Of course I’ve been using Windows 7 for longer than three days, but this is the third day having it on my old Dell XPS M1210. I just noticed recently that the poor laptop is coming up on its 3-year anniversary. It had a 3-year warranty with accidental damage coverage. The only stupid thing I ever did to it was to dump a can of soda into the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard by shopping on eBay and the touchpad buttons still have a slight issue, but I’ll live with it. Anyway, back to my story and the reason why this is relevant. The machine I had Windows 7 installed on at work was fairly new, and over its short pre-Windows 7 history it ran Windows XP 64bit and Debian when XP 64 wasn’t stable. Neither of these were installed for more than a month before Windows 7 was RTM.
My laptop, on the other hand, was used constantly for nearly three years under XP and Vista, so I have a pretty good idea of how it looks and performs. Everything seems to look better under Windows 7, and I’m not sure exactly why. I went through the cleartype configuration wizard, which may have been the reason this is better. As far as performance, I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but I didn’t really expect the speed to increase more than I just hoped it wouldn’t decrease. The laptop does run cooler now. Even when I’m doing more intensive things the fan seems to run less frequently and the bottom feels cooler.
Now I admit, these observations are not scientific. I didn’t measure the temperature of the bottom of my laptop after watching precisely 1 hour of HD content in both configurations. People’s impressions always trump scientific data anyway, as evidenced by Vista. The general impression of Vista was negative, so very few people actually tried it themselves. Windows 7 has the potential to be just as negative, especially since there are some big changes to the interface. Microsoft has done a good job of keeping the initial impressions positive, with only a few exceptions. There was an ignorant article on Federal Computer Week that described Windows 7 as Vista with only a very minor facelift, but not enough to be an improvement. It was obvious from reading it that the author either hadn’t used Vista or hadn’t used Windows 7.
Just as with Vista, people who don’t try it for themselves on decent hardware have no grounds to talk on it. Win 7 is a vast improvement over Windows XP and a valuable improvement over Vista. In my opinion there is no value in “upgrading” from Vista, however a clean install from XP or Vista is valuable if your hardware is reasonably fast. If you have a computer over 3 years old, a new computer is the best upgrade path.
Mozy has disappointed me. I have been unable to do a restore, and without a restore all the routine backups are worthless. The client has sat at “Connecting to backup service…” since I kicked it off yesterday. I’m going to need to reboot soon, so we’ll see if that fixes things. Windows Home Server appears to be able to perform a complete backup of this laptop now, so I’m feeling better about that. I’m going to blow away my desktop and try a full system restore from Windows Home Server and if that works I’m going to start feeling a little better about trusting it.
The big question I had was whether or not entering a retail code into the RTM code would work. It did not work for me.
Now that I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional on my Dell XPS M1210, I thought I’d go through a little of the process so far. First of all, I used the upgrade version, but did a clean install. I verified also that the old trick about installing without a key, not activating, and then using the upgrade key still works. I am upgrading from Vista, but I wiped it out first (dban) in order to try since I had heard conflicting reports on the net about that.
So now the reload process is in full-swing. First on were some windows patches that included a driver for my Nvidia GO 7400 card. A previous install I had attempted to find drivers directly through Nvidia. I went through a few attempts to install a version that wasn’t specifically for my card by changing the INF file. It worked, but I see no advantage of that over the built-in driver, and the built-in driver is certainly easier to install. I installed the Windows 7 compatible Synaptics driver as well because I like the scroll zones and a couple other features of the touchpad.
Next on was ESET Internet Security, my favorite AV software at the moment. Note that these things change as soon as a company starts getting the idea of packing their software full of useless additional components that slow a computer down more than help it (Symantec I’m looking at you, which I dropped shortly after 2000, and also Trend Micro which I dropped around 2007, but should have dropped sooner – you can thank a corporate agreement for keeping me that long).
Next on was Office 2007 Enterprise (thanks to work for the home licensing arrangement). Now I’m starting to see a trend of patch, reboot, patch, reboot for Microsoft things. I’ve done this 4 times now, and although Microsoft Update says I’m done, my AV software says it detects missing patches. Interesting.
Next on was TrueCrypt which recently updated to 6.3 for what they call full Win 7 support. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but it works fine. I run full-disk encryption on my laptop. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to do the same.
Next on was Free File Sync, an open source Windows based synchronization GUI which I used to restore my previously synchronized folders from the Windows Home Server that I’ve been evaluating. While that was synchronizing I kicked off the encryption process for TrueCrypt and downloaded Mozy. I remembered that I used my own encryption key and that it was stored in Roboform, so I downloaded, installed, and re-activated my copy of Roboform in order to pull out my custom key. I need to remember to locate and test my offline copy of that key or there’s little point in my using Mozy in a disaster recovery situation.
I made an image of my system with Acronis prior to wiping it out. For reasons I’ll describe later, I still do not trust Windows Home Server completely. I am not going to put Acronis back on for several reasons. First, Windows Home Server is supposed to be able to do image restores of my OS, so I’m going to do some testing to verify that works properly. Second, Acronis does a major release way too often, and I can’t afford to keep purchasing the software. The version 2009 of their software is not Windows 7 compatible, and they want another $30 in order to upgrade to 2010. If I need that image, and I probably will, I will install my license on another PC and use it to restore. Between Mozy, my offline backups, and Windows Home Server, I just don’t need an additional solution.
Somewhere in there I managed to get Firefox installed. The integration between Firefox and Windows 7 “feels” tighter than it did with Vista. It is hard to describe really, but links appear to open more quickly now, and I haven’t had anything strange happen yet.
I have a RTM build of Windows 7 on my work desktop. I brought up task manager after leaving the system on for about a week and found the following:
Now I am trying to use the machine just like I would use Vista or XP except that I, until this point, hadn’t yet loaded firefox to do the majority of my browsing. This machine has 8 total cores and 16GB of RAM in it, so wasn’t experiencing any performance issues using this much RAM, but it still seems excessive. Normally with past Internet Explorer use I try to make a habit of closing tabs and restarting the browser occasionally, but as I said I was trying to treat it the same way I would firefox and put it through its paces.
Anyone else experience this? I’m not sure if the excessive amount of RAM that I have is part of the reason this happened. In other words, would this have happened if I had 2GB of RAM? Are they caching data in RAM such as my browsing history to make it quick to go back?
In a nutshell it seems as if the lead developer for CentOS, which is a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, has disappeared. Now, before I begin, I’d like to point out that – and I come into this information late – it seems to me that step one would be to determine if the guy is actually alright and not stuck between a toilet and a door, or something similarly unpleasant. Maybe they have already done this, but I don’t know.
We’ve certainly lost a little sleep with the likes of LinuxNetworx who went under shortly after accepting payment on a 3-year support contract. Then SGI who stepped in to pick up the pieces but refused to honor the contract also went belly up and invalidated all prepaid support contracts leaving our old SGI machines in the lurch. Still, there’s nothing quite as disconcerting as a project as large as CentOS that relies so heavily on one single individual.
This is just a very brief rant, but if you run your business on or with Linux, use something that is supported commercially.
It took me less than 5 minutes to upgrade 4 blogs that I’m responsible for on the technical end. If you are a Wordpress user who has shell access to your server and you aren’t using subversion to update, then you are just wasting your time.
I have been looking forward to this release for quite some time. The interface is nicer looking on the back end, and threaded comments are available without a plugin. As with any upgrade, please let me know if you experience any issues. I have tested most things on a test site, but there is always the chance something crazy will happen during a release.
That is what I heard from a Microsoft trainer recently. Does anyone have any direct knowledge of whether this is true or not? The problem with any metric like this is that there are so many more variables than just Windows Vista and Windows XP. For example, take a 3-year old Windows XP machine and refresh it with a brand new PC and a fresh operating system and I guarantee help desk calls will go down, at least temporarily.
This is some good stuff. I downloaded the DirecTV2PC beta recently and have been using it to watch recorded shows in other rooms of the house. Read on for a full review with screen shots. Read the rest of this entry »
You heard about it here and elsewhere, plus Microsoft should have been popping up in your system tray asking you to update. Did you do it? If not, now is the time to get on it. Some exploit code has been published, so this typically means that it will not be much longer before people with ill intentions integrate the code into some other type of malicious software.
Clearly this one was not quite as dire as we were led to believe, however it is a good exercise in emergency patch procedure. I recently wrote about having to delay the monthly patches a week due to some high profile visitors and a general sudden paranoia about the safety of patching. The same week I finally pushed patches with WSUS was the week this critical patch was released, so we quickly called for some downtime again with the servers and forced the patch out to all users.
I did some things a long time ago to make such an emergency patch more feasible. The first thing was to lower the interval that desktops check for the patch. Since they are checking with my WSUS server, this ads slightly more network activity, but does not slow down the WAN connection one bit. The default limit is 24 hours and I changed it to 8. This means that so long as I schedule a patch outside of 8 hours of a deadline I can hit every single computer that was turned on. The second thing was an auto-approve rule. I automatically approve every single patch that comes into my WSUS server for a computer group called Not Fully Approved, or NFA that has no computer as member. This forces the patch to immediately begin downloading so that it is immediately ready for distribution when I approve it.
Wordpress is close to releasing version 2.7, and there is never a better time to jump on the Wordpress bandwagon. Some of the best new features are threaded comments, inline editing, comments API, dashboard comment replies, keyboard shortcuts, sticky posts, Automattic plugin install.
I noticed that the dashboard is drag and drop customisable and much more configurable. The idea is to make you more efficient. It looks like plugin installs work the same way plugin updates try to now. Of course, you must enter your username and password in the clear in order to make it work, so that’s not a wonderful solution, but it works. I don’t mind too much because I can connect with a ssh tunnel and tinyproxy, but I would prefer some way to store my real password on the server and use a secondary password such as my blog password to pull that password out and use it for my account.
Check out this page for a video of the demonstration.
Wordpress is the gold standard by which all other web applications will eventually be judged. With these additions and automatic software updating, there is not much left to make it easier for the user. I’m sure they will think of something though.
We just had patch Tuesday last week, so typically today would be the day when all the Windows servers are patched and rebooted. Due to a visit by a dignitary early next week a decision was made by people outside of IT to postpone patching until the following weekend. Is this a legitimate reason to postpone patching? The one legitimate argument is that something could go wrong with the patching and we end up recovering systems into the week. The likelihood of that happening must be pretty small since it has never once happened to us before. I do plenty of patch testing before making the decision to roll out, so there is usually forewarning that something negative is in the air in plenty of time to delay patching for a fix. In addition, many of the machines are virtual which could easily be snapshot before a patch if it were that critical.
On the other hand, patching regularly has kept us from getting any serious virus or worm for over three years. I wouldn’t wish for it because I would have to help in cleanup, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like if such a decision backfired and we got hurt precisely because they tried to avoid it.
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