Windows 7 – First Impressions

Two days ago, I laid my hands on the Windows 7 Beta. I went through the paining of moving and changing partitions. On any other given day, I would not have done this just for the sake of installing any version of Windows. But this time curiosity and the all round rave reviews got the better of me and I decided to take the plunge. I am not going to write a comprehensive review but would mention my specific experiences with Windows 7.

System

Before we start, here are the specs of my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6400

Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 CPU @ 1.73 GHz
1 GB RAM
25 GB partition for Windows 7 formatted as NTFS
Intel 945 GMA
Bluetooth
Intel 3495 Wireless Adapter

My system scored a experience rating of 3 with the hard disk being the lowest at 3 and the graphics at 3.1. The other components scored a decent 4.5

Installation

The installation was pretty smooth. It took about 35 minutes for the installation to complete. Vista came installed by Dell. Since I never installed another Windows version on my laptop I cannot judge the time taken. There were no issues at all and the process was also more streamlined. A couple of questions to begin with and there we go. Once the installation has been completed come the rest of the questions. It is more like a Linux distro install with one difference. My laptop rebooted twice during the installation. Can the Linux killer not install without rebooting yet? No.

Hard Disk Space

Windows 7 took about 50% of the hard disk space than Vista which came installed on the laptop. 7.2 GB of space was consumed by the OS. Bloat has been reduced by the way of removing Mail, Calendar etc which can now be downloaded.

Startup and Shutdown

Boot till login screen took 36 seconds. Impressive cosidering Vista took over a minute on the very same hardware

Login to Desktop took 8 seconds. Again impressive. Vista used to take more than 30 seconds

Shutdown took 15 seconds. Again, much better than its ancestor

Memory Consumption

Memory consumption has been considerably reduced compared to Vista. The OS consumed about 645 MB of RAM. I was able to open multiple Windows of Explorer, Internet Explorer and other applications like Paint and Wordpad. I know this is not a real test but I am just comparing with how Vista fared.

Aero

Aero was enabled by default and there was no fuss in running aero and I did not see memory consumption shoot up.

Applications

I installed a few applications and every one of them worked. Here is what I installed.

WinRAR 3.x
Adobe Acrobat Reader 8
Opera 9.5
Winamp 5.3
Firefox 3.0.5
Pidgin 2.5.2

Other Improvements

1. Taskbar – The task bar now behaves like a dock – not there but almost. Application shortcuts can be pinned to the taskbar. There is no text this time, just icons. Every other opened application gets a new button on the taskbar and interestingly every open tab in applications that support tabs also get a button but are grouped. Hovering the mouse over the application revealed all tabs/windows of a particular application. Windows can be moved and closed right there. Nifty. I was able to right click on the IE icon on the taskbar and jump to one of my recently visited websites. Same kind of options called “Jump Lists” were available for other applications as well. The most nifty one being the jump list of Windows Explorer

2. Windows Explorer -  The Windows explorer has been revamped. It now sports a clean and lean look. The key Win + E now opens an Explorer window with something called Library with icons for Documents, Movies, Pictures etc. This is more like opening the Home folder on linux. Still, I dont think Windows thought about putting this Library on a separate partition. Opening folders with large number of files or huge files were not a problem. It was a pain with Vista. Another improvement was copying huge number of files or large files. They were handled with ease unlike Vista

3. Internet Explorer - Internet Explorer 8 was available with this Beta and though I did not use it much I figured out something was wrong. IE used to show 99% of a file as downloaded and stay there forever without completing the download. I feel IE is still this is the weakest link in Windows 7 – or any other version for that matter.

4. Windows Media Player – Windows Media Player is still bloated. It took about 10  seconds to start. It was not able to play a 650 MB movie file without torturing the hard disk.

5. Others

a. Shake to Minimize - Shaking a window by holding its title bar minimizes all the windows except the one which is being held

b. Shutdown – really shuts down and does not hibernate. Text has been added to show that it indeed shuts down. I am not sure if I am the first one to like this change.

c. Network Center - Is really fast compared to Vista. A few changes to graphics and that is it. I did not have a wi-fi connection to check how it performed.

d. Ribbon – The Ribbon interface has found its way to Paint and Wordpad from Office 2007

e. Media Center – Did not check much of this as I was never a fan of this application

f. Progress on Taskbar -  The progress of a file being downloaded is now shown in the form of a progress bar on the IE icon in the taskbar. This feature has been available on Linux (GNOME) for a long time now. But it is not limited to just downloads. CD Burning, Copying files is included. I just hope other applications in Windows too implement this feature.

Annoyances

1. The show desktop button has been moved to the extreme right, even beyond the clock. I did not try to drag it to where I liked but in my opinion that is a very bad default position for an important action.

2. Bluetooth did not work. I tried to pair my Nokia N81 with my laptop but except for detecting it as a remote control device all the other device drivers failed to install.

3. Print Screen or Alt + Print Screen did not seem to work making capture of some controls like menus impossible without a third party too.

Screenshots

No review is complete without a bunch of screenshots

Head over here for a few

Conclusion

I can say two things for sure.

1. Windows 7 Beta is far better than Windows Vista
2. Windows 7 is no Linux killer

No more Windows Vista :)

I have fallen sick and have been at home for the past week or so. I took this opportunity to remove Windows Vista Home Premium that came with my laptop. I was thinking about this for sometime now and the only thing that was stopping me was time.

Now that I had the time, I removed Vista and made Ubuntu my primary Operating System. In the process I have freed close to 50GB of disk space 15 GB on which Vista was installed and the remaining which it did not allow me to move to a different partition.

Please note that this is a decision after about one year of using my laptop. I was able to do all that I wanted to do on Ubuntu. I found that I logged into Vista only to update it. And more recently stopped the updates as well. Even after SP1 Vista was not that great. Yes, it was usable though.

So I have decided to try out different flavors of Linux on a different partition. I will retain Ubuntu as my primary OS until the time where it behaves so badly so as to get kicked out. I am currently trying out OpenSUSE 11 KDE 4 and my once upon a time sweet heart – Mandriva Linux One Spring 2008 KDE. I am also planning to try the GNOME version of Mandriva.

Windows Vista SP1: Good

The Decision

After mulling over for a few days, I installed Windows Vista SP1 today. I was thinking whether or not to go on this expedition since I did not want to spoil my weekend. But the sluggish performance of Vista on my laptop and the promised improvements made me jump on the decision to go ahead and install SP1.

The SP can be downloaded from the Microsoft website – click on Download Center link on the Related Links section – or you can wait until it appears on your Windows Update. I took the download route. The file is about 435 MB in size.

Machine Specifications

Model: Dell Inspiron 6400

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 @1.73 MHz

RAM: 1 GB

Audio: SigmaTel

HDD: Primary Drive is C: and is 50 GB in size

Optical Drive: TSST Corp

Graphics: Intel 945 GMA

Card Reader: Ricoh Co Ltd

Vista Flavor: Windows Vista Home Premium

Other Software: McAfee Internet Security, Roxio Creator DE 9, OpenOffice.org 2.3

Installation

The installation took an hour and forty minutes with three reboots in all. Post installation I also removed most of the crap that came pre-installed. I should have done this long ago but found the time today. One major irritant was Dell Media Direct which had one component called PCMService with a huge memory leak which brings the computer down to its knees after using for about an hour.

Whats Improved?

Post installation I checked all my hardware and software and compared them with the experience prior to SP1 installation

Hardware: Every piece of hardware worked. No problems with audio or graphics or even the Dell Quickset programs which are used for operating the volume and media buttons in the front.

Login: No change. Still takes the usual two minutes. I think this would have to be the highest time taken by a modern OS to boot up.

Explorer: Drastic Improvements. I must say that for the first time I found Explorer on Vista usable. No stalling until the progress bar disappears on the address bar. Folders open with ease and no stress was noticed when opening multiple Explorer windows. Almost everything thats got to do with Explorer has improved. For example, the Control Panel loads faster than it did previously.

Other Programs: Programs load much faster. Open and Save dialogs also reflect the same speed as Explorer. I get a feeling they use the same component as Explorer.

Media Center: Though I don’t use this, I opened to see how things have improved. I should say quite a lot has improved. Just as in explorer, the buttons and the menus respond beautifully. I used to struggle to go back and forth in Media Center prior to SP1 and that is one of the main reasons I stopped using Media Center

Shut Down: Shut down speed has been improved as well. It takes about 35% less time for my laptop to shut down post SP1. Its still high compared to my Linux installation which shuts down in 10-12 seconds. I am not going to mention the distro here and start a flame war

Conclusion

After the post installation experience, my conclusion is that SP1 is really good. Of course, hardware differences might cause problems, check on the MS website if you are suspicious about some of your hardware. In the one day where I used Vista after SP1 installation for all my day to day activities, I feel one should not wait for the update to show up on Windows Update. If your hardware is the same as mine or similar, just grab the download and install. You won’t regret it.

Update:

I am seeing some quirks after the installation. Windows Update still shows 256 MB worth of updates available and that includes (see Correction) SP1. Not a major issue but quite annoying.

On a side note, I would like some opinion of Roxio Creator. I did not find it good. I have another system with Nero and it offers quite a lot of options. I would like to know any free or open source alternatives that are available for Vista with a decent feature set. Thanks in advance.

 Correction

The SP1 which I said was available after the Vista SP1 install was that of MS Office 2007 Trial and a few other security updates.

Windows Vista – Update Failure

I dual boot Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) with Windows Vista Home Premium which came along with my laptop. Until today, there was no problem with Windows due to installing third party software or Windows Updates. Well, the problems like sluggishness on a Core 2 Duo T5300 with 1 GB ram, slow startup, shutdown, hard disk working all the time, resolution being set to 1024 X 768 on waking up from Stand By were there right from day one.

Yesterday, four updates showed up. One for ATI PCI something which I was not interested in since I dont have an ATI card, one update for Windows Email, Media Center each and another one named, Windows Vista Update which said it increased system reliability.

I tried to updated yesterday. Once all the updates were downloaded and installed, the computer rebooted twice and I logged in. I was thinking that the updates were successful. I could even see that it said so in the Updater window. A minute later it again said updates were available. That is when I realised that the updates failed. I gave another try, but in vain.

Today I tried to update again. I included the ATI update as well even though it was an Optional update. After the update was complete, the system rebooted twice and then showed me a screen which was 800 x 600 instead of 1280 X 800. I logged in and checked if I could change the resolution but I could not. Again all the other three updates have failed. For a moment I thought I had done something stupid by including the ATI update.

But, I calmed down and did a System Restore hoping that everything would be back to normal. I should say I was not confident at all. The nightmare of installing Windows was right in front of my eyes. I have installed Windows versions 98/ME/2000/XP innumerable times. So I know what it means and how much time it would take, even though I have not tried installing Vista.

Things did go well. At least the System Restore worked. And I was able to set the right resolution. Well, it was my fault to select that update. I don’t know how it went for the others. If everything went alright then may be this is an isolated problem. If it has been occurring to other people as well then that raises several questions.

• Why publish an update that fails? Was it really tested?
• Why does an update that does not work be online for two days?
• Is someone at MS aware that their update failed?

I am not sure if the Windows Update program calls home if a particular update failed. Does anyone have any idea?

I then singled out the Windows Media Center Cumulative update and installed it. No hitches there. It went fine. No reboot was required. As I was typing this, I updated Ubuntu 7.10. It installed several (atleast 15 or more) updates and none failed. Nor was a reboot required. Since I typed this post on Ubuntu I don’t have those crazy KB numbers handy. I will post an update.

Already, I am using Vista only for gaming, and I have started thinking that if I should wipe it out and install XP.

Nov 17, 2007: Update:

The updates are

• Updates for Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter [November 2007] (KB905866)
• Update for Windows Vista (KB941649)
• Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista (KB941229)
• ATI Technologies Inc – Other Hardware – ATI PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver

Nov 19, 2007: Update:

I tried to install the updates one by one today. I could see only the first two of them from the above list. Looks like the other two got installed somehow during the prior update that failed. I wonder how :O

Well, I was able to install the first one Update for Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter [November 2007] (KB905866) successfully.

I tried the next one. After download – install – reboot – configuring updates – reboot – please wait – login events,  Update for Windows Vista (KB941649) failed

I am not trying this for another two days.

My Blog Statistics

Well, I had been thinking about this for a long time. Today I had the time and the patience to do it. What was that? Consolidate the statistics of this blog.

I have prepared a rough document and put it here for all of you to see

Some cool graphs to summarize. I had taken all the data right out of my sitemeter.com account. All the graphs were created with OpenOffice.org 2.3.0

Primary Information

Total Unique Visitors: 7397
Lifetime of Blog: 15 months
Posts: 70
Comments: 74
Top Post: 1600 hits to this day : Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

OS % Share

No prizes for guessing this one. Win XP wins hands down

Browser % Share

Well, again, no prizes here. Firefox turned out to be the most widely used browser by the readers of my blog.

Traffic Distribution

The real surprise was here. Until a few days ago, it was North America, from where most of the traffic to this site came from. Well, Europe just snatched the first place as of today

I dont pay for sitemeter, so no display resolution, Javascript and such details. Well, that would have been nice but I am satisfied with what I have got so far.

And, I have the satisfaction of completing a long due post

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

A couple of days earlier, I had given a hint of what I was doing with my laptop. Today lets dive deeper and see what that was all about. Well, I installed the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn) on my laptop and it would dual boot with Windows Vista Home Premium that had come preinstalled with the machine. I will share with you my experiences.

Steps

1. Backup important files

2. Checklist of required items

3. Partition hard disk

4. Install Ubuntu

5. Reboot and check Windows can still boot

6. Reboot into Ubuntu

Caution: The steps outlined below deal with partitioning and formatting. If you are following these steps to do the installation yourself and are not sure about a particular step, exercise caution else you might end up losing all the data on your disk. I recommend taking help of a friend who is knowledgeable about partitioning and formatting hard disks.
Backup

Its always a good idea to backup important files before I – for that matter you or anyone else – venture into the exciting world of OS installation. I made sure that my backups can be restored and the files are in good order.

Checklist of required items

1. Ubuntu 7.04 CD. I downloaded the iso image from here and burnt a CD. Make sure that you download the correct version matching your processor type. Alternately, you can order a pressed CD from Canonical at Shipit

2. Windows DVD that came with my laptop – for the worst case scenario

Partitioning the hard disk

I had read in the forums that if I need to dual boot with Windows Vista, then I need to partition the disk using the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows. Right click on My Computer > Manage. Select Storage > Disk Management. I shrunk and existing partition and made some free space. I then created three simple partitions to hold the root, home and swap partitions. The first two were 10 GB each and the swap partition was 1 GB in size. I formatted the drives as NTFS. Though this is not required, I went ahead since I did not want to have any trouble while installing. I rebooted my laptop again and made sure that Windows was still able to pull itself up. Yes, it was ok. The new drives showed up correctly. The reason we do the partitioning in Windows is, Windows does not allow changes to the partition table and will require you to restore the partition table using the repair option available on the Windows DVD.

Dell laptops by default would have 4 primary partition one each for the OS, Recovery, Dell Media Direct and a small 50 MB partition for which I saw no use rather than to install a boot manager. The small 50 MB partition was formatted as FAT 16.

Installing Ubuntu

I rebooted my laptop with the Ubuntu CD. You can boot from the CD by selecting the device in the boot menu. On Dell machines you can do this by holding down the F12 key when the system boots up. The networks were configured and I was able to surf the net. I then started the installation. This is now a 7 step process. The first three steps involve selecting your language, keyboard layout and time zone. Next was the partitioning.

Since I already had my drives partitioned, the only task here was to select Manual partitioning and assign the drives to appropriate partitions. I selected the drive, clicked on edit partition and selected the mount point as / (root), home and swap respectively. I also chose the file system as ext3, one of the best available today and asked the partition manager to format my / and home partitions. If you get an error that one of your partitions has some inconsistent sectors, allocation units etc, click on Cancel. Clicking on Ignore will spell trouble during the boot manager installation and render the machine non bootable in either OS. I learnt this the hard way. I was all set and continued with the install. It took around 14 minutes for the install to complete.

Reboot and check Windows can still boot

I rebooted and GRUB appeared. I selected Windows which was listed as the last option. I held my breath as the OS came to life. No signs of trouble here. I was able to login and everything looked so good.

Reboot into Ubuntu

So, I booted into Ubuntu. All was well here too. I was greeted with a popup that said the OS was using restricted drivers for the Wireless device. I tried connecting to a Wireless network and there was no problem. The NTFS drives were automatically mounted as read only and I could open the files on the Windows section of my hard disk. I had at hand a very usable, friendly, fast and stable OS. I strongly feel I can live using Ubuntu alone.

Conclusion

All my fears of dual booting with Windows Vista was laid to rest when I saw that GRUB managed quite well in the end. I am enjoying Ubuntu now and has been a while since I booted into Vista. The memory footprint was also small. Would that not constitute another post? Well, yes, kinda. I am planning to write a review on Ubuntu sometime next week and will cover all these in detail. Some of you might ask why dual boot when I can live with Ubuntu. Simple, I have paid for Windows Vista when I purchased the laptop and I will use it for what it is worth. A few games, Windows DVD creator is a cool app that lets me create photo DVDs with some neat effects. So its going to be both atleast for sometime now.

I am glad to help anyone who might have questions regarding the dual boot installation process. However, my limited time may not be in favor of that and I have to admit that I may not be able to help on time. I recommend that you visit the Ubuntu forums at http://www.ubuntuforums.org.

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Other Applications

Now that my laptop with the OS was working well, it was time to get some software installed to be productive. Here is a list of software that I installed – without any fuss except for the UAC nag.

1. OpenOffice.org suite 2.2.0 with JRE
2. Adobe Reader 8.0
3. Jdk-6-windows-i586 for my development work
4. Apache Tomcat 6.0.13
5. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3
6. WinRAR 3.7 Beta 8
7. An outdated but really capable and lightweight Java IDE GeI
8. Adobe Flash Player plugins for both IE and Firefox
9. Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003
10. Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003
11. Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

Ironically, the problems were with the pre-installed Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 DE which was not very comfortable with the Windows libraries. I had to re-install this application to resolve the problem. The Roxio Direct-to-Disc application which is a part of the Roxio EMC 9 suite did not have a suitable driver – I did not understand, that is what windows complained at startup – and I removed it for good. It was of no use to me anyway.

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 3 – Screenshots

After the first two parts [part 1, part 2] I could not manage to get a post the third post ready today. So, here are a bunch of screenshots.

All the screenshots are in 1280×800 resolution, PNG Format

Well, the last one is a sign of progress
More details on this one in the coming days

 

 

 

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 2

This is part two of the series on my laptop. We had already seen about the build and the hardware in part 1. Before we look at the OS, lets have a peek at the laptop specifications.

Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo Processor T5300 (2MB Cache, 1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows VistaTM Home Premium
Intel® 945GM Chipset
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2X512MB)
120GB1 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
15.4″ Wide Screen XGA TFT Display (1280×800 res.)
4 USB Ports (2.0), Integrated IEEE1394 Port
6 Cell 53Whr Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection 802.11a/g
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 945 Up to 224MB shared system memory
Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection 802.11a/g
Integrated Stereo Sound w/ subwoofer
DVD Burner

Now lets look at the OS

1. 1. General: As the name implies, the version that was bundled (on request, else it would have been Windows Vista Home Basic). The OS at first look was pretty solid and looked good. But first looks deceive. The OS has been considerably dumbed down compare to the previous releases of the OS. Easy tasks like changing icon for a file type has been completely removed from the Folder Options dialog. Now one has to do a Registry setting to change the icon for a particular file type. This is a serious annoyance to developers like me since distinguishing the file types becomes difficult. I tried the add a new Key called DefualtIcon registry hack suggested on so many Windows forums but it did not work for me. Then there is another place in the control panel which lets the user to change the default association of file types with programs. Here again, you can only change the program. There is no way to change the description of a file type. Such small things may not mean a lot to many people, but considering the name of the OS, at least there should have been a way to do it.

   2. Aero: I am really not sure why so much hype was given to Aero. I agree, the interface is quite nice, shiny progress bars, maximize, restore and close buttons that light up when you hover your mouse over them, thumbnails when you hover your mouse on an open program in the taskbar, transparency everywhere. But if this is the criteria for selling an OS, then I am disappointed. There aren’t even a couple of other themes included save for a bunch of wallpapers.

   3. Start Menu: In one word. Bad to Worse. Navigating through a lot of layers of menus was painful. Now you have to either scroll to open the program you want or type the name of the program in the search box. <sarcasm>Wonderfully use friendly</sarcasm>

   4. IE: Well, most of us already know what it is capable of. So I got Firefox installed.

   5. Networking: Just worked out for me.

   6. User Access Control: Those pesky dialogs which popup whenever you try to run a third party app that has not been certified by MS. You can easily disable this from the Control Panel. But thats not the end to it. A red shield sits in the system tray and keeps popping out a bubble saying that you are strongly recommended to turn on UAC.

   7. Windows Components: Windows Explorer has been redesigned and the icons for folders and a few common files like images, music have be done again. They are neat and pretty. Windows Explorer is also a pleasure to use. Additional programs like Windows Calendar, Windows Email, Windows DVD Maker have been included. I have not tried the email client. Both Calendar and DVD Maker are usable. Calendar is again dumbed down version of the MS Office Outlook Calendar. In MS Office Outlook I can double click on the calendar area and instantly create an appointment or a task with as many details as I wish. But here you could just enter the title and then edit the item in the sidebar.

   8. Control Panel: That another mess. Too many icons spoil the panel. But fortunately you can switch over to the classic versions of the Control Panel. Which on is better. Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features? Hm. Well again, everyone may not agree with me. I found the former easier.

   9. Security: MS made sure that this was their most secure Windows ever. But they still let users login without a password. I agree you can do this in Linux as well. Windows Defender, Windows Firewall are built into the OS now. I did not get a chance to check them out.

   10. Windows Media Center: No complaints here. Everything worked well except for the small quirk that the songs took a whole three seconds before they started playing and the same was noticed when I clicked the Next button. However, when I ran Windows Media Player as a separate application, sometimes it struggled to play the songs. The output was jarred for a song that plays well when used with Winamp.

Ok. So much for the OS. If there is something I may have missed, let me know, so that I can check out those features as well.