Some fun from Slashdot:
I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She’s had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.I’m not going to Windows 7. I’m down to 1 Windows system, the Vista system that is used exclusively for Lineage II. It doesn’t so much run Vista, but Lineage II as the OS and it runs well enough that I don’t feel the need to mess with it.
I’m going to put up one Win7 system (well, and a few virtual machines for consulting gigs), and that one system will be for Mrs. Large, as she really, really can’t seem to adapt to running XP in a VM, and the extra quad CPU I have is underutilized by XP.
We’ll see how it goes…
Comment by Largenfirm — October 27, 2009 @ 4:22 pm
I’ll be very interested in your findings
Comment by Sinner — October 28, 2009 @ 8:31 am
I am also most interested.
Comment by Machinist — October 31, 2009 @ 2:19 pm
It was miserable - so bad that Mrs. Large decided, out of the blue, to switch to a Mac.
She now has a new 21″ iMac. Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.06GHz, 4GB of ram, 500GB disk, wireless keyboard and mouse, just needs power and either wireless or wired ethernet. Nice design, too, with everything contained in the “monitor”, and a clean, small pedestal footprint.
Now that’s a sweet little machine!
Fast, clean, easy to set up - Joe Bob says get one!
Comment by Largenfirm — November 12, 2009 @ 1:01 pm
LOL
So what was so bad about Win7?
Dish the sweet sweet M$ dirt!
Comment by Sinner — November 12, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
Let’s see, installation problems (had to unplug everything before installing), didn’t recognize PS2 keyboard (!), hung several times during install, then bluescreened while updating over the innertubes.
Started with a clean install, incidentally. The machine started life as a Dell box running Windows XP. Pentium 4, 4GB RAM, 250GB hard drive. Nvidia 7600GT video card. About as vanilla as they come.
Four hours to install. Please, Microsoft, my time is not free.
Then, after all that settled out, Win7 was constantly yakking about memory problems, even when I swapped out the whole 4GB of DDR2. Finally found a technote that cleared that one up. It was a configuration problem with the older memory controller and the particular memory brand, had to upgrade the BIOS, not strictly MS’s fault, though they could have worked around it - XP did, as did Linux.
Another three hours, gone. Hello, Microsoft? Seven hours into this upgrade, and I’m not happy.
So, after it was installed, and running “properly” it was slower than XP on the same hardware, and significantly slower than OpenSuse 11.1 32-bit (which it had been running prior to the OS change).
Painful to browse with, painful to email with, painful to edit business documents with (using MS Office 2007), and, as expected, MS tech support was worse than useless:
“Yes, I have reinstalled the OS. Yes, I have power cycled the machine. Yes, I have run the vendor diagnostics. Yes, I would like to speak with your supervisor. No, I am not happy with either your product or the support you have provided.”
Said machine, without change, is now quite happily running Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu), and is a joy to surf with, to edit documents, and to read email. Fifteen minutes to install, after booting off of a liveUSB pen. No licensing fees. No hassle. No qualms about throwing good money after bad.
It is now handling some mundane IT activities on my home business network.
Microsoft, how can you screw this up so badly? Do you really expect people to buy new machines every three years? Do you expect that to fly when Linux runs happily (and snappily) on 5 to 10 year old machines?
Sure, you got your license fee, but you also confirmed my long-running experience with each new generation of MS operating systems. Namely, wait until SP2.
No more. I’ll run all MS operating systems, if I have to, in VMs from now on - your direct access to the hardware is *permanently revoked*, Microsoft!
And I will continue to counsel others to avoid MS products.
Comment by Largenfirm — November 12, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
Hmm, there’s something in the text that is causing posting problems.
Comment by Largenfirm — November 12, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
Lots of stuff made it into Moderation. I think Microsoft controls Wordpress’ moderation filter….
Deleted all except initial post, thanks for the info. I will copy-n-paste into a front page post.
Comment by Sinner — November 13, 2009 @ 9:13 am