Life with Windows 7: Part II

Installation
The install process on both the workstation and laptop when quite smoothly. With each new version of OS Microsoft releases, the installation wizard continues to improve. The most recent addition to the wizard that allows the user to better understand the process and time remaining is a progress bar with verbiage that states what is be installed or configured.

32 or 64 bit operating system?
I opted for the 64 bit flavor of Win7

Life with Windows 7: Part I

This series of blog posts will report on the experiences with the new Microsoft Windows 7 RC operating system. The RC stands for Release Candidate which means that it is close to finished, but there are still bugs to kill, tweaking, and optimization remaining before the final version ships.

Background: After auditioning Microsoft''s new Windows 7 (referred to Win7 here forward) operating system over the past 6 months on virtual machines without any major issues, I decided to migrate the new OS into my everyday work and personal life. Just like much of the articles and reviews on Win7, my experienced showed a clean and elegant environment, snappy response times (even when installed on a virtual machine on my laptop), and quite a few UI improvements. While not all the applications that we use on a daily basis were installed on the virtual machine installation, most were and worked with any issues.

Both my home office workstation and laptop were getting "long in the tooth" (which is approximately 9-10 months in my estimation), and both were showing signs of unnecessary delays in boot times, application launching, and general response. While I typically go to great pains to keep as much miscellaneous software off my systems to keep them clean and lean, over time these random applications still seem to find a way onto my machines. It seems the right time to rebuild two of the three main systems that use on a daily basis. Notice that my office workstation is omitted from these posts... for now.

The platforms: The home office workstation is a modest Core2 Duo 2.6Ghz with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 512MB of video memory, and a speedy 74GB Western Digital Raptor SATA drive. Not bad but definitely not bleeding edge hardware.

The other future home for Win7 is a Dell Precision m4300 laptop. While the laptop was considered fast when purchased a couple years ago, technology can barely see the m4300 in its rear view mirror. A 2.4 Core2 Duo mobile processor, 4 GB of DDR2RAM, and a 7200k SATA drive allow this laptop to be a serviceable workstation when away from the office.

Stock Up / Stock Down: 20090430

This is a series of posts that will feature my views on the future of technologies, companies, and trends. At times there will be an explanation associated with the mentioned topic and others will not.

Microsoft - Windows 7 is looking very promising. From all the leaked news and beta releases, W7 will put MS back inbthe "good graces" of corporations, IT staffs, end-users, and consumers. The new OS is performing remarkably on even the weakest of platforms (ie the recently popular netbooks). Anyone remember Windows Me? Yeah, a real piece of junk. Windows Me was the OS that led to Windows XP. While Vista has received an undue amount of bad press over the past couple of years, it is the first version of what is to become Windows 7. 

Google - the search empire is starting to really show chinks in the armor and make some really poor decisions. Barbarians are at the gate, and they're growing in size and quality of product. The social component is beginning to creep into the picture for other search engines instead of a secret, proprietary algorithm that seems to promote sites that "play ball" with Google. This trend has led to very poor search results.

Twitter - i mean, really? do we really need another outlet for our narcissistic tendencies? while there are some socially beneficial uses for Twitter, what is their business model? Can't find one? Well neither can the rest of the tech community.

Facebook - they've peaked, and now it's time for the bandwagon to move onto something new. Twitter comes to mind. But as I just mentioned above, they've got a short(er) lifespan.