My Windows 7 Experience (3 days in)

[jmadero]

LOL! Thought this was worth sharing after seeing the idiotic propaganda that Microsoft is running on tv right now.

To be fair...I installed the release candidate....hold on, it's freezing...I'll finish this in a few minutes in Ubuntu

[jmadero]

okay I'm back....

so going on with my story...

I installed release candidate on another machine awhile back and I was actually pretty impressed (relative to Vista)...boot time was quite a bit faster, drivers were working, programs were a bit faster....looked a bit nicer

So...I have a Windows partition on my machine for netflix, decide "why not" in terms of upgrading to Windows 7.

So far my experience:
1. DAY 2, 3rd boot into Windows 7, was going to install a couple things just so that if I ever booted into Windows it would be functional. Goes to the black screen saying it needs to check disk...okay cool, I understand....counts down from 10..9...8...7......1 STOPS. Disk stops spinning, complete system freeze

so I restart, then it goes to black screen again, I press "any button to quit", like it says I can do....guess what, does nothing, countdown continues, gets stuck at 1....nothing

So...similar to old stories with Windows machines, I reformat, spend 5 hours installing Vista first, then upgrading it to Windows 7.

2. So now I'm running a brand new machine, I redid my whole partition set up and have a fresh install of Windows (taking 5 hours of course) and Linux (taking about 40 minutes with everything, from install to installing all software and having it IDENTICAL to what I had before the format).

I go into Windows again, to watch The Office on NBC (site doesn't work in Linux yet), I decide that it's time I get my other languages installed on Windows, just for the hell of it. Go into control panel....stops responding, I give it a minute....two minutes....okay fine, one freeze, all good. I restart, try again, freezes again.

I can do nothing in my control panel at this point, I've looked, several forums have the issue listed, no clue what the status is on it.

Then I decide "OOOKAY" fine no control panel, I don't use Windows enough to care (probably about once every month or so). Then I go into the system updates, and go into the "optional updates", why not right? I mean, if they have been put on the MS website, where we pay an insane amount of money to boost their profits, I was assuming that it'd work fine. I install the three optional updates, one of which crashes my system, no more windows, good riddance


Now I'll be the first to admit that Linux has some issues, but I can blame software developers for 90% of those issues (basically selling out to MS across the board and making it almost impossible to get the same "functionality" -- not sure if that word can be used considering the above story -- in Linux. Already in Ubuntu 9.10 I have two pretty hefty issues, one of which is kernel panics, never had them before, the STA driver through the system -> admin -> hardware drivers crashes my kernel, so I found a temporary work around. The 2nd of which is the clicking issues in Flash, for some reason mouse clicks are not being "seen"

The difference is that Microsoft gets everyone to work for THEM while our community has to work many times with no help at all. Furthermore, Microsoft rarely tells us what the status of the issues are....both of the issues I have listed in Ubuntu 9.10 are on "high" priority in Launchpad and therefore will probably be fixed in the coming month or so...

What a waste of my time, 5 hours yesterday....GAH! Why did I even try?

[rokytnji]

Ouch jmadero

I hope my wifes new Acer with Windows 7 doesn't take a dive. She might want her Acer Aspire One back if that happens. It (Win 7) came preinstalled and she hasn't made a recovery DVD yet either. I am only thankful for Win 7 as it gave me this Aspire One as a consolation prize. So I hope her laptop doesn't bite the dust yet. I kept a Partition of XP Home on the Aspire but use Easy Peasy 1.0 on another partition on the Aspire. Figured since it came on here stock and has a 160 gig hardrive I might as well for now. Don't use it much yet as I am not a Windows aficionado. Spent most of my time in it cleaning it up and immunizing it.

On a related matter. She had me get rid of Macafee Trial Virus program, and Norton WEB storage whatever. So I put Avira, Spyware Blaster, CCleaner, Malwarebytes on it instead. Did a Malwarebytes quick scan right after and it picked up 6 BHO Trojans right after scan. Just doing some quick downloads and installs. What a trip. Don't know if any false positives were involved but with Windows you never know. Sorry to hear about your experience and knocking on wood that it stays clear of my Ol Ladys gear.

[Roxoff]

jmadero, you're getting spurious errors in two operating systems. If it were my rig, I'd run memtest86 and leave it till it completes. If those errors were purely down to software, they'd have been fixed - they seem like critical errors the way you report them, and certainly serious enough to halt a software release.

[jmadero]

the errors are unrelated....the Linux ones are well known, in launchpad and listed as high priorities (therefore they're acknowledged to be software issues).

As for Microsoft 7, yes I would agree that the issues are big enough to have needed a freeze on the release date. From the forums there are a lot of people having unresponsive systems after opening the control panel.

[bigvoo]

ms lost me 2 years ago and I will never go back...no matter how cute a new windows is...as for the office on linux, you can watch it on fancast. I use linux mint 7 and i watch ghost hunters and destination truth daly on there, never had any issue, as for the office, it may be 2 days after actual air date, that's how southpark is on there.

[techieMoe]

My experience.

TechieMoe tries Microsoft Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate

[jmadero]

First off, thank you much bigvoo for the link, it's nice not having to go to Windows to watch a 30 minute show (considering it takes a good 5 just to get Windows all the way booted....okay maybe exaggerating but still...)

Techie, seems like your experience was much better than mine....I still can't get into control panel, tried again just for the heck of it and it just freezes, can't do ANYTHING in it. Did a virus scan just to check (although I've only visited like 4 sites in Windows), came out clean....totally unresponsive any time I go into control panel....

I just found out that Ubuntu released the fix for Flash so....even less of a reason to waste my time in Windows

[minthaka]

I've red your rant about Win7, Techie, and you made me curious: how will they rescue their encrypted data? I mean, if Win7 breaks down (which is to be expected), what is going to happen with the user's data. Anyway, the same thing is offered at installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, but I didn't choose it, since I don't see very clearly the possible consequences.

[techieMoe]

I've red your rant about Win7, Techie, and you made me curious: how will they rescue their encrypted data? I mean, if Win7 breaks down (which is to be expected), what is going to happen with the user's data. Anyway, the same thing is offered at installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, but I didn't choose it, since I don't see very clearly the possible consequences.

In theory, you can connect a Bitlocker-encrypted drive to another computer and enter the heavy-duty passphrase that gets generated when you first ran Bitlocker to decrypt it. If you don't save your passphrase somewhere, however, I'm not sure the data can be recovered.

The presenter at the conference said there is a reason why they don't offer BitLocker in the versions of Windows that go to general consumers (Starter, Home, Professional), only their corporate or "extreme enthusiast" base (Enterprise, Ultimate). They assume those people will either be responsible with their encryption keys or have an IT guy who will.