So, for the past week and few days I have been using some­thing that I hon­estly expected to be yet another Micro$oft abom­i­na­tion — Win­dows 7 — or as I call it, Win­dows Se7en, in honor of the Kevin Spacey movie, Se7en (AKA Seven).  As much as I hate to admit it, how­ever, it has not yet proven to be an abom­i­na­tion, or as evil as Kevin Spacey’s char­ac­ter in said movie.  In fact, its been quite coop­er­a­tive except for a few minor things.

Ini­tial Win­dows 7 Desk­top (2 monitors)

One Week…

Over this week and a few days of using Win­dows 7, I actu­ally have not had any crashes or major hassles/problems with the oper­at­ing sys­tem, aside from the stu­pid User Account Con­trol secu­rity pop­ups I get when try­ing to install soft­ware.  XFire’s auto­matic update doesn’t work any­more since it needs Admin­is­tra­tor rights to install that, but man­u­ally run­ning the updates solves that prob­lem.  Win­dows does keep telling me it needs to back itself up, but it wants a drive that has 196GB free — the amount I am cur­rently using on the sys­tem drive — to make a com­plete sys­tem image.  While this is a more effec­tive backup method, and pre­serves installed appli­ca­tions and set­tings, how many peo­ple have a drive with equal capac­ity to their sys­tem drive lying around, aside from us nerds.  I haven’t run the backup yet so can’t com­ment on the process, I’m wait­ing to final­ize my deci­sion on my new net­work stor­age server (can’t decide between one gigan­tic server or one mod­er­ate one for stor­age and one small one for backup — the more likely option).

A few things have come up though dur­ing the week.  Itunes can’t save its library with­out giv­ing an error due to the way that it uses tem­po­rary files to save its library.  This is a stu­pid minor thing that hope­fully will be fixed by Apple because Microsoft sure ain’t gonna fix it and I’m too lazy to run through the 6+ steps to fix it myself that involve exces­sive reboots.  By default, the oper­at­ing sys­tem will auto­mat­i­cally index your drive.  While this is good if you ever want to quickly search for a file, it does hurt sys­tem per­for­mance, so I dis­abled it for my sys­tem drive.  Also, Win­dows 7 is a stan­dard Microsoft Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.  By that, I mean it is INCREDIBLY bloated.  It takes up at least 15GB for just the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself, let alone soft­ware, so don’t expect to see a full blown ver­sion of this on SSD net­books any­time soon.  The new fea­ture that lets you auto­mat­i­cally have a win­dow take up half of your mon­i­tor doesn’t work prop­erly if you have two or more mon­i­tors.  Win­dows Fire­wall blocks every­thing by default, but its been that way since XP so its not sur­pris­ing at all.  A lot of the bells and whis­tles are nice, but are shame­lessly stolen from Mac OS and Linux.  Come on Microsoft, lets see some inno­va­tion for a change.

But there have been some good things as well.  The power but­ton in the start menu defaults to shut­down now instead of hiber­nate (like it did in Vista), mean­ing my com­puter actu­ally would shut­down if I ever decided to click that but­ton.  The fact that I went with the 64bit ver­sion means my com­puter will finally use all its resources, since XP 32 bit decided to ignore one of my sticks of ram all the time due to the fact it had to deal with graph­ics mem­ory as well.

(Run­down and Instal­la­tion process rant/review after the break)

The Run­down

Over­all, I give Win­dows 7 (Ulti­mate, I don’t have the money to review other ver­sions) a solid 6 out of 10.  For com­par­i­son, I rate Mac OSX at an 8/10 (this is the OS only (minus its restric­tion on only run­ning on apple hard­ware) and it loses points for lack of gam­ing capa­bil­ity.  The machines them­selves are unrat­able because they are too expensve.), Ubuntu gets an 9/10 (loses points for dumb­ing down Linux), Solaris gets an 8/10 (due to its lack of pre-compiled appli­ca­tions), and XP Pro­fes­sional (post-service pack 3) still sits at a solid 9/10 along with Fedora and Debian Linux.  For com­par­i­son in the NEGATIVE direc­tion, we have Win­dows ME, which sits at a 3/10 due to its inher­ent bug­i­ness and the fact that it is a poorly-improved ver­sion of Win­dows 98SE.  Win­dows Vista sits at a 5/10 due to UAC annoy­ances, soft­ware incom­pata­bil­ity, and issues with ACPI on some lap­tops (lead­ing to the screen not turn­ing back on after hiber­na­tion 50% of the time).  It should be noted that I have NEVER given an OS a per­fect 10 and prob­a­bly never will, there is always room for improvement.

Win­dows 7 loses points for:

1. Being the spawn of an evil, power-hungry, money-grabbing, cor­po­rate ass­hole sys­tem.  Yeah, its a good prod­uct, but I just don’t like Microsoft’s busi­ness strat­egy and ethics (or lack thereof).  So I’m biased, big freak­ing deal.
2. Tiered dis­tri­b­u­tion.  I haven’t liked this idea since XP.  XP Home was a piece of crap for any­one except the most basic of users, as it was miss­ing sev­eral key fea­tures, includ­ing proper sup­port for net­work stor­age.  Vista went even fur­ther with Home Basic (which might as well have been reskinned XP), Home Pre­mium, Busi­ness, and Ulti­mate.  But for them to add TWO MORE ver­sions (Starter and Pro­fes­sional) to Win­dows 7 is just absurd.  Espe­cially since they removed the capa­bil­ity to remote desk­top into your machine in Home Basic and Home Pre­mium.  Starter is just EXTREMELY lim­ited and I know that it serves an impor­tant role (cheap com­put­ers), but its still another version.
3. Sin #1 — Overly-drastic anti-piracy pro­tec­tion.  Blind­ing peo­ple with the LABEL side of your discs is a bad idea.
4. Sin #2 — More preva­lent Rib­bon inter­face.  Bring me back my easy to nav­i­gate menus!  Remem­ber us old-timers that have been using Office and the like for years and knew where every hid­den fea­ture and func­tion could be found!
5. Sin #3 — No back­wards com­pata­bil­ity for older antivirus soft­wares.  Okay, its prob­a­bly actu­ally a GOOD thing but its still annoy­ing that I have to aban­don some­thing that I paid once for and instead get some­thing I have to buy and then pay yearly for.  I HATE sub­scrip­tion mod­els for software.
6. Sin #4 — Only the EU gets the abil­ity to choose an alter­na­tive to IE at instal­la­tion.  Epic Fail Microsoft, Epic Fail.  Thank you for cre­at­ing another gen­er­a­tion of morons who load their browser up with tool­bars and their com­puter up with viruses thanks to your inse­cure browser.  Also, thank you for con­tin­u­ing to increase the stress on web devel­op­ers like myself who have to code our web­sites twice to sup­port your browser that dis­plays pages incor­rectly, hates proper AJAX, and fails epi­cally at advanced Javascript sup­port.  You are cost­ing us and our employ­ers valu­able time and money.  And for that, I declare a threat to national and global infor­ma­tion security.
7. Sin #5 (holdover Sin from Vista) — One hor­ri­fy­ing thing has been dis­cov­ered!  Appar­ently a won­der­ful fea­ture that XP had — the abil­ity to broad­cast audio to mul­ti­ple audio des­ti­na­tions I.E., your local com­puter speak­ers and a remote set of speak­ers (I have wire­less ones in my room that I would use to lis­ten to music in the morn­ing), was removed in Vista and is still removed in Win­dows 7.

Win­dows 7 GAINS points for:

1. Easy and propaganda-free instal­la­tion.  I got sick and tired of the XP install screens that pro­claimed numer­ous things that XP could do.
2. The new taskbar.  Improved group­ing of win­dows is nice, as is the abil­ity to have some appli­ca­tions per­ma­nently on the taskbar with­out hav­ing to use a quick­launch bar.
3. MINOR: Built in wall­pa­per rota­tor.  What, I like chang­ing my wallpaper.
4. Major improve­ments in the Win­dows Sidebar/Gadget soft­ware.  Its no longer as much as a mem­ory hog as it was in Vista.  As for the “you can now use the gad­gets any­where” claim, you WERE able to do that in Vista too, just not as easily.
5. XP Mode.  This is prac­ti­cal­ity required for any­one upgrad­ing, unfor­tu­nately it requires that you pur­chase Pro­fes­sional or higher for your ver­sion.  I can seri­ously see this catch­ing on in places that use really old legacy appli­ca­tions — like schools that still use soft­ware from 1997 for atten­dance tracking.

The Details…

I’ve had my cur­rent gam­ing rig since May of 2008, when I built it to replace my pre­vi­ous gam­ing rig which had started to die in var­i­ous ways.  Its a Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0 GHz stock speed) with 4GB of DDR2 (I really need to upgrade the RAM, but that requires get­ting a whole new moth­er­board if I want DDR3).  I’ve got 2 NVidia 8600GTS cards with 256MB of DDR3 (need to upgrade those as well) pow­er­ing the graphics.

Win­dows 7 OEM went up for sale at http://ewiz.com the week of Octo­ber 12th, so I snagged a copy of 64 Bit Ulti­mate (for rea­sons I will explain later) and a 1.5 ter­abyte hard drive — my old 250GB IDE drive wasn’t cut­ting it any­more.  The OEM ver­sion of Ulti­mate is about 185 dol­lars, a HUGE sav­ings over retail when all you are really los­ing is the stu­pid phone tech sup­port you get with retail.  The pack­age showed up on the 16th and I set about get­ting into some­thing that I expected to be a mas­sive pain in the lower body.  After installing the new drive, which took all of about 2 min­utes thanks to a screw­less drive mount case, I popped in the oblig­a­tory shiny holo­graphic Win­dows 7 disc and booted up the computer.

Win­dows 7 OEM went up for sale at http://www.ewiz.com the week of Octo­ber 12th, so I snagged a copy of 64 Bit Ulti­mate (for rea­sons I will explain later) and a 1.5 ter­abyte hard drive — my old 250GB IDE drive wasn’t cut­ting it any­more.  The OEM ver­sion of Ulti­mate is about 185 dol­lars, a HUGE sav­ings over retail when all you are really los­ing is the stu­pid phone tech sup­port you get with retail.  The pack­age showed up on the 16th and I set about get­ting into some­thing that I expected to be a mas­sive pain in the lower body.  After installing the new drive, which took all of about 2 min­utes thanks to a screw­less drive mount case, I popped in the oblig­a­tory shiny holo­graphic Win­dows 7 disc and booted up the computer.

Which brings me Sin Num­ber One of Win­dows 7.  Why in the name of unnamed deities can’t Microsoft make a CD/DVD that is not only easy to dis­tin­guish from a pirated ver­sion of the disc, but also not going to blind me when I look at the non-data side?  Admi­tadly, its not as bad as pre­vi­ous discs which the entire label side was the freak­ing holo­gram, these ones had a cir­cu­lar label that took up a good 3/4ths of the disc, but the edge of it still man­aged to give me a good eye­ful of reflected sun­light when I opened the case.

So the instal­la­tion process starts up and I go through the usual process of select­ing the drive I want to install to, mak­ing sure not to choose my old XP par­ti­tion, as I wanted to keep that intact as a fall­back for legacy appli­ca­tions that didn’t work.  This was rather quick and pain­less, as usual, but you get a noti­fi­ca­tion that Win­dows will be cre­at­ing an addi­tional par­ti­tion to store things into.  Win­dows Setup makes a 100MB par­ti­tion, and I’ve got no idea what it is used for.  Its not bootable, so it doesnt store the boot­loader and such, and its only 72% full right now.  Accord­ing to my research, it con­tains boot files and sys­tem recov­ery files, so its best to leave it alone as some peo­ple have said that they deleted it and then wer­ent able to boot their computer.

The instal­la­tion process from then on was the nor­mal pain­less win­dows install, thank­fully more like the Vista one than the XP one that had that won­der­ful propoganda-laden setup screen after the ini­tial reboot.  The instal­la­tion pro­ceeds and I get a new screen which tells me that it is “Copy­ing win­dows files.”  This step suscpi­ciously fin­ishes in less than a minute.  This gave way to the “Expand­ing win­dows files” step which hov­ered at 0% for a minute before start­ing to go up by 1% every five to ten sec­onds.  10 or so miin­utes later it switched to “Installing fea­tures” and then “Installing updates” which ended quick.  My guess is this is because its a brand new OS and an OEM copy, so there arent any prepack­aged updates or soft­ware to install.

The com­puter rebooted itself and then went into “Com­plet­ing instal­la­tion” where it started to (much to my sur­prise) cor­rectly begin to con­fig­ure my hard­ware.  This is prob­a­bly the only time I have ever installed Win­dows and not needed to go on and man­u­ally install graph­ics dri­vers later on.

After another reboot I got into the stan­dard Win­dows setup things.  User­name, com­puter name (CASTER3, in the great tra­di­tion of my gam­ing rigs being called CASTER), pass­word, and of course — prod­uct key.  I had a bit of a scare here involv­ing 2 swapped char­ac­ters.  No, you can’t have my key.  <Smeagol-Gollum>It is my precious.…</Smeagol-Gollum>

As is the case with XP and Vista, Win­dows next tried to get me to let it auto-install updates and reboot itself with­out my per­mis­sion.  Since this usu­ally hap­pens when I am using the com­puter and leads to such evil things as Inter­net Explorer ver­sion upgrades get­ting installed, I imme­di­ately told it to go shove its dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of its foot up its pos­te­rior.  More on this lit­tle gripe later.

After deal­ing with time zone set­tings (and get­ting it to give me the time in the proper HHmm 24 hour for­mat with no colon and lead­ing zeroes) and net­work set­tings, I received a wel­come screen and a mes­sage that it was prepar­ing my desk­top.  30 sec­onds and one anny­oing Win­dows login sound later, I haz a desk­top.  I imme­di­ately run a Print Screen and boot up paint, mak­ing my first hor­rific dis­cov­ery — MS Paint (and word­pad too for that mat­ter) now have that god-forsaken Rib­bon inte­face from Office 2007.

Which brings me Sin Num­ber Two of Win­dows 7.  The Rib­bon inter­face is a load of bovine fecal mate­r­ial.  If you are going to make a change that dras­tic to a com­monly used applicaion…say Word or Excel (I don’t give a damn about Out­look or Exchange, there’s bet­ter pro­grams out there) in the name of mak­ing it more friendly to new users, then at least give the OLD users the abil­ity to go BACK to the inter­face they learned on.  Cur­rently the only way to do this with Office 2007 is to spend 60USD on a piece of soft­ware.  Because I’m a cheap­skate nerd (and would rather spend 60USD on Gun­dams and Games), I just have given op on it and now waste a large amount of time hunt­ing for fea­tures I used to be able to get from a drop­down menu.

I received a pleas­ant sur­prise for the next thing I did.  The device man­ager has told me that I have no devices with bad or miss­ing dri­vers.  This has hon­estly never hap­pened to me before.  So I pro­ceeded to cal­cu­late my Win­dows Expe­ri­ence Index, which is a rat­ing intro­duced in Vista that goes from 1.0 to 7.9 (why it stops there I have no idea) that is essen­tially a poor-mans ver­sion of Passmark’s Per­for­mance Test and the like.  Determing this rat­ing takes a few min­utes dur­ing which I real­ized that my speak­ers were not work­ing cor­rectly due to the fact that Win­dows decided to improp­erly con­fig­ure my Dolby 5.1 sound sys­tem out­puts.  Resolved that and then had a look at my rat­ing, which turned out to be a 5.9.  The final rat­ing is actu­ally your low­est score, which in my case was the hard drive — prob­a­bly due to the fact that its a stan­dard 7500RPM drive and not a blaz­ing 10000RPM drive.  6.5s in every­thing except that.

After get­ting annoyed at the lit­tle box in the right hand side that kept telling me I had two prob­lems, I decided to deal with the one related to win­dows update.  I ended up telling it that it could down­load the updates, but it can’t install them with­out my per­mis­sion, which appar­ently made it happy and sent the warn­ing away.  The other one was an expected warn­ing, telling me that I need antivirus.  I unhap­pily went off to invest some hard-earned money into a one year license for ESET’s NOD32, since all my cur­rent ver­sions of Syman­tec Cor­po­rate won’t work on Win­dows 7.

This brings me to Sin Num­ber Three of Win­dows 7.  Okay, its not really a sin of THIS ver­sion of Win­dows, its a sin of the pre­vi­ous ones prior to Vista.  The major changes they made to Vista’s ker­nel secu­rity pissed off a lot of antivirus com­pa­nies and made all pre­vi­ous ver­sions of their soft­ware just not work at all.  The issue is that all of the pre­vi­ous ver­sions of win­dows had allowed soft­ware to access the ker­nel (or what passes for a ker­nel in Win­dows) far more eas­ily than they should have.  There is unfor­tu­nately no way to get these old ver­sions of AV soft­ware to WORK on Vista and 7.  AVs like Symantec’s Cor­po­rate Dis­tri­b­u­tions, which con­tinue to recieve engine and detec­tion updates up to 2 ver­sions back, keep­ing them as valid pieces of secu­rity software.

I next started up Win­dows Update to see that I had 7 impor­tant updates to install.  Its slightly annoy­ing, but nice to see that Microsoft has been fix­ing these flaws even before the OS is offi­cially released to the pub­lic.  What caught my atten­tion was 34 of the optional updates.  These were the multi-language packs that nor­mally came on seper­ate discs that you had to pur­chase.  While I am happy to see that it is no in win­dows update, I am annoyed to see that the only way to get them with­out actu­ally buy­ing a for­eign ver­sion is to own either Enter­prise (vol­ume license users only) or Ulti­mate.  This to me sounds a like a bad move, as there are peo­ple in the USA that have a need for multi-lingual sup­port and prob­a­bly don’t need all the other bells and whis­tles in Ulti­mate.  After choos­ing to install Chi­nese, Japan­ese, Hebrew, and Russ­ian sup­port, as well as the lat­est (sur­pris­ingly) offi­cial NVidia dri­vers, I let win­dows update do its thing while I installed a browser supo­rior to IE (yay Chrome).

And here is Sin Num­ber Four.  Recently there was a law­suit in Europe that forced Microsoft to make it so that all copies of Win­dows 7 dis­trib­uted in the Euro­pean Union to give the option to install a dif­fer­ent browser and out­right dis­able IE DURING instal­la­tion.  While Microsoft has obeyed, this change was ONLY made to the EU ver­sions.  Their crime against human­ity in this instance is NOT mak­ing the change to all the other ver­sions.  And this is indeed a crime against human­ity since Inter­net Explorer is a piece of crap that needs to be killed with copius amounts of fire now that it is no longer needed to run win­dows update.

45 min­utes and one reboot later, I have all the updates installed and set about installing var­i­ous games, which involves boot­ing back into XP since Win­dows 7 refuses to access the My Doc­u­ments folder on the XP drive.  I spent the rest of that night installing and test­ing var­i­ous games.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Rail­gun intro­duces new Macindows-OS
• Win­dows 7 Japan Edi­tion ~ Wel­com­ing Nanami

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