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David Langendoen said:
The low rating is not a reflection of the quality of the installed experience; rather a rant about the lack of ability to install.
Specifically the Professional version, which seemed to best match my feature needs will not upgrade Vista Home or Premium editions…ONLY Vista Business. I found documentation to this point buried on Microsoft’s website only after buying and trying to install (and failing…well, I COULD have chosen to wipe my drive and do a full install and then re-install all my applications…no thanks!)
The frontline marketing and promotion of this upgrade manages to neglect this key point. Anyway, Amazon is accepting the return and I’m ordering Ultimate…but just a word of caution to those who might go down a similar path.
Rating: 1 / 5
# 18 December 2009 at 3:36 pm

E. Garcia said:
I really looked forward to Win 7 after all the positive reviews. Here is my experience so far. The startup and overall performance of my computer, with 4Gb of RAM, a 1.83 GHz Intel core duo CPU and a 64-bit version of Win 7. While working on a Word and Excel doc, the computer spontaneously rebooted after installing new updates (without warning me it was about to reboot, or informing me it was installing updates, it just did it in the background so I had no idea it was doing so). After rebooting and restoring the Word and Excel session I was working on, I discovered, to my horror and frustration, the hyperlinks I had on my Excel doc, links to files on my external hard drive, had been edited to link to non-existing locations on my C: drive. How did this happen?? I spent hours having to re-edit the links on those cells to point to a folder on my external HD.
Unbelievable!
Also, my Gateway laptop trackpad seems incompatible with Win 7. When I move my finger across the trackpad the scrollbar scrolls down spontaneously, uncontrollably. I had to buy an external wireless mouse to deal with this, although honestly this may be a Gateway issue that they need to address. I’ve tried updating the trackpad/mouse driver from Device Manager, but I get a message saying I have the latest driver installed. Hopefully Gateway issues a fix, this is a VERY ANNOYING BUG!
Rating: 2 / 5
# 18 December 2009 at 5:25 pm

David Edborg said:
So here we are 1 day after the official GA launch of Windows 7; months of preparation, testing, and anticipation and all I am left with is a severe case of disappointment. I trusted the prognosticators and experts in the press. They have been touting Windows 7 for quite some time, telling anyone who will listen how great it is. But what I’ve discovered is that many of the analysts and press types have simply been regurgitating Redmond press releases. Not really understanding the words that they have been saying; I can only assume that they must have come from Babylon.
To be sure there are some interesting features in Windows 7. And true to Redmond’s press releases, Windows 7 boots awfully fast; and if fast booting is your criteria for an enterprise class operating system then you will be pleased.
If on the other hand you are a serious computer user and you view your PC as a professional tool, then perhaps Windows 7 out of the gate is not for you. Since Windows cleaned up its act in Windows/XP, I rarely boot. I have an extended battery in my laptop, a couple of docking stations strategically placed; so most of the time, I don’t even bother shutting down, hibernating, or sleeping, I just close the lid and move to my next meeting or customer. There’s nothing quicker that opening the lid and pounding on the keyboard. Tell me again why I need a fast boot?
Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of incremental improvements that you may consider worth the pain of converting. Microsoft has added wizards to help make a novice’s life less frustrating. There are new network setup wizards and problem determination wizards. And including Media Center in the distribution is a nice touch. Those improvements will play nice for the novice or household user, not the corporate one.
But ultimately Microsoft is heading down the wrong path. The bulk of Microsoft’s moneyed base is the enterprise space which by and large is populated with experienced users; the new toys in Windows 7 aren’t needed to play in corporate environments. And to be sure, Microsoft is not just pursuing one path, but it seems to be pursing many, and mostly wrong ones.
Bad path number 1: Microsoft is trying to “out cool” Apple. Aero glass or whatever they call it is a pig. Unless you have an expensive graphics card, a bunch of memory, and a beefy CPU, and you think you need a dopamine rush for your inner geek; turn it off. XP’s desktop and windows borders and controls expend far more processing cycles that any professional or student for that matter needs to get a job done. To Microsoft’s credit they included a Windows 7 experience analyzer to let you know how well Windows 7 would fare on your hardware. Ironically my overall score was pulled down by my computer’s graphic capabilities. No problem, turn-off the pig and my system runs like a champ.
Bad path number 2: for some reason, the techno brains at Microsoft decided that Windows Explorer needed an overhaul. And to be fair, this is not a Windows 7 thing it’s a hold-over from the rarely seen daylight from Vista’s days. And I have to admit that of all of the enhancements, this one makes me the craziest. And yes I understand that Windows Explorer in XP has its weaknesses, but guess what, it works!!!
And with the ill-conceived changes to the interface, millions of users that knew how to use the old interface, now suddenly have to learn a new interface. Did anyone in Redmond calculate how many hours of learning it will take for an existing user to become proficient with the new interface and multiply that by the number of experienced Windows users around the world and the value of their time? My guess is that the cost to productivity should at least be able to fund Obama Care for quite a while.
Think about it; Microsoft in their arrogance decided to destroy nearly every companies PC user’s productivity so that some `cool new’ way of doing a simple task, using Windows Explorer; suddenly becomes foreign. What they did is like taking the steering wheel out of a car and mount it on the roof to make it more fun to drive the car and to improve the driver’s vision.
About the only nice feature in the new Windows Explorer is the extra information displayed for dvr-ms files. The extra meta data wrapping the mpeg file, includes to name a few of the elements, the recording title, sub-title, channel, and original broadcast date. To get at this data in XP, you had to bring up the properties or use a 3-party utility such as EDITDVRMS; kudos to Microsoft for providing immediate access to the information by simply selecting.
And yes, the inclusion of an enhanced Media Center is nice to see. The old version was pretty lame and simply lacking any sort of rational features. So they added a few nice gimmicks like the ability to click on a timeline to advance your position in a recording, something that I may add has been in Windows Media Player for a while. But Microsoft went overboard in its enforcement of digital rights to make a lot of use cases, shall I say, useless.

I’ve have had a SONY Media Center computer as part of my family’s home entertainment center for a while. I record kid shows during that air during the day and we play them back for my youngsters before bedtime when teenage and adult fare is broadcast. I also record a few of my favorite shows to take with me on the road and I watch them while I fly.
In the Windows XP days, I would use my Media Center computer to record shows and I would use a converter to copy and convert the dvr-ms files to MPEG on a USB drive. And at a later time hook the USB drive up to my laptop and watch a show.
I was initially happy to see that Media Center was part of Windows 7; I theorized that I would be able simply copy the dvr-ms files to my Windows 7 laptop and watch the recorded shows off the laptop. My theory was wrong; Microsoft’s twisted interpretation of digital rights prevented the recording of some shows and simply displayed a message that a do not record bit was set. Or I rudely learned that playback on my laptop was prohibited because it was not the recording device; so much for being able to enjoy a personal media in a distributed fashion. I’ll just go back to screen scraping Hulu and playing those recordings at 37,000 feet as Microsoft has lost its value in my home entertainment system.
Okay so my complaints are my annoyances and frustrations. If you’re a business user and you are buying new PCs you’ll soon find the new boxes entering your organization are pre-installed with Windows 7. So, what matters to you, once you get over the training and ramped up for the inevitable extra load on your help desk is, “will Windows 7 work for my organization”. And the answer today is probably not.
The reason that you will not be able to deploy a Windows 7 PC is the same story in Vista, the lack of drivers. For some unexplained reason, HP decided not to participate in the Windows public Beta or Release Candidate process. So as of October 22nd if you have any HP Printers or Scanners, you are out of luck; still no Windows 7 drivers available. Are you a Hauppauge PVR user? Hauppauge is not going to support those devices in Windows 7. Are you a user of Symantec’s Partition Magic; hang it up. Microsoft has changed interfaces again, so unless your vendor chooses to support its previously sold devices, you will find yourself looking for and paying for new devices and software.
HP finally posted Windows 7 printer drivers on October the 23rd; but since they did not participate in the public beta or release candidate process their reliability has to be suspect.
Microsoft dictated obsolescence reminds me of Detroit’s 50’s and 60’s arrogance; you know the one, “I’ll make sexy cars that you’ll need to replace every three years. I have no respect for your investment. Come `on, look at all the new features I am introducing this year, get with the program you need to be seen in the seat of this shinny new car”.
Microsoft must have seen that a lot of vendors were avoiding Windows 7. And to be fair, if I were in the vendors’ shoes, I would wait to see if the market accepts Windows 7 before I spent a bunch of R&D bucks. So, to provide some relief to the customer base, Microsoft has released what looks like a scaled down version of Hyper-V which allows you to run XP-Mode programs and some devices with only XP support.
Nice idea, but it comes up short. I was able to run my HP scanner in the XP environment, but not all XP native devices are supported. For example disks appear as a pseudo-network drive; which limits the types of things you can do with it. Symantec’s Partition Magic wanted no part of a network drive. Perhaps a VMware concept of Raw Device Mapping or RDM device would solve the problem. But until either Microsoft or Symantec says uncle and upgrades their software support, I and a lot of other folks are stuck with a bunch of bookcase obsoware.
And did I mention that XP-Mode is very slow. And you have to install all of the software you would normally have for a desktop; Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Virus Scanner, Fire Wall etc. And I had to run 5-cycles of Microsoft update to get the XP image up to the latest patch level. What is Microsoft thinking?
My prediction is the corporate world will give Windows 7 the cold shoulder again. Microsoft needs to decide what it wants to be and what path it needs to go down. As a stock-holder, I suggest that they follow the money and embrace the corporate or professional user community. Fork-off Media Center centric uses for the home market, stop calling it Windows. And yes I’d like to see Microsoft trounce the elitists at Apple; so fork off a code line with your aero glass and create a viable competitor to the rotten core.
Microsoft also needs to take a keen look at IBM. IBM has had and still does have many operating systems for different classes of users. When an OS has reached it end of life, the SHARE and GUIDE crowd have a nice eulogy and move on the next better thing.
IBM has also firmly embraced LINUX and run it runs as a guest so to speak on their mainframes. Competition is good, and if Microsoft created a culture of competing OSes, you’d see them stealing features from each other and not so much the competition. When I did software at CA eons ago during their heyday, they had a saying in management; “if a product is going awry, fire half the developers to get the other half focused”.

And as I observe many corporate users, I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft Windows is tolerated because there is nothing better out there. My final predication is that if Microsoft keeps its head in the sand, the Chinese will take over the commercial software industry like the Japanese and more recently the Koreans have taken over the auto industry.
Microsoft wake-up please!!!

Rating: 2 / 5
# 18 December 2009 at 7:03 pm

MedStudent said:
In two days, I’ve experienced more system crashes than I should. 7 is very pretty, but it still performs like a beta software. I won’t go into full details here, but I wanted to list some of the problems I’ve had.
1) My wireless connection cuts out periodically, but it doesn’t come back unless I unplug/replug the adapter. Normally, it’ll cut out here and there, but it usually comes back by itself. Now I have to replug it manually.
2) When watching DivX movies from an external HD, the system’ll restart randomly. However, when I transfer the file to an internal HD first, no problems. Something tells me there’s a USB transfer problem with extended read.
3) Lots of random system hangs where the software/internet explorer hickups.
4) Currently, there are multiple “important” Windows updates daily. Sounds like Microsoft is discovering these problems very recently upon product launch. This still feels like a beta software.
Rating: 3 / 5
# 18 December 2009 at 9:20 pm

K. benford said:
I was waiting since June 23, 2009 for this new OS. Checked upgrade advisor every week for any problems. Only problem was my printer needed a new driver. HA! I got my Windows 7 yesterday and immediately went to installing it. SURPRISE – the Intel (R) 82801ER SATA RAID Controller Driver would not be recognized by the Windows 7. Spent 8 hours yesterday and another 5 hours today trying to install (clean) and find a solution, nothing. Called Microsoft and 40 minutes later they said it was Dell’s problem. Well, I’m stuck with Windows XP………. Maybe MAC? Really dissapointed!
Rating: 1 / 5
# 18 December 2009 at 10:00 pm

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