Microsoft Windows 7

I'm going to make this real easy on everyone who is debating the purchase. If you are asking, "What should I do about Windows 7", here's the answers. YES, make sure it is on that new computer you want. NO, don't upgrade from XP on your current computer. UP TO YOU, if you have a computer with Vista installed.

Now, for those who need qualifying explanations, here we go.

YES, Windows 7 is stable, solid, awesome. Make sure it is on your new computer because anything less would be just plain ridiculous.

NO, if you bought your computer and it came with XP, chances are that 7 may not run so hot. That being said, 7 runs on my eeePC 1000HE netbook just fine. If you bought your computer in the past 3 years, it should upgrade just fine, but if you are happy with XP, just hang out until you get a new computer. You'll be fine.

UP TO YOU, not really, get 7 and you'll thank me later.

just kidding. Unlike the vast majority of Vista "users"(that despise it), I actually use it. I've been using it since the first beta. I've seen the optimizations and revisions and it has come a long way. Yes there were issues, but the vast majority were problems with hard ware vendors not the software itself, and most were resolved in the first year and by SP1. Vista is as solid as 7 is. 7 is built on the same "engine" that Vista is. So it will be interesting to see the 7 lovers who still despise Vista when it's pretty much the same guts. That being said, 7 has a lot of new features and runs well on even old hardware. UP TO YOU.

There. All the IT pros and hardware/software enthusiasts, this article need not apply to you. You've probably tried it out already and know what you will do (or have done already). But for those who could give a crap about computers, but for some reason want to know the hub bub about Windows 7. There you go.

Late

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690G Chipset and Windows 7

FYI for those in the same boat as me.

If you have a 690G Chipset motherboard and have need of the Catalyst Control Panel (and by default the AMD drivers) for use with Windows 7, AMD has released a driver (well, like a month and a half ago) that can be installed and used with Windows 7. It's not officially supported but, I downloaded it, right-clicked/properties and set the compatibility tab to: Vista SP2, disable themses, checked the box next to run as an admin, and clicked OK. Then I right-clicked/Run as Administrator and there you go. Select Custom and let it detect the drivers you need. The Video drivers and CCC Application should be on the list along with a C+ runtime or something.

I needed this driver because, by default, the MS driver does not fill the screen on my Samsung 32" TV. So I need the scaling option provided by the CCC that I can use to adjust the visable screen size.

Driver found here.

Good Luck

Later.

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Creative Relief

Well after a lot and not enough thought, I decided to remove XP from my eeePC. Now as it stands, my Hard Drive is divided thusly... around 10G for XP, then 20G for OSX, 80G for 7, and the rest is an extended partition with a 8G Logical mounted at /, a 20G Logical mounted at /home and a 2G Swap Partition. In that order on the drive.

So in order to do this, I am removing the first Partition, and bumping everything towards the from, expanding as I go along. So after much consideration, I popped in my trusted Gparted Live disc (0.4.4.1) and went to work. I deleted the XP Partition, Move the OSX to the front, tried to resized it but later found out it is not possible while Journaling is enabled. So I left the 8G partition alone (RAW) and resized the 80G 7 partition to 70G, and expanded the Extented Partition 10G, Moved everything to the front, enlarging the /Home partition 10G. After not thinking, I hit the Apply button and and hour and a half later, it finished with 3 warnings. But warnings are for suckers and upon reboot, my grub menu popped up. No way, this is to good to be true. OSX booted fine, Ubuntu booted fine, but 7 did not. So, having been this route before, I eeked out a plan. First I booted into Ubuntu and edited my grub menu.lst. It used to say hda 0,0 but since I want to boot off of the 7 partition instead of the XP I changed that to 0,2 (OSX being 0 and 1 being that blank partition).... upon reading what i just wrote, I'll probably have to change it from 2 to 1 after I merge the OSX partition with the blank one, but let's not get ahead of oourselves. So I did that, popped in the 7 disc, booted up, went to Repair Windows. It asked to do some automatice repairs, I let it. It reboots. I boot off of the disc again, click Repair Windows, Select Startup Repair, let it do its thing and BAM, reboots, I let grub come up, and select Windows 7... And it works. EVERYTHING ACTUALLY WORKS. Even better, since XP is gone, I don't see another boot loader. Everything is going according to plan.

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One caveat I'm noticing about multi-booting my eeePC is that Windows 7 will work fine no matter what, but if I boot into 7 and then restart and boot into Ubuntu, I lose sound, the only remedy is shutting down and starting up again. If I boot into 7 and then restart into OSX I lose mouse/trackpad functionality again only remedied with a shutdown and startup. Weird but since that's the only thins I can see that is causing it, I'm good.
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Now let's see If I can screw up resizing the OSX partition...

So I boot into OSX and open up the Disk Utility and, following instructions I found on the web, I click the OSX partition and then click the File menu and look for Disbale Journaling. Greyed out. So still following the web advice, I open a terminal and do the following:

cd /Volumes/
ls

it spits out this:
Apple OS X Leopard Windows 7

so I counter witha diskutil uppercut:
sudo diskutil enableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/
(yes you need all those "\" when you have spaces in the name of your hard drive)

it replies saying, it's already enabled , dawg.
I'm just following instructions. I respond with
sudo diskutil disableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/

and it's disabled. I pop in my trustyl Gparted Live disc and reboot... and apparantly It can't resize HSF+ partitions. After some careful reading, it seem I need to boot up off of my mac osx disc. I'll try that later.

Late

**** UPDATE ****

I guess you can't grow HSF+ Partitions, only shrink or delete. Lame. or is it? First person to show me how to do it, well, I'll make you famous... semi-famous anyhow.

Late

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Just a few things on the mind...

Well, first off, anyone who touts that the Blackberry Storm is superior, or even preferred, over an iPhone is smoking some serious chronic, shooting heroin, and freebasing his brain into a stupor.  This is coming from a guy with a slight (it's getting better) bias against Apple.  I have spent a couple of days here at work trying to get a guys Storm to communicate with our Exchange server.  Due to security issues with our server I couldn't get it to work just yet, but the touch screen is a pain to deal with, it's slow (not slow-slow, but sluggish), and is overall a piece of crap, compared to the iPhone.  Now if this thing came out 3 or 4 years ago, it may have had a place in history, but as soon as the iPhone would appear it would be forgotten in time.  I never want to get my hands on a Storm ever again, at least the 1G ones.  Hopefully they will fix these issues with the 2G or hopefully no one here will buy one for me to configure ever again.

I'm still having fun with my eeePC.  And wouldn't you know it?  The two OS's I'm using the most right now are Ubuntu 9.04 and OSX Leopard.  SHOCKING.  I've really had to learn OSX as we support a few systems and I recently formatted an old PowerBook G4 (677MHZ PowerPC Processor, 512M SD RAM) and loaded it up with OSX Tiger.  I have to hand it to Apple, they made pretty things even way back in 2002.  Look at any Windows based notebook from that era and wretch.  Using Leopard on my eeePC, I've installed some handy apps to read NTFS hard drives that have made my life so much easier (MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, both free/open source).  Now if i could find some games that would be enjoyable and run on the eeePC.

On the Windows 7 front, it will be released this Fall/Winter Late 2009.  That's pretty awesome, since it is a pretty awesome OS.  Just shy of 3 years since Vista.  For once Microsoft beat its own forecast, but expect Windows 8 either in 3 years or 6 depending on if they scrap 2 years of development like they did before Vista.  Both OS run great at the moment (as they are pretty much 1st cousins if not siblings.)  so don't give me any of that "Vista SuX" nonsense.  You only show how ignorant and biased you are to the rest of us... unless you are running Vista on a old, pre 2005 machine... then I'll let you slide... but remember, Vista wasn't made for you.

I'm  playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately.  I'm actually enjoying myself immensely and dreading the ending which will show up all to soon.  There is a lot of downloadable content available (free and pay) so we'll see if I continue past the prescribed ending, but I have a crap-load of games to play and since money is tight, it will force me (well not against my will) to play them instead of going ADD with my current library.

And on another awesome note.  Those who like Star Wars and are getting into the novels and then see the 22 book epic New Jedi Order and feel overwhelmed?  Well Dark Horse is putting those stories (well at least the era) into comic book form (which I believe they wanted to do all along, but then Lucas Books gave it to Del Ray to make novels) called INVASION.  It looks awesome.  Did I just saw awesome a bunch of times?  You bet I did.  Awesome like Transformers 2.

And yes, I did see Terminator:Salvation.  Great movie, I can totally recommend it.  Great story and action.  Go see it.  Need to see Star Trek, Wolverine, and then Transformers.... but probably just Transformers seeing as I'm broke.

Late.

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Still looking for a job and Windows 7 Build 7057

Huh,

I just sat down to do this, and I get a call from an IT company for an interview. w00t! I've been job hunting for almost 7 weeks now. It's frustrating but doable... and at the same time, and I know this may sound weird but, it's actually kind of exciting. I finally am in a position to choose my own destiny as far as the rest of my career. It's a mix of awesome and anxiety.

Windows 7 has been on my radar for the better part of 6 months. I ran a pre-beta for a couple of weeks, then went back to Vista. Then I installed the 64 bit Beta (build 7000) and used it for 5 weeks. I also installed the beta 2 months ago on my wife's Asus eeePC 1000HA. Two days ago when I upgraded to 64 bit Build 5048. Release Candidate 1 (RC1) also known as build 7057 (rumored) has been out for a few days as well, but I held off due to reports that 7057 was slower than 5048. But how to be sure? I upgraded my wife's netbook with build 7057 and she has had little to no issues. I'm pretty happy with Windows 7. I'm not going to get all emotional like a lot of posts you might read about an Operating System. There are a lot of people who talk about OS's like they are the make or break technology of the univers and they either SUCK or ROCK, there is no inbetween.

Windows 7 is made of ROCK. It's pretty solid/stable, much more stable than Vista was at this stage (however let me point out, 7 is built on the same tech that's been refined with Vista). I still like Vista and I'm excited where Microsoft is going with their operating system with 7.

Well, to the juice of this post, this morning while I was perusing Dice.com and my email account, I looked up at my Home Theatre Personal Computer (HTPC) and thought, hmmm, I wonder what the Windows 7 Media Center is like. Ten minutes later I was installing 7. The install went well, with the exception of some fine re-configuration with my Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) (I have a 690G based motherboard, and AMD/ATI doesn't have beta or official Windows 7 drivers for it yet.). But after installing ATI Windows 7 Beta Drivers, and the install failing to install the display driver (unsupported, and I was aware of this), it did install the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) and with that application I was able to complete the display install (I needed the image expand/shrink option to expand the display to fill my TV's screen). Onto Media Center, it's really clean and simple, yet improved and awesome.

First the negatives:

-no official MKV, MP4 support in Media Center. Yes, MP4's are supported in Media Player but not Media Center. Confused? I am. A simple registry change fixes this, however, so no big deal.

Next the positives:

-The clean interface. If you own a Zune, the fonts and layout is very similar. I like the fact that MS is making an across the board effort to implement a common theme with their products. I think they need to bring this to the XBOX 360, but saldy, I don't see that happening until at least the next generation XBOX. But, MS has been surprisingly supportive of their Zune line, updating ALL of their Zune products and not just the latest generation (APPLE), so it's not out of the question.

-The Movie Library. Adding folders to the Movies Library merges all the movies into one place. It doesn't move them but it's seemless. For instance, I have movies from 3 different folders getting pulled into the Movies library, but when you select Movies from the main menu, you just see all the movies, no folders.

-The Pictures/Videos Library. Not so much for the Pictures part, but for thost that want to open a specific folder, the Videos Library allows you to add folders containing video files and then see the specific folders when you select Videos from the main menu. For example, when I select Videos, I see all the individual folders I added, like Sports, Music (Videos), Television (Shows), Animation (Cartoons), Children (Kids TV Shows).

And the rest:

-I didn't check to see if h264/x264 is supported out of the box, like Microsoft has been touting, but, when I do, I will report back. Instead, I installed the Shark007 codec pack, which is linked here on the site. I highly recommend it in it's current form.

This is really scratching the surface. There are more indepth reviews, but those were main points that stuck out to me so far. Windows 7 is shaping up to be a great OS, and while there is a lot of time between now and launch, I'm feeling confident this will be a milestone in Microsoft's legacy.

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