Windows 7
It has just been released and the early reports are in: get it on a new box, because attempting to upgrade will probably not work if you are moving up from Vista, and definitely won’t work if you have XP. The reason is simple, they actually attempted to fix some of the worst of Vista, and that required throwing backwards compatibility down the toilet.
As expected, bigger and faster hardware is required. Most people put 2 gigabytes of RAM as the minimum, and the fastest processor you can afford. That’s for the low end version. Your older peripherals probably won’t work.
This is 7.0. Never buy anything from Microsoft that ends in .0. Wait until Service Pack 1, and then it should be reasonably stable. Installing this on an old machine, even if it has the power to accept it, means reinstalling all of your software, and then upgrading all of that software once again. You are probably looking at days of upgrading.
Save yourself the aggravation and wait until you need a new machine, and it must have Windows on it.
Let’s all have a moment of silence for all of the network administrators in the land who are looking at this mess and the possibility of having to update their systems. Based on what is known, I can’t see many of them thinking that this is a good idea in this economy. This is more of the world class thinking from the business wizards at Microsoft.
13 comments
I see Windows 7 as a solution in search of a problem. Everything I use the pc for can be run under XP. There is also zero chance my company will be upgrading any time soon. We’re not exactly on the cutting edge… we still use dos based DataFlex for a few things.
When it becomes unavoidable I will upgrade at home. Hopefully that will be long after service pack 1 is released and it is relatively stable.
On the other hand, if it snows too much or I get bored this winter, I may put a test copy on my notebook play around with it. On it’s own partition of course.
.-= last blog ..LadyBug Invasion =-.
I’ve done a few upgrades, and telling me I have to take the system and reinstall everything, which in many cases means working through a three-day weekend in hopes that things will be back to normal when people come back to work.
It also means dealing with the people needed to do it, and the bosses to work out a deal for the labor involved to test and ensure the sucker is up and stable when you finish. Then there’s the problem of access control and individual settings… it’s a nightmare. Microsoft has no concept of what they are asking to buy and install the program on a network.
As I said about a week (or so) ago, I have it running here. I got it via MSDN (or techNet actually, which for some strange reason I still have a membership. M$ don’t seem to have caught onto the fact that I haven’t been an active developer, or requested renewals for years!) *shrug*
Anyway… I’ve found it to be quite stable so far, but there are gotchas! You REALLY need as much RAM as you can possible install and a decent graphics card, and a reasonable fast dual-core CPU. If you want real XP compatibility, you have to run the ‘XP Compatibility Mode’ addon, which is a special version if XP running on top of a special build of Virtual PC 7. To do that, you need (really) at least 4GB RAM, which means you MUST run the 64-bit version of Win7 (since, as with XP & Vista, the 32-bit version can only address up to 4GB, and you only have up to 3.5GB max to use – including for Windows itself). If you do use the XP addon, you really need at least a 3GHz AMD or Intel dual-core CPU and 6GB RAM And a 4 to 8 GB fast USB key to use for Cache (ReadyBoost as M$ call it) makes a BIG difference to performance! USB key/drive must be ReadyBoost certified, such as Sandisk Cruzer, or Corsair Voyager GT (which is significantly faster. I get a cache throughput of around 24MB/s on the Sandisk, and 32MB/s on the Corsair). For some reason, on Win7 (as well as Vista and to a lesser extent, XP) even on the latest SATA HDD’s don’t get anywhere near their rated performance spec’s! Slow as a lavaflow! Actually, I found a 3rd party caching (ReadyBoost equivalent) s/w to be much better, called eBoostr (developed by a Russian company curiously!) 😉 It allows me much better control over which app’s and processed have higher priority in the cache, and also controls RAM cache and several cache *drives*. And yet, when I switch to the Linux partition… I don’t need any caching to get the same or better performance as Win WITH external fast cache! I guess M$ need a few more decades yet to develop a decent DOS! LMAO
That’s why I don’t upgrade Windows on machines. I already know that I will be paying for the software the next time I need a Winbox, so there is no financial justification, and I know it is cheaper, and less aggravating to let someone else configure and install the OS.
I would roll my own Linux box, but Windows is just too flaky about peripherals.
The Eastern Bloc countries were stuck for the newest and the best, so they had to learn low-level programming skills, like assembler and C. As a result, they still know how to do the hard stuff, like anti-virus software and OS utilities. You can’t do that stuff with 4GL or OOP, which is why M$ can’t get the performance from the SATA interface, and their caching sucks. They probably “borrowed” their caching from a beta of a small developer, like “their” disk compression in DOS 6.0.
Yep! Lot of good s/w comes from the old Soviet era countries, especially Romania. 🙂
I’m using a new v4 beta of eBoostr (that has Win7 compatibility) and has some exciting features including the ability to make use of RAM above the 3.5GB RAM limit on 32-bit systems. 🙂
The company is in Moscow apparently.
MDO Ltd
46 Tkatskaya str, suite 25
Moscow, Russia, 105187
eBooster Home Site
eBoostr v4 Beta Test Site
Hope you don’t mind me giving them a little plug here. It’s rare enough to find s/w at a very reasonable price that does exactly what it’s claimed to do and works without any hassles (at least, I haven’t had any with it, and I’ve been using it almost a year now, from v2 to the net v4 beta). 🙂 There really are not that many commercial software companies I’d say that about. (O&O and Ashampoo in Germany are another couple that come to mind. O&O used to have problems with some of their products years ago, but they listened to their customers and quickly fixed the issues. Well done! I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect real problems with commercial s/w to be fixed! They also both have very good customer loyalty programs.) 🙂
(I decided to add this as a new comment, since your SPAM thingy hates me!) 😛
M$ are upto their old (usual) mischief again it seems. (What a SHOCK!! Really… no, really… It’s shocking to think a massive
monopolycompany liek M$ would stoop to such tactics! I’m shocked I tell you… SHOCKED! 😯Microsoft Bypasses the Law and Breaks the Web for Opera and GNU/Linux Users, Again
Can any company be more stupid than M$?? Really… I ask you? A-mazing! 😉
Hell, I finally upgraded to Explorer 8 aand now everytime I log on to the Internet, I get popup that says no internet connection, do I want to work offline or try again. When I click try again, it connects…and a gray cat jumps on my lap. I don’t think the cat is part of the problem, though.
I have a couple of utilities that use IE and IE8 keeps trying to “help” when it comes up, instead of displaying the information pages that are supposed to come up. It’s a quirky piece of software that makes you do more work than is actually necessary. Yes, one of my complaints about the entire line is the annoying frequency with which it misses the obvious – like the existence of the Internet connection.
Kryten, back in the days when Lotus was still a competitive company, it was commonly reported that when MS upgraded the operating system their software guys had the mindset of “if Lotus will run, it isn’t done”.
Explicitly breaking the software of competitors has been a fairly obvious “feature” of many MS upgrades. You were on the developers network, so it you had wanted, you could have tracked the changes that were made to specifically break software, i.e. dropping hooks, changing names, changing functions. They pull this crap all the time, and their behavior regarding anything on the web is egregious.
What people tend to miss, but we know, is that if you create web sites you want everyone to be able to see and use them. If you use MS tools, it is almost a guarantee that the site will only look right and function properly with the version of IE that was shipping at the same time as the tools. Hell, you have no guarantee that future versions of IE will be able to load the site.
If you create using the W3C standards, it will work for everyone. If there is a site I want to use and it isn’t functional using Firefox, I let them know that they have a problem – they are turning away customers. MS is in self-destruct mode. It happens to all large tech companies.
You were on the developers network, so it you had wanted, you could have tracked the changes that were made to specifically break software
That is, in fact, one of the primary reasons I no longer am a reg’d developer (and only was in the 90’s because it was a requirement at the company I was a proj mgr for as most of our clients ran M$ based client networks, or tried to)! It’s also one of the reasons why I despise m$ (also the fact that I actually have met The Dweeb a few times over the past few decades, and to know him is enough to make one reach for a barf bag! He truly is a paranoid sociopath! You have NO idea how much of his personal wealth is spent on keeping his family and anything at all private out of the gossip rags and press! It’s not a coincidence nobody knows much about his kids.)
Sometimes, too much knowledge can make one loose sleep at night.
OK… This is freaky!! And good stuff like this NEVER happens to me! This does not bode well…
Anyway, after posting above about the few S/W companies I support, including Ashampoo, I just received an email from them (I get emails regularly from Ashampoo and O&O with news/updates/special deal (REAL special deals!) But this is a first:
I’m kinda gobsmacked! These are not just the usual cheap low-end giveaways most companies do! These are some of Ashampoo’s top line products!
The timing is sooo wierd! But… I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, or gift eMail! 😉 😀
So, I d/l everything and got my key’s. And I didn’t have to sign anything or promise my soul or nothing! 😯
A-mazing! 😉
I ran into him at events in Southern California very early in the company’s history, but was more interested in what Paul Allen had to say. Bill was the financial/sales side, and that had no draw for me as a techie. He wasn’t married at the time.
He sounds a lot like the first Henry Ford vis-à-vis personal paranoia/privacy, and Henry was facing real threats. I guess life is tough if you’re a billionaire, but that problem could be solved quickly with a checkbook if it was a real concern.
Well, a decade is an eternity in the computer business, and there can’t be that many people with that kind of loyalty. It’s good PR for them.
Not every company follows the MS lead, and most of those that did have disappeared, which is a shame because some of them produced good and useful programs… at least until the founders cashed out and were bought by MS wannabes.