but I do have to admit that performance is better than Vista SP1. I haven’t run Windows XP on my laptop, so I can’t really compare it well with that OS. Simply put, it does appear to be a better performer than Vista.
Comparability
Here is one area that a few people will get a chuckle, or maybe help me figure out my one issue. Most everything is working great, except… Outlook 2007. I had to run the application compatibility troubleshooter to figure out what was wrong. I ended up setting the compatibility to “Vista” to run it. I’ll come back to Outlook later this week to investigate the issue more. Other than that, I’ve had no problems with 3rd party apps and utilities from large and small vendors.
Windows Sidebar/Desktop Gadgets
IS GONE! This is probably one of the things that helps performance in my opinion. While I liked the utility of the Windows Sidebar in Vista, the extra screen real estate and the processor cycles just for the Windows Sidebar ate up RAM and performance.
Luckily, this isn’t the case in Windows 7! The gadgets that were helpful, useful, or just plain fun in Vista’s Sidebar now run right on the Windows 7 desktop. This is a great enhancement, and one that I was looking forward to. You can see a few Vista Sidebar gadgets shown running on the Windows 7 desktop.
Peaking
Peaking is an uber-cool enhancement to Windows 7. Simply hover it the absolute bottom-right corner of the screen (shown in the 2nd screen capture below) and whatever windows you have open become transparent so you can see the desktop. Nifty to check the time, weather, or other gadgets you have on the desktop.
There are many great enhancements to the UI in Windows 7, and Microsoft seems to have focused on just making it all work together simply and easily. Of course, I thought that of Windows Vista as well, so take it for what its worth.
I’ve not had a chance to perform any significant testing that is network or file-system related. Areas that Vista had real issues on it’s initial release. I’ll be watching and testing for those as time goes by, but the first day has been a fun experience.
Since Windows 7 is running on my personal production laptop, I’ll be using it daily for all my usual tasks, and will probably drop a post when I run into things that are interesting or troublesome. I hope this gives you an idea of where Windows 7 is at so far. If you’re interested in experiencing it, I do think it’s stable enough for the average IT pro to use on a daily basis as you’d probably know what your getting into anyway. Good stuff.
Jan 10, 2009 | blog
It’s nice to have a new beta to play with. Microsoft’s released Windows 7 Beta 1 to the public, and I’ve got it downloading now. I’ve really enjoyed Windows Vista for the past 2+ years, and am looking forward to the updates that Windows 7 brings.
If you’re interested, you can head over to the Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview site and download the 2.8GB DVD to try out yourself.
Oct 13, 2008 | blog
Yep, Mike Nash announced it today on the Windows Vista blog. The next version of Microsoft Windows will be named: Windows 7
I like it, but then I’ve been accused of being a Microsoft fan-boy, so my opinion probably doesn’t count. It’s a name anyway, and darn early for a Microsoft OS release at that. Not even in beta yet. The idea with Windows 7 is simplicity, and the name seems to fit fairly well.
At any rate, I’d like to toss a few ideas regarding W7 (can I coin an acronym this early?) at Microsoft that would make the next version a little bit better than Vista. These are mostly non-technical suggestions, but one’s I’d like to see at any rate.
- SKUs: Let’s pare it down to 3 versions of W7: Basic, Home, and Business. Forget about anything else.
- Basic is just that and should be for UMPCs and Netbooks, etc…
- Home should have Media Center, Tablet support and a few other “fun†things that used to be in “Ultimateâ€
- Business is the standard business client with full Active Directory & corporate security functionality. It should also have Tablet PC extensions.
- Licensing: Home licensing should be made super-simple. It’d be great for home users to by a 3-Pack of “Windows 7 Home†licenses for $99 (US). How about a 5-Pack for $150 (US)? Sure, not all home users will need many of these license packs, but the positive PR from bloggers of low-cost upgrade license packs, reduced packaging materials & shipping of these is a great “green†spin.
- Include the Windows Home Server client components on the Windows 7 DVD.
- Nice to see the duplicated “live†components being removed and available as free add-ons. Now do this with Media Player, Internet Explorer, and other non-essentials. You don’t need to go open-source with Windows, but take out all the optional-extras that you’ve been making us install by default. Make it so damn easy for Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, IBM, Bob’s Computer Supply, etc… to make available downloadable replacements for these. Then make the Live offering so damn good that everything else can’t compare. A tall order, but one that is based on true competition and is what users what anyway. Can you imagine folks not complaining about IE or WMP? Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?
- Publish all the hooks needed for 3rd party developers to create replacements for these and share them. Shout from the rooftops about it. make it simple and easy for any developer to find and use it.
- Create an installation routine that will include 3rd party components during the install of Windows 7. Let the user choose from an alphabetical list of choices, with no pre-set defaults. MAKE them CHOOSE one. Make it easy & free for 3rd party developers to get their wares in the list.
- Make all the “Windows Vista Ultimate Extras†that you were supposed to offer for
- Windows Vista Ultimate available at no charge as offerings from the Live site to any Windows SKU.
- Be 100% accurate when you share resource requirements to the average Joe.
Something I’d like Microsoft to get as well is that we’re buying an operating system. We’re not buying a soup-to-nuts software suite. I’m not sorry to tell you that, that is all I want. Just like all I want from my broadband ISP (Cable in this case) is a simple, fast, pipe. Nothing else. Your value-add is the Windows Live stuff, so make that good.
Some of the early indications on Windows 7 is a new approach. I’m not sure it that’s true or just more spin like the last 20 years. Prove our suspicions wrong. If Windows 7 is really about “simplicity†than make it so – make it OSX simple.
I know you can do it – I’d just like to see folks as happy with Windows as I’ve been for nearly two decades.
Ok, I’m off my soap-box. What’s your take? More spin? Stupid or great name? Do you believe the next version of Windows will be worth your time? Tell Microsoft what you think – some of ‘em are actually listening.
May 31, 2007 | blog
A new version of Windows Live Writer is available for download. Have just installed it, I’ll be reporting issues as I find them – my one wish that wasn’t included in this release is support for XHTML so WLW is just as messy with HTML as all Microsoft products. Yuck on that front, but I’m hoping that it’ll be included in future releases.
I’ll post more once I’ve worked with it, and yes this is my first post with WLW2.
Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer
