KaiSchaller.com

Microsoft recently released the public beta of Windows 7 and given my inability to resist trying new (free) software, I bit the bullet and gave it a shot. Here are my thoughts thus far:

Fresh Install is faster
By this point I consider myself a veteran XP installer, mostly because of voluntary formats. Operating system installations (not just Windows) usually take a while, but this one was relatively fast — right around the 10 minute mark, as opposed to the usual 20 or 30.

Windows Update is just as slow
I’m not sure if this is something Microsoft is trying to improve in this iteration, but Windows Update is as slow as ever. Installing optional drivers took almost as long as the OS install. On a more positive note Update was very good about finding drivers for my monitor, network card, and sound card.

Anti-virus and Windows Defender
The first thing I was asked to do after installing and updating Windows was to find an anti-virus program. A link was provided to a Microsoft page with a list of supported programs. While the lists for each Windows OS is incomplete (my current favorite, avast!, is missing) there were several options listed. I opted for Kaspersky, and the installation and subsequent scan was painless; Windows was very quick to recognize that I had installed an anti-virus program and also when the program had been updated.

The suggested Windows Defender scan was surprisingly quick — even though it’s a fresh install and there aren’t many files on the system yet, it still seemed faster than a scan on Vista.

Desktop Personalization
The dreaded gadget bar seems to be hidden by default. Windows 7 includes some pre-packaged “Windows Themes” that apply quickly and are fun to use — some include multiple backgrounds, so if you get sick of looking at one of the backgrounds in the “Landscape” theme you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Next Desktop Background Picture” from the context menu.

Windows 7 - Next Desktop Background Picture

Paint
Paint has been greatly improved, now offering things like cropping and even free-form selections. Equally impressive is that the default format when saving was PNG. All of the screenshots in this post were edited with Paint.

Taskbar
I thought it would take longer to get used to the new taskbar, but the transition has been less painful than expected. It does seem to take a little longer to identify programs due to the lack of a text description, but at the same time this provides more room. I thought I might not like the extra space the new taskbar occupies, but it’s really not that much larger and still smaller than your average OS X dock.

System Tray
The system tray (or “Notification Area” as it’s called in the Control Panel) sports a very sharp redesign with simple and attractive system icons:

Windows 7 - System Tray

There are also some nice customization features available, including the ability to hide an an icon’s notifications and being able to turn off system icons.

“Snap To”
A really nice feature is the ability to “snap” an open window to either the left or right side of the screen. This makes it easy to compare two documents or websites by having each of them take up half of the screen. In a related feature you can drag a window to the very top of the screen to maximize it. Each of these actions comes with a nice window-outline animation that shows what will happen when you release the mouse button, and the window will return to its original size when it is dragged away from the screen edge.

Conclusion
I honestly didn’t expect my first impression to be so positive (or to be using the words “quick” and “fast” so often!), but I must say that Microsoft has pleasantly surprised me. I came in expecting to see a lot of ideas stolen from Apple, but there are a lot of original concepts that are actually intuitive and fun. Assuming Microsoft can continue to make improvements and stop itself from making any major bad code and design decisions this might actually be a decent operating system. I’d be happy to finally ween my PC off of the now very dated Windows XP and move to something more modern — let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into another Vista.

Remember that time I accidentally erased all of my uploaded images when updating my version of WordPress? Yeah, I did that again.

I think maybe I should either back up my uploads or start using Flickr for blog images.

::sigh::

Coming in to work this morning I passed a billboard encouraging me to vote Yes on Proposition A. They had a website listed that took the typical form of “VoteXonY.com”. That got me thinking: surely they would have run out of domains of this type long ago, given the amount of elections that happen at the local, state, and national levels. The next logical thought was that the domains are allowed to expire every year (since the campaigns no longer need them), thus freeing them up for others to use.

I then realized that there was potential for capitalism if someone were to buy up the domains and offer to sell or lease them whenever a campaign was in need of one. I checked this out once I got to work and it turns out there is at least one business that does exactly this. They have hundreds of domains dedicated to “VoteXonY.com” that are available for lease (about $40/month if you were wondering). Clever idea, and it ensures that no one government can hog a particular domain.

I was all geared up to write a post about how it is a poor idea to have Firefox save your passwords since there is plenty of password field “unmasking” software floating around out there. In theory all a malicious user would need to do is go to the login page of one of your saved password sites, load up the unmasking software, unmask the password field (which has been auto-populated by the browser) and be on their way.

I figured it would be wise to make sure this actually worked before ranting about security flaws; imagine my surprise to discover Firefox (v3) seems to have taken this tactic into account. The unmasking software I was trying had no effect on stored password fields. I was curious to see what the mechanism for this was, so I downloaded the FF3 source code. I didn’t dig in too deeply, but was nevertheless amused to see the XML namespace they were using was “there.is.only.xul”. Clever.

Also, I went to the Obama rally on Saturday. It was amazing to see 100,000 people come together like that. Go-bama!

My hosting provider, Dreamhost, is in the midst of becoming a “greener” company. One part of this is moving to more efficient servers. Since this kind of massive undertaking inherently comes with its fair share of problems, they are offering free upgrades to “unlimited” bandwidth and storage for users that volunteer to be moved first. Since this site isn’t vitally important I decided to be one of the guinea pigs.

Fair warning in case the site goes down for a time!

Our Pur water filter started leaking every which way recently. I’ll admit that this probably isn’t very interesting… but hey, here’s a picture!

I daresay that’s some pretty shoddy construction. Time to look for a replacement — suggestions welcome.

I suppose I have one more hardware post in me before moving on to greener pastures. Previously on KaiSchaller.com:

Since the last post the 8600 GT card from Best Buy had developed a horrible grinding noise that was being caused by its fan. Since the fan wasn’t performing the card was running at 92 degrees Celsius while idling (that’s about twice as hot as it should be), and it was quite impossible to do anything graphically intensive as the card would shoot up to about 120 degrees Celsius at which point the computer would lock up and require a hard reboot. Putting it down to bad luck and poor manufacturing, I decided that it wasn’t so bad considering my new video card from NewEgg was arriving the next day.

Fast-forward to after work today, where a lovely box is waiting on my desk. After popping the old, seemingly defunct video card out of my tower I noticed that the decal that had been glued to the top of the GPU fan (no idea what purpose that serves…) had slid off to one side and was grinding against the side of the heatsink. No wonder the fan was acting crazy! I re-mounted the sticker (if I weren’t returning the card I would have removed it) and plugged the card back in to do a quick test. Lo and behold everything worked swimmingly again. At that point I noticed another piece of plastic that had evidently peeled off of the top of the heatsink (the kind you find on new electronics that protect them from fingerprints). Again, no idea who’s idea it was to stick plastic and adhesive all over the cooling elements of a video card. To be fair, I should have noticed, but the thought didn’t even occur to me.

Anyway, I plugged the new beast of a card into the motherboard and ran a few benchmarking tests. For about $20 more this card has more than twice the performance of the other. Needless to say, I’m very pleased — it’s great when hardware cooperates.

I’ll be returning the other card to Best Buy sometime this week.

It looks like my video card was going bad. I definitely prefer that outcome to my motherboard needing to be replaced. Aside from cost it’s a pain in the arse to remove CPU fans.

I swung by Best Buy after work and picked up a dinky little PNY nVidia 8600 GT to test things. Plugged it in and the monitor sprung to life… current plan is to return this card to Best Buy and get a much better one from NewEgg for about the same price.

In other news, my dad may be sending some money my way in the way of a Christmas advance for a Mac mini! Now I just have to play the waiting game and hope Apple rolls out an updated line in September…

Sadly I am once again experiencing problems with the PC’s video signal. Every now and then it will just refuse to output anything to the monitor when it is turned on, which puts the LCD into a power save mode as a result. When this started happening a couple of months ago it seemed to be enough to just switch DVI ports (the video card has 2) or reboot the system, but it’s become a bit trickier since then. When I ran out of easy options about a month ago I carried the thing outside and gave it a good air-dusting. After blowing out a fair amount of dust — mostly from the processor’s heat sink — and reseating the video card in the PCI-E slot, everything was running well again. The problems returned this evening, though, and I’m not sure what is causing this strange behavior.

In other hardware-related news, I’m currently very interested in acquiring a Mac mini for use as a HTPC. There is a plethora of great-looking software out there that I’m itching to use, but I have to get the hardware first. I’m waiting (and hoping) to see Apple release an update to their mini product line, which is rumored to happen sometime in September. 802.11n wouldn’t be too shabby at all. Waiting isn’t so bad considering I don’t have the money to go out and buy one right now anyway!