 "Disastrous!" | 2009-11-18 |
| - Reviewed By unamusicologist |
I bought the computer for which this was destined three years ago. I'd intended to upgrade that machine to Vista, so I added a nice video card. Then Vista was released, and it proved to be disastrous. I passed. In the mean time, I doubled the RAM in my computer, and I watched when MS released the beta of Windows 7 as tech writers hailed the new OS as a huge improvement. With this in mind, I decided to take advantage of an offer to purchase the Windows 7 Pro upgrade for $100.
After a few days, I finally got around to installing the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on my computer. What a mistake! First, I had difficulties locating drivers for components made by well-known manufacturers: ever heard of Linksys? Belkin? Some of these I never found. Then, in the first week, I was getting the blue screen of death (BSOD) more than a half-dozen times per day, often in the middle of the night when no one was working on the computer. So much for stability!
The BSOD issue prompted me to install the 64-bit version. In this case as well, I have been unable to find drivers (including for network cards).
Now, contrast my Windows 7 experience with my Ubuntu 9.10 experience. I installed 64-bit Ubuntu. All the drivers were available, and the operating system is fast and stable. It's also free and easy to use, looks great, and includes tons of terrific free applications (including OpenOffice, the first office suite to give MS Office a run for its money).
I only have a few reasons to run Windows: I'm a software developer, and some of the applications I develop use technologies targeted at Windows. I also have other software (e.g., Quicken and the music notation program Sibelius) for which Linux versions aren't available. My solution will be to run Windows in a virtual machine. Otherwise, I'm going to stick with Ubuntu for the rest of my computing needs.
My recommendation: download Ubuntu and, if you're still a bit nervous about a new operating system, pick up a book like this: Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Fourth Edition. As for Windows? Don't even go there. |
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| "GARBAGE!" | 2009-11-17 |
| - Reviewed By kingraine |
HELLO, why can't you make the taskbar show behind windows? Why is there no quick launch, why was MSPaint turned into a confusing cluttered mess? Why is that annoying user account control garbage still there to annoy the hell out of everyone whenever they want to install a program? Why the hell is the network manager so stupid: you're forced to view it in the corn of ur screen when trying to access it, and forced to watch it try to connect to a single connection instead of being allowed to try and switch it on the fly. I CAN'T BELIEVE VISTA IS BETTER THAN THIS THING. IT'S INSANE!
The only noticeable improvement is the SDHC scanning speed and auto-finding of drivers for your laptop/PC, but Vista can do that too. Well I'm not going to use Linux, it's nerdware, and will probably go back to Vista, ironically. I don't, like most other people, how a company that is worth and makes billions, can't come out with an OS, and GUI, after getting tons of complaints about Vista, that doesn't anger the majority. If we want to be angry we can all just go to Linux, ok Microsoft? At least linux, apple and microsoft aren't the only alternative os', I'll keep searching for something better that isn't stuck the way it is because of companies that are paranoid about showing their source to anyone. |
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 "Windows 7 Rocks!" | 2009-11-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: AIVNRARP3471X |
| I was already using the BETA and the RC1 of Windows 7 so I kind of knew what to expect when I received the officially released version. It is definitely the best version of Microsoft Windows I have ever used, and I have used all of them since Windows 3.11. I highly recommend Windows 7 for anyone still using Windows XP. Upgrade, you won't regret it. |
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| "Not Ready Yet." | 2009-11-03 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3H6T17EDYGHBS |
Unless you are a PC professional or your recreation consists solely in fiddling with computers (and you're not sure whether there is an opposite sex or not), you'd be better off staying away from Win7.
You will be doing Microsoft's integration testing and final QA. And you will pay for the privilege. I've been using Win 7 Beta since it first came out, and the Windows 7 Release Candidate (supposedly frozen code) for the last 6 months. Both were generally good OS packages, and fast, but the purchased version has features (and "inconveniences") not in the Beta or the Release Candidate. My guess is the code was frozen a few minutes before the first product disks were made.
Win 7 is a big improvement over Vista. But then, XP is a big improvement over Vista. Win 7 is much faster than Vista, it may be faster than XP. But it has big-company computer management clunkiness, not what I want in my very-own personal PC.
And Win7 is not ready for Prime Time. Nobody but Microsoft could get away with releasing such untested software.
Networking among Win7 computers is totally different from the Workgroup networking of 98 and XP. You will have to forget all you figured out over the last decade and start over. Vista concepts may be carried forward, but as I studiously avoided Vista, I don't know how Vista to Vista networking works.
If you understand and are competent with XP, you will find Microsoft support clueless. They can help first-time computer users set up Win7, but beyond the basics they are lost. Good, friendly people, eager to help, but in over their heads. And second-tier (higher level) technical support is buried. Not a good sign.
After 30 hours of trying to get Win7 to do what I could do with XP, I reloaded XP. This review is typed on XP. I'll wait for Win 7 service pack (SP) 2 in a year or so. I suggest you do the same.
More details and explanation
I had Win 7 Beta in a heterogeneous network with XP. When I upgraded my XP computer to Win 7 things changed - particularly networking.
I've been using Microsoft products since the beginning, and have advanced through Win 95, Win 98, and XP, with home networks since networking became native with Win98. For me a computer is a tool to do work. Computers are not hobbies, entertainment, nor my profession. I try to get computers and networks to do what I want (sharing printers and files, backing each other up) and have generally succeeded, but fiddling with them is not entertaining.
Win 7 is a big improvement over Vista. But then, XP is a big improvement over Vista. I replaced Vista with XP on my laptop when I realized the 3gigaherz dual-core laptop with 2 gig of memory running Vista was slower than my desktop which had a 500 megaherz Pentium, half a gig of memory, and ran XP. Eight times the processing power, 4 times the memory, and slower. Vista is a pig.
But then, Win 98 is an improvement over Vista, as was DOS 6 and Windows 3.0.
Overall Approach.
Windows 98 was for personal computers - your computer, you managed it, you (and only you) used it. It was your computer with your OS, your configuration, your file structure, your networking, and your software.
Windows NT and Win 2000 were for corporate PCs. The computer belonged to corporate IT. Corporate IT managed and controlled the computer: its configuration, networking, software, available services, etc. A Windows 2000 computer was just a terminal into the big distributed corporate computer, a terminal that had local storage for your personal work, but you, the user, were not to control it.
An environment (and need) that emerged about 10 years ago was the multi-user PC: your spouse, your kids (of varying ages), the baby sitter, your brother, and anybody else who happened to be in your house would use your PC, surf the web (porn sites), download software, introduce malware, and make changes that messed forced you to rebuild.
XP adapted to the multi-user PC environment, giving you, the owner, some control and giving each user his own logon and file structure. This changed where files were stored, even if you were the only user, pretending that the file system actually began with the Desktop (a la Apple; Bill Gates has a serious envy problem relative to Steven Jobs) rather than with the hard drive, the actual root. XP wants to force all your work into the "My Documents" folder which is OK, I guess, unless you want to put your work on a hard drive or partition other than C:\. My Documents is, of course, actually located at C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents, right next to where the Desktop actually is: C:\Documents and Settings\\Desktop. Everything Windows Explorer (Microsoft used to call this program "File Manager", when you were expected to manage files rather than simply explore) shows above "My Computer" is a fiction.
Win 7 combines the Win 98, WinXP, and Win 2000 approaches into one single package. Now, its may be your persona PC you bought from Dell, you may be the only user, but there are some things you can't do unless you are the Administrator. This is to protect you from people who won't be using your computer anyway and to ensure you use the PC in a corporate-approved way. If you follow Microsoft's advice and set up an Administrator account in addition to your user account, you will discover that, when you turned the computer on while you were making coffee, it didn't boot all the way up, but only half-way and waited for you to tell it who was going to use the computer: you or the Administrator (which is, of course, you). After you give it an answer, Win 7 will finish launching while you waste time watching it.
If you want your laptop to be ready to do work when you come back with coffee, don't set up an Administrator account. Just make sure you have all administrative privileges (easy to do) when you set up your user account during install. Or straighten everything out with the Users program in Control Panel. Vista is the same way, so if you've been suffering with Vista you already know about it.
Operating without full privileges actually makes sense in Linux, where you can accidentally do some serious damage very quickly, and when IT doesn't want you do change your PC, but it is unnecessary for a personal PC. (It's sad when PC no longer means "Personal Computer," so you have Corporate Personal Computers and Personal Personal Computers.)
Still, you will regularly be told you can't do things you want to do unless the Administrator approves. Click a button to approve (or turn the protection off, I don't remember how) as it is an opportunity to think twice before doing something really stupid - like installing and running eatsyourdiskforlunch.exe which you accidently downloaded).
When upgraded from XP, I discovered that I didn't have permission to install some of the utility programs I'd downloaded (and paid for). The upgrade conveniently saved the install files, but I couldn't run them. Changing the file ownership (file ownership - another new "feature") didn't help. Fortunately I'd copied all these programs to another disk and I could run them from there. Why Win7 would save an exe file then not let you run it is another entry in the growing list of Redmond Mysteries.
Networking
Somewhere along the way (98 or XP) Windows made networking a native feature of the OS and introduced the concept of Workgroups. Workgroups allowed you to set up logical subnets on your router so I could keep my computers and their associated storage and printers separate from my kids computers. You can give your workgroup any name you want, though the default was "Workgroup". You added individual computers to one workgroup or another. Certain resources could be shared among workgroups. Each computer selected files and folders for sharing, with or without passwords, and it was all pretty powerful; at least it did everything I ever wanted it to. Firewalls on individual computers provided added protection and flexibility.
Rather than building on the familiar, Win7 introduces a totally new concept: Homegroup. In a heterogeneous network (e.g., Win 7 and XP on different computers) Workgroups still exist, but became inoperative when I upgraded my XP to Win7. Now everything is "Homegroup". All homegroups are named "Homegroup". You can put in security and passwords, but you can't change the name. Perhaps that's not true, but Microsoft support doesn't know how to do it.
If it is possible to set up separate logical subnets on a router - with different passwords and sharing - and I'm not convinced it is - all the homegroups will have the same name: "Homegroup." Worthless.
Support.
The Microsoft website is about as organized as a library with all the books misfiled. There is a support Chat function, if you have the Win7 ID number (the one that appears in Computer Properties, not the unlock key that comes with the disk) you can "chat" with friendly, responsive people who seem to know less about Win7 than I do. I've been into chat 3 times, each time it took me 30 minutes to find it, and each time I somehow got there a different way. It isn't easy and obvious like other support sites like Dell and Computer Associates.
Like much that comes from Microsoft, the web site makes sense only if you already know so much that you don't need to go to the web site.
I spent 4 hours with three different first-level support people (nice folks) doing goofy things as they tried to figure out how Win7 networking worked. Microsoft is so inundated with Win7 problems that the second-level technical support is backlogged at least 24 hours.
When support is buried, you know the product has lots of problems. |
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| "XP Upgraders BEWARE!!!!" | 2009-11-03 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1MAN5UFK1BP3A |
When Microsoft says that you can upgrade from XP Pro (32-bit) to Windows 7 Pro (32-bit) in several hours, well, this is an understatement. Almost 35 hours and a week later, my computer is still NOT back to where it was before the upgrade.
I am still having problems with several of my previously installed and previously working applications. It is now apparent that I will have to purchase a new printer. This is frustrating as my previous printer worked just fine using XP for copying, scanning, and printing....my current printer suited me just fine, it did everything and more than I needed to do. So now...I have to spend another $150 or so to purchase a new printer and just trash my current printer???!!!! No thank you!!!! Did I mention that my current printer was working flawlessly under XP?
I never went through the frustrations of Windows VISTA, as XP worked just fine for me. I have a new desktop computer that is only 9 months old, and scores very high (via Microsoft's website# with respect to the minimum hardware requirements needed for Windows 7....my computer has a Quad core Intel processor-2.4 GHz, 4 GB of Ram, 500 GB hard drive, a significantly upgraded video card, etc.
When will Microsoft learn that their customers are quickly growing weary of just throwing good money at bad.
In summary, upgraders from XP, please BEWARE!!!! unless of course you have about 30 extra hours of time that you are willing to waste, at least a couple hundred dollars to buy new printers, hardware, applications, etc., and are able to stomach constant re-boots and constant restores, constant loss of access to the internet and your email, constant calls to #800# number technical support, etc., etc., etc. #and to boot, they now want me to pay for technical support before they'll even talk to me) I've learned the very hard way, I should have waited at least 6 more months to another year before jumping on the Windows 7 bandwagon.
Microsoft, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Please be honest with your loyal customers about what an upgrade from XP to Windows 7 actually entails. |
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| "I am completely blown away by Windows 7" | 2009-11-02 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1IAZWSDQPJ4E7 |
I am completely blown away by Windows 7. Today I installed its "Professional" version on my file server - way sooner than I had intended, but Windows 7 Ultimate 64 has been running extremely smoothly on my Lenovo laptop (the link goes to the new G550 model, equivalent to the N500 I have) to the point that I felt it would be safe - only one issue so far, and that has to do with disk defragmentation, not a life-and-limb problem. This too was a "clean" install, the true Vista in-place upgrade I am leaving for last, as I want to see "7" run on several CPUs for a while before attempting that.
I run little software on this file server, so simply blew away the C: drive partitions, did a quick temporary XP install, necessary to be able to use the upgrade software, and then began a clean install of Win7. Once it had done its first install run, I changed the default settings to "find new drivers", and I'll be damned if it hadn't found and installed all of the drivers it had not had after the first run. Let me tell you how special this is: the PC I am running on is an older Everex desktop designed for Linux, and on top of that Everex as a company has since bitten the dust, so I have no access to any drivers for Windows, as I never had a Windows install for this machine, and their website went dead when they did.
Now it would have been unusual enough if Windows 7 had found all of the necessary device drivers for motherboard and attached storage devices, but it then went one better on me: not only did it find and recognize all devices, it then went and found the driver for my Sabrent SATA-2PRD eSATA Raid disk controler, then discovered the two Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750 GB External Hard Drives attached to this controller, figured out that these had been configured to run as a RAID 0 pair, and mounted the pair in the right sequence without needing the SATARaid management software that normally does that job, or any input from me. I gotta tell you I just about fell off my chair when I saw that happen. I have in the past managed to manually mount an existing RAID pair through the Windows Vista Disk Manager, but to see a brand new "1.0" operating system do this all by itself, on an older desktop with an anemic 1500 mHz Via processor for which no drivers were available at all, is to me a major miracle. It is as if Microsoft, in one fell swoop, has suddenly understood what an operating system really ought to look like. "7" even recognized the definitely non-standard Uninterruptible Power Supply I have hooked up to this system, and manages that without needing the external software I needed before!
Vital in this process is that the "7" install can connect to the internet during the install - this goes for a new PC as much as it does for an upgrade. If you do not have the internet hookup ready and connected, the software you want to install handy, license keys at your elbow, don't start.
It looks to me that Microsoft has made a truly impressive effort to have network drivers included for most network cards known to man. You are best off connecting your PC or laptop to an Ethernet router, but I have to tell you that on my Lenovo laptop it found both the regular and the WiFi card, then presented me during the install with a choice of three wireless networks to connect to - I had never seen that happen before, swear to God. Windows 7 does something I had noticed in Vista on some occasions, but "7" does it consistently - it doesn't go out to look for drivers for the adapter, peripheral or other doodah it is installing, it goes into the device, figures out whose chipset it uses, then installs a driver for that. This makes very good sense - there are only a few manufacturers of graphics chipsets, for instance, and most manufacturers of graphics adapters use one of those OEM chipsets. Since Microsoft has working relationships with all of those chipset manufacturers, it has the information as well as the software to "drive" those chipsets. To give you an example, Windows 7 does not care whether you bought your drive array from Fantom or from Cavalier - it recognizes, "knows", there are Western Digital hard disks in the enclosure, and is able to drive those direct. Teehee, problem solved.
So the consequence - I have now installed "7", one Ultimate, one Professional, on two systems, neither of which I had drivers for - is that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to go out and buy a new system "with a free upgrade". Back up your stuff, clean up your existing install, and chances are you'll be running Windows 7 by the end of the afternoon (I tested this earlier with the 7 Beta on a positively ancient HP laptop, and it worked there too)! That was the other eye opener - it normally takes me anywhere from six to ten hours to fully install an operating system, much of the time taken by downloading and installing online upgrades, and online upgrades to the online upgrades - "7" took me exactly two hours and fourty-three minutes to install, including updates, down to and including making the network drives visible to the network, and mounting them on my other systems. That's gotta be a record, kids - for the first time, ever - and I am including Apple's Snow Leopard here! - I did not have to go and look for a single device or adapter driver to get Windows 7 to run properly. It even recognized my Samsung network laser printer across the network, and offered to install its drivers (I chose not to, so can't tell you it worked), which aren't exactly standard.
I have seen a few reviews of "7" that exhort you to be cautious, not to install Windows 7 as an upgrade on older computers that have not been certified by Microsoft, preferably buy a PC or laptop that either is preloaded, or certified and "upgradable", but I can't agree with any of that. I had tried the Windows 7 Beta Microsoft has made available on several CPUs, over the past six or so months, and had the experience that that ran on just about anything I wanted to throw it at, but the production release is even smoother than that, and I can tell you from experience that no previous version of Windows has been that compatible. With Windows XP, it would often take a lot of work and tweaking to get it to run on some machines - Windows Vista was better, but not problem free - I have to say that Vista was pretty smooth about a year after it was first introduced, when I began using it - but Windows 7 is a revelation. Apart from installing very smoothly, "7" seems faster than any previous version of Windows - I noticed this especially on the Everex desktop I am reporting on here, which has an anemic processor and can only handle 2 GB of RAM, and yet runs like a bat out of hell, where on Vista, previously, and even on the Windows 7 final Beta, the thing crawled. As I am only using it as a network file server, mostly for backups, that wasn't an issue, but I can now use it for other things as well, such as controlling my house lighting and alarm system.
What remains is for me to upgrade my little Everex laptop, which I will do with Vista and applications in place, provided Windows 7 will upgrade Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional "in place". Watch this space, but so far, so (very) good. |
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