Category Archives: Windows Vista

Converted to Windows 7. Nearly.

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Over the past decade I have played with any number of operating systems in various states of completeness.  Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac and even once Solaris (I was really bored).  In very few cases I was surprised.  In most cases – especially with Betas – I was left with the realisation that several hours of work had resulted in a useless PC.

One golden rule that I had enforced throughout was that I would never perform any of these bash’n’crash installations on my principal computer.  This is a rule that I followed solemnly until the 5th May 2009 when I installed Windows 7 RC on my stalwart Dell laptop.

This was not an off-the-cuff decision.  I had been running Windows 7 Beta on another machine for some time, and unlike Vista on my Dell, it hadn’t crashed no matter what I threw at it.  Furthermore, I had gotten increasingly frustrated with Windows Vista, an operating system I had previously liked.  Dire file copying performance , intermittent video driver issues and an overall lack of general responsiveness had left me with two options: reinstall Vista or do something else.  Do Something Else won.

Installation was a doddle, with all the drivers being automatically installed bar one.  It even found a video driver that was better than the nVidia one I had previously been using.

Two weeks in, and Windows 7 has behaved flawlessly.  It is fluid, fast and above all stable.  No video problems.  Files move to and from my servers without any issues.

Now I know that I am currently in the honeymoon period.  Sooner or later, the inevitable WinRot will set in (where Windows progressively gums itself up)  but Windows 7 is currently ticking all the right boxes.  It has taken Microsoft far too long, but they appear to finally have produced a version of Windows for the 21st Century.

Vista Update

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A quick update on the Vista front.  I wrote a while back about I succumbed to some of my earlier opinions on Vista and installed it on one of my principal laptops.

Well, since then I have fairly thrashing the computer on which Vista runs.  I have used recently and a whole range of tasks from writing complex ASP.Net websites to building Virtual Machines and it has yet to crash on me.  Thanks to some help found online, I have solved the NVidia graphics card issue – the performance rating was actually slower with the that latest NVidia drivers from Dell.  A quick driver hack later and the graphics are now much better.

The only new annoyance so far is that Vista tends to be more hardware intensive which in turn increases the component temperature which in turn causes the laptop cooling fan to run more.

Succumbing to Vista

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A few months ago, I wrote about my opinions of Windows Vista, and stated that I wasn’t planning to use it.  Even now, none of the businesses I work with have running Vista machines – any computer supplied with Vista is quickly downgraded to XP.

Irrespective of my own opinions, Vista exists and simply cannot be ignored by someone whose bread and butter work is IT Support.  Therefore, earlier this month I installed Vista Business on my principal home computer (a Dell Latitude D820).  The completed installation isn’t perfect – I’m still hacking around with video drivers, although this is more a NVidia than Microsoft issue – but I am not as disappointed as I had expected to be.

Now, this isn’t my first experience of Vista.  I participated in the original Beta programme, and back then I wasn’t overly impressed when it completely neutered my test computer.  I have also played around with the original RTM versions of Vista, and I was certainly not thrilled by it.  However, after using it for just over three weeks, I have to admit that I am beginning to warm to it.  I don’t think I have suffered any particular life changing experience, I think Vista has thanks to Service Pack 1.  SP1 seems to have addressed a whole range of annoyances that had served as ammunition to my anti-Vista viewpoints.   Chief among these was its’ woeful performance when copying files to and from network drives and external devices.

Does this mean that I am a now a fully-fledged, paid up member of the I love Vista club? Well no.  I now consider its’ positives outweight the negatives, but it is still not the all conquering product that Microsoft promised.  Will I continue to use it?  Yes, and for the foreseeable future.  Am I giving up on XP?  No, and in fact I am actually typing this post on my antique Thinkpad T30 running XP.