Rampid Byter

Like many I was very excited when Microsoft decided to open the Windows 7 beta to the public. Within the first few hours of availability I downloaded the Windows 7 x64 edition, but excitement doesn’t necessarily mean i had the time to install the OS on a machine.

That changed yesterday when I needed an extra PC with windows in order to play Left4Dead. I didn’t want to use my Windows Vista Ultimate license unless I absolutely had to because I only get one license per year from school. So that’s when I remembered that I had a free chance to both test Windows 7, and have essentially a free licensed install to boot. So i made the switch yesterday opting for a dual booting system loaded with Fedora 9, and Windows 7.

The first thing i noticed when installing Windows 7 was when i clicked on the windows installation help files. In big bold print it said ‘Installing Windows Vista'! HA. I’ve heard through another blogs people found the same installation title in the help documents, but still seeing it myself just furthers my suspicion that Windows 7 is just Vista with a UI update, and some neat add-on core features.

Anyway, after the installation, which went pretty quickly i might add, i got to the new fancy dancy desktop. Nice, new toolbar, dockable desktop edges, and new improved processes to control the desktop themes. All in all it has the same Vista feel when interacting with files and folders, but a new Windows 7 desktop interface. It seems as if the only big change to the UI is the new ribbonesk toolbar instead of the traditional menu style of old.

I like it, don’t love it, but then again I don’t have a multi-touch device that I can really use to blow me away with using Windows 7. It’s almost beyond temptation to wish for a HP TouchSmart PC to take this puppy for a real spin, and have a legit excuse to purchase one since the price really isn’t that unreasonable. I did test a TouchSmart while at Microcenter and I sadly didn’t care for it that much. The reason? Well the machine gets hot on the display, the friction of running my finger on the screen actually caused my fingertip to get red and sore. Not a great intro to the machine, but i digress the Windows 7 system with multi-touch will be a great addition to the tools i add to my skill set.

All in all a pleasant first experience, no major bugs to report, docking desktop isn’t exactly as useful as i first thought it would be, but all in all it looks nice and is essentially the Vista I've become accustomed to.

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I don’t know about you all but I can’t wait for Windows 7. I enjoy Vista as it is now; at least since I discovered the faulty RAM … that reminds me I’m sorry Vista! I saw the tech previews, the .Net 4.0 inklings, entity frameworks, multi-touch user interactivity, and the new and improved Visual Studio. Man, talk about drooling, and the whole video has me in complete rapture over the idea of getting my hands on it, not to mention some free time to play, and I couldn’t help but think. Microsoft is awesome. People call it a monopoly and say how open-source is so much better. Open-source is nice, I’ll give you that, but I make my money building tools/systems for Microsoft products and services. I couldn’t make my money anywhere else, and not to mention I wouldn’t want to.

I don’t even think it’s about making money. I wake up day to day and I go to work, I open my Windows XP notebook, and I open visual studio to another day of building something new. If I wanted to build something open-source I can, if I don’t then that is just fine too. I can build away all day, and I enjoy it. I don’t like when things don’t work, but that is half the enjoyment later in the years of easily recognizing oops mistakes. We have a large community of .Net developers, most of whom like to help each other out, and we have ways to grow and build. We have certifications, we have user groups, we have operating systems, office tools, frameworks, easy api access, and years of developers who came before us that are eager to tell us how things work.

How much better can it get? Well watch the PDC and you’ll see things are going to get so much sweeter, with functional interactive environments, and really jazzy UI programs and plug-ins. Man, every time I see something new from Microsoft like this I get energized again and again on how much I really love computers. It’s great to be a developer in this day in age.

 As an aside though if you watch the video there is a lady who really enjoys saying 'super easy' a lot. I guess instead of going 'um' this lady started thinking 'super easy' was a good way to pause between thoughts before explaining where she was going with whatever functionality she was supposed to present. Just an FYI note there as it gets kind of distracting.

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Vista,

You scare me. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of ways to end it with you, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I mean you’re so gorgeous I’d be so hard pressed to ever replace you, except to go Mac, but I’m not gay so I can’t swing that way.

Vista, what is wrong? I mean you treat me really, really well for the most part. You warn me whenever I try to do anything with you that you could be upset with it. It was nice for the first day but then we got into that fight when I had to keep accepting your demands. Thankfully I found you just had a nasty case of the UAC when we first got together, but that was cleared up after a while when your friend Defender moved away. Things even got a little better between us when you went to see your first SP therapist.

Last night we were just about to get really hot and heavy in a menashatwa(sp?) with C, and then you decided dump me. I don’t know what the problem was it isn’t the first time that I was with you using C to get my Groove on. This isn’t the first time we’ve been with C, well it’s becoming more frequent since I dumped Visual Studio, but I thought you were different?

It’s really starting to get rough Vista I think you’re starting to get out of control. Since that night… I almost hate to mention it because we swore we’d never talk about it. I just can’t hold it back. I know what you did. I know you killed XP. I know you over heard my plans to break up with you and leave you for XP. Since then I’ve heard that XP isn’t around anymore, nobody seems to know where it went to, and you’ve been silent about it ever since.

I want to know the truth, did you really kill XP? I’m going to go to the …. *preparing dump file*

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I upgraded Vista to service pack 1 just yesterday. Besides taking a while to load, which is ok, the service pack restarted my computer to a wonderful new experience. To say slow booting, well I could get a can of coke out of the fridge, and be about three quarters of the way through it before I’d call the system functionally responsive. First, it took forever to boot on the first restart, hell it took the side bar application a good two minutes to load up. I’m used to hitting the power, the machine shows my boot menu for a few seconds, hear the Vista startup noise, and I’m ready to login in at about twenty seconds. I have a quad core machine with plenty of Ram, and previous to the update I was almost content with the performance. Keep in mind I’ve already lost my ability to use my photo printer, no longer able to play my old PC games, and networking am not able to connect properly to my internal network thanks to McCafee.

Anyway, when the new service pack was installed I instantly lost my configured web server. Gone, had to reconfigure the settings in order to get the web server to run. All of the services required to run the web server were instantly stopped, and non responsive. From that point forward I had to reboot several times, and try to start the service manually. Frustration began at that very moment. From there my desktop takes a long time to load, hell navigating through my computer hard drive will leave my entire system non responsive with the loading bar being stuck at about 10% complete visible from the address bar on the window pane. There it sits with a disabled grayed out view of the folder contents, and it will take a good three minutes before it becomes responsive. IF it becomes responsive I should say. Not to mention that my graphics card seems to want to ‘recover’ itself from failure every ten minutes while trying to use Visual Studio 2008 on this machine. I can’t program on it, it’s become too frustrating to start work, only for Visual Studio to have to restart it politely, and then for some odd reason the graphics goes totally black with my graphics card being recovered. Fantastic. Just fantastic. I’m not even sure what the point of the upgrade was at this point because honestly my system seems far slower than it was before. If a quad core PC can’t boot to the desktop, with no user initiated applications running, then what can?  I’m starring at my XP CD, and honestly the only thing keeping me from down-grading is the fact I’m not sure what this new hardware is supported on. It’s one hassle after another. You would think Vista Ultimate would be the Ultimate experience. Besides being pretty it seems this is the Ultimate waste of my time, Ultimate pain the butt, and the Ultimate annoyance of the 21^st century.

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I actually failed to realize just how neat Vista Ultimate is. I’ve had the new pc for a few months now (Dell XPS) and all its quad core glory. It wasn’t until this past weekend when I was sitting down getting it setup as my new development PC that I realized it had IIS 7 with ability to create multiple websites & multiple FTP sites. I was a little surprised at that fact as I’d have thought it would be reserved solely for the Windows Server family as was the case with IIS 6 for Server 2003 compared to the version I was using on XP Pro. So after a few clicks, some firewall modifications, and a couple choice words later I had my six websites setup and configured. Unfortunately it wasn’t until I tried to switch over this blog engine until I realized that a lot changed between IIS versions.

Anyway, long story short (props out to Ck) a buddy of mine pointed out some conversion issues, and I was able to resolve it after about five hours of head banging confusion. Dang you and the new web.config setup dealing with http handlers. So the site is live (RampidByter.com) after about a five month hiatus, my new system has been converted into a web server / development system, and of course I’m now having some new strange problems.

I ran Windows update just yesterday on the Vista PC, and installed the recommended NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX drivers. Wouldn’t you know it, now periodically the system will drop the screen, goes totally black, and then will come back to the desktop saying my video driver has failed but was restarted.

Man, can’t win with you Vista. That was one thing I liked about XP Pro it didn’t fail on the things I most rely on working without question. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t unstable, but at least it didn’t give me the impression that things broke all the time. So I’d run visual studio, make a web page, switch to design view, black screen, error message on the status bar, or I’d open media player while buiding the web page… back to black.

I guess Vista is an exception to the rule. Once you go black (Vista), you go back (XP).

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