My Dinner with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7

After a previous disaster (my evening with Vista), that ended up with a lot of cursing, hurt feelings and a windows divorce, I was loath to try Windows 7. But half the computer lab is now 7, and the new students will arrive bearing laptops with 7 and the attendant problems. So i have to learn it so i can be of some help.

This all started when passing the usual dumpster spot i noticed a familiar looking computer. It was a dell precision 450, the little brother of my main desktop (dell precision 470, 2 x 3.4Ghz xeon's, 1.5tb, 6gig ddr2). Students had taken the optical drives, video card and ram but the innards (esp the dual cpu's) looked good so i had to bring him home.



Digging through the parts box resulted in 2 gig of ddr ram, ati radeon 128mb video card, a combo dvd/cdrw and a 250 gig hard drive. Put it together and fire it up and viola, a dual xeon (2.4Ghz) box with HT. Then it stuck me, this would be a good machine to try out windows 7 and i could connect it to the new 32" toshiba lcd with vga, dvi and hdmi (xmas present).

The windows 7 install went smoothly, unlike Vista which for some reason couldn't connect to microsoft's server and i had to telephone an autobot to get a validation number to enter. When it was all done i ran the 'windows experience score' and found most things scored 4.5 - 5, except as expected the ancient ati radeon 128mb video card (a score of 1). This had a max resolution of 1024 x 768 and the included windows driver was not accelerated. Tried to download and install a ATI driver without success.
Here is the windows 7 desktop showing the 4 cores in action. Note the Vista desktop background, the only thing i liked about vista! (I even use it on my ubuntu desktop...). The windows update did not fix the video problem but installed the correct driver for the analog devices ad1918b integrated sound chip, which was good as i wanted to try out the media functions microsoft advertising so heavily. I had tested the media center xp edition as a possible living room media center but it was very lacking and thus discarded.

Anyway, with the sound now hooked up to the Spherex sound system (grab one of these if you can find it) and the video sort of working (480p only) we plugged in our windows media center remote and after a few minutes telling it where the media files are located (on a server) and removing the default local options we had a media center.

The audio part works well and goes off to the internet to display the cover art. The look and operation of the 7 media center is very familiar to users of XBMC. I just played mp3's to start from one machine, the main media server has only FLAC files, although the mac pro runs connect 360 and so serves audio files from iTunes. Yet to test if the media center can pick up the connect 360 and TVersity upnp media servers.

We next test out the image function and it works fine. I like it better than the media center client update on the XBOX 360. The last update has slowed the image viewing down and made it more clunky to use.
The big test is movies, it is a media center after all - music and pictures are nice but it HAS to play movies well. And here it all comes crashing down. It took forever to pick up the 976 movies from the server and each time you click the movies option it seems to have to do it again instead of being instantaneous. And the display - butt ugly, where are the movie covers? I watch (and buy) a lot of movies, so i expect and need a good interface. I also like the MKV format (see MakeMKV for mac) but like FLAC for audio, windows lags behind the times. Not only could i not play my MKV video but also the MOV (quicktime) and a bunch of AVI's. A media player MUST play all formats and not just the ones the company decides it has deals with - so now we have to spend a lot of time hacking windows media player yet again to get it to play common file formats.

Summary

Overall, i give windows 7 a B+, it is not totally useless like Vista and did not get in my way much for common tasks. It does the job competently. The GUI is nice (and will be a lot nicer and faster once i add an ATI 4670) and it ran surprising well on just 2 gig of ram (soon to be 4 gig).

The major failing for a consumer OS is the lack of robust digital audio and video support for common formats. Business won't care about that (maybe it is a feature for enterprises!). Basically microsoft doesn't get the digital world anyway....proof - Zune - the 'ipod killer', windows smart phones - 'the ipod/android killer' and their new tablet - 'the ipad killer'...

Ya right..

PS

So i go to add a printer. It's a network printer at 192.168.1.2 but windows fails to discover it on the network. So i Add Printer manually and put in the IP address. It then presents a list of manufactures, and surprise Apple is no longer listed. My laser printers are Apple postscript so i search for a generic postscript driver but that is no longer there and Adobe doesn't provide one anymore. The solution was to choose a postscript level 2 printer like the Lexmark Optra Ep PS and install that. It worked (which is should, that's the idea behind postscript...) and the test page printed perfectly on my ancient Apple Laserwriter...

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Dell Precision 450, dual xeon cpu's @ 2.4 Ghz, 2 gig DDR ram, 250 gig hard drive, ati radeon 9200

UPDATE

Replaced the existing processors with two 3.2 Ghz 1mb cache hyperthreaded cpu's. Interesting in that when windows starts it updates a driver and requires you to reboot. The cpu score went from 4.5 to 5.0, a moderate improvement. I also upgraded the ram from 2 gig to 4 gig which raised that score to 5.0, all we need now is to install the 1 gig video card which should arrive tomorrow. The end result is a usable windows 7 box for about $240 in upgrades to a freebie..

Update 2

The ATI HD 4600 card arrived and is installed. Take 2 slots. Odd is that it is listed as having 1275 mb of total graphics memory but that only 1000 mb is actually on the video card and 251 mb is shared system memory. I don't want memory shared, that is the whole point of a dedicated graphic card vs onboard graphics! However, i can find no setting to change this. We rerun the performance index and the graphics score has gone from 1.0 to 6.7 so now the slowest component is the ram at 5.0! I check the bios but no setting on shared memory but i did change the agp aperture setting from 256 to 32mb.

Update:

Appalling! I just started up a small 1 gig copy operation of 13,000 files and basically it totally ties up the file manager window. I've never run across this in OSX or Ubuntu. Other windows can be operated and you can run a second copy of the windows explorer file manager to perform file tasks while the copy operation is going on but the original file manager window did not respond until the copying was complete.

Horrible! Windows 7 managed to scramble the file system on my USB stick while copying a file! It now cannot read the stick and wants to reformat it as there is 'no recognizable file system'. The stick will not mount on osx or ubuntu so it has to be reformatted. This never happened in XP, the primary rule is 'do no harm', how can a file copy corrupt and entire file system?