trumpy.net

If you have ever assembled a personal computer and then installed a working copy of Windows XXX, have you ever noticed how quick it is the first time you launch windows?

I have, in fact I have installed windows hundreds of times and each time the one thing I notice most of all is how fast, smooth and responsive windows is, until that is, you start to install your favorite programs. After installing 3 or 4 programs of various size and complexity, I have noticed that the smoothness and crispness of windows declines somewhat.

This to me at least, was most notable when I commissioned my latest computer, an i7core 920 running on an ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm motherboard with 3 gig of Corsair memory. With this machine I decided to setup two RAID volumes. The first volume uses two Seagate 500gig drives and the second volume uses two 250gig Western Digital drives.

All this added up to one hellishly quick machine, at least at first start up. I’d even go so far as to say that this machine was quicker than I am at any click of the mouse. Truely instant opening of the standard Microsoft programs and utilities, and file copy in the blink of an eye. The OS was extremely smooth and responsive and aside from some annoying hiccups with the installation it was every thing I expected and more.

Then I started to install my usual suite of programs. Mind you, I install over 200 different utilities by the time I’m finished, and this can take considerable time, something I still haven’t completed yet.

After installing a dozen or so programs I noticed a marked difference in performance. Window opening and closing speed was slower, boot up and shutdown times are much slower, window animations start looking a little jittery and so on.

This is something I have observed since the days of Windows 95 and even though the speed and complexity of the hardware changes from one version of windows to the next, the overall speed of windows remains pretty much the same.

So, the question is, why is it so?

If you have any ideas, or first hand knowledge, I’d like to know.

The first and most obvious change is the task bar. At first glance the task bar is appealing to the eye, but what about the functioning of it?

Well, with my limited experience with it, I ended up loving it and hating it. The visual effects are quite nice and are definately appealing, something that I do like about the new task bar, but this adds little to the overall functionality of the task bar as a whole. In particular, I found it very difficult to recognise when I had more than one window open.

At one time I had a total of ten windows open, but at a visual glance I was not able to tell that I had any open windows at all. The visual ques were simply not noticeable . A more focused look at the task bar does reveal the fact that more than one window is open but not how many windows are open, and this detracts from ones prefferred task, the task of completing an important assignment that is due yesterday for example.

This could potentially lead to a machine running out of resources simply because a user has one too many windows open and no easy way to tell. Of course, running the mouse over a task bar icon will reveal all open windows under that icon, well eventually it will, providing your machine is equipped with a decent video card, a healthy serve of ram and an ultra fast CPU. If your machine doesn’t measure up though, I suspect that this scenario will become quite painful.

Something else that I find distracting is the amount of wasted real estate around each icon. While it is necessary to have the additional space around each icon in order for the visual effects to have somewhere to display, it is still a waste of screen real estate. Not much of a problem on your 32inch High Definition monitor, but on an average 20 – 22inch model it quickly eats up what little space is left on the task bar, especially if you are trying to do a little web development, or transfer your photos from one place to another whilst making sure things are going where they’re supposed to be. This is something that could easily be cleaned up and I hope it is before Windows 7 is released.

Another thing detracting from the task bar is the disappearance of the quick lauch bar. In recent times I have found the quick lauch bar to be invaluable. It allows me to open a program without closing an already open window, quickly and with a single click of the mouse. This has improved my personal work times considerably and now it is gone.

While this may not be too much of a problem on a home computer, it would, or at least should, be a big deal in the corporate world. Why you ask? simply because it adds, or should I say wastes, time. Something I think corporate customers will take into account when considering Windows 7 for their IT departments.

It is true that you can add a custom toolbar to replace the Quick Launch bar, but it wastes time setting it up and it still wont have the same level of functionality that already exists in Vista. Bad move Microsoft!

The next new feature that has caught my attention is the way Windows are handled, especially on a dual monitor system such as mine. Grab the title bar of an open, but not maximised window, and drag the window to the top edge of the screen. This will cause the window to instantly maximise and fill the screen. Very nice when moving windows from one monitor to another and a real time saver! Good one Microsoft!

You can also grab the title bar of a maximised window and drag it down. This will cause the window to return to its normal size and allow you to move it around the screen, again, a real time saver. No more clickety click on often hard to see buttons in the top right of the window. No more clicking on the wrong button either.

More to come so stay tuned folks…

I decided after installing Windows 7 Beta 1 32bit that I would also try the 64bit version. Unfortunately, the installation of the 64bit version didn’t go as smoothly as did the 32bit version.

First off, the boot block that came with the 64bit DVD image contained 2 boot options. The 2 boot options were not labelled and therefore I had to experiment in order to determine which option was the correct one. Option 1 allowed me to see the ‘Press any key to boot from CD/DVD’ prompt that you would normally see when inserting a Windows CD/DVD in the drive. Option 2 seemed to go into an endless loop and wouldn’t advance any further. The only solution was to do the three finger salute (Ctrl – Alt – Del) and reboot. Of course, this is only a minor hiccup and no doubt it will not be an issue once Windows 7 has been released.

After navigating the dreaded boot options the installation proceeded pretty much as expected and again, the main monitor was detected and set to the manufacturers recommended setting of 1680 x 1050. The speed of the installation was pretty much the same as with the 32bit version and all went smoothly. When the installation had completed the most notable difference was that my second monitor had not been detected and consequently it had not been setup at all. A minor problem, but I was rather sadened by the fact that I may have to perform this step manually again. Hopefully, Microsoft will rectify this by the time that Windows 7 goes to press.

As with my experiences with the 32bit version, I will report on the additional features of Windows 7 64bit at a later date, probably after I have assembled my new i7 core machine.

I recently installed Windows 7 onto my main computer so that I could take a look-see at the new features that we are all about to be blessed with, well if Microsoft have their way we will

The installation went smoothly and quickly, something that Microsoft have been working on no doubt. Installation was at least as fast as Vista, maybe even faster. I didn’t bother to time it, who has the time to do that?. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Windows 7 recognises dual monitor setups during the installation, and both my monitors were correctly set to maximum resolution and color depth, and also the monitors were correctly extended. This normally has been a manual operation once Windows has been installed, but now it would seem that I have one less step whenever I setup a new installation of Windows 7. Thanks Microsoft!

However, my jubilation was short lived when Windows 7 decided to alter the monitor settings, for no apparent reason, and decided to set monitor 2 as the main monitor, and to set the resolution back to the minimum of 1024 x 768. Strange thing is, it left monitor 1 alone, except for now making it the extended monitor. My desktop icons also disappearred temporarily, and only reappeared after I had straightened out the monitor configuration. That was also short lived as the configuration again went curfluey (that’s a word?) and reset itself again. Same deal, monitor 2 was now the main monitor and the resolution was back to 1024 x 768 with monitor 1 as the extended monitor. I reset the monitor configuration again and since then it has been reasonably stable. I might add that at this point in time I had installed a fair amount of third party software, so maybe that had something to do with the mysterious behaviour of Windows 7.

Now, whenever the system resumes from a sleep condition, I have to click once on each monitor before the screen will refresh and become readable. Not Good! but then this is only a beta version and hopefully these sorts of bugs will be ironed out before the software is released.

The New Features:

I will talk about some of the new features later, in a new post so stay tuned folks…..