Windows 7

Windows 7 has now been running on 4 machines here at home since I installed it back in November. Three of the 4 are 32-bit machines. The other is a 64-bit machine.

Two of the 32-bit machines are used by my two teenage kids. My son is studying drafting at college and he uses his machine extensively to run various CAD packages, including AutoCAD. He reports that his machine is much more stable now than it was with Vista, which was what his machine shipped with in March last year.

My daughter is at college, too, but her use of her machine will never really show up any major problems. She uses all the standard stuff like MS Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 8. She used to complain a lot about her machine going to a black screen prior to the Windows 7 upgrade, but I have heard nothing new since.

My wife uses her machine for college studies and accounting-related stuff. We run both Quicken and Quickbooks and it all works fine. We have not seen anything on her machine that causes a problem with one exception.

Slideshow Screen Saver Hangs

We have a couple of LaCie 2-Big network drives that contain shared data and backups. Among the shared data on one of the drives is our library of photographs. My wife uses the built-in screensaver that creates a slideshow of photographs onto the display. We have found that this screensaver will work for a period of time, but when she comes back to the machine to start working again, the machine freezes on the screensaver. We have switched to different screensavers and we don't have the problem with others so we are putting it down to that.

I have seen a similar problem on my 64-bit machine with the screensaver, but the difference is that the interface only becomes unresponsive for a period of about 20 seconds. After that it comes back whereas with the 32-bit machine, it hangs permanently.

Other Applications

On my 64-bit notebook I am running a lot of stuff, including Eclipse v3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, Java 1.5 and 1.6, Java EE, Glassfish, MySQL, Visual Studio 2008, DIRECTV Supercast which allows me to watch NFL games on my notebook, and Netflix's video player. Other than the issue with the screensaver, I have had no problem with this machine. It has been substantially more stable than when it was running Vista and I'd go as far as to say that it is more stable than my work notebook which runs Windows XP SP3.

Homegroups

A couple of people asked me about Homegroups and how effective they were. I set up a homegroup expecting that it would simplify things, but all it really does is ease file sharing. There is not a lot of value to it that I do not get from having a central share on the LaCie 2-big drive, so I have switched off the homegroup functionality.

Google Chrome Browser

I installed Google's Chrome Browser on my machine a while ago, but had not really used it. I had been using Internet Explorer 8 and did not really spend much time evaluating it.

A while ago, I was looking for a browser I could use at work. Corporate restrictions had me using Internet Explorer 6 which is not satisfactory. I had previously used Opera, but it fell short on a number of things that I needed it to do. I decided to re-evaluate Firefox and Chrome.

I ended up going with Google Chrome. Chrome is much faster than any of the others. It loads instantly and the first page comes up immediately. Screen-painting is instantaneous. When I compared this with any of the others, whether Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera, there is just no comparison. Internet Explorer 8, for example, takes 3 or 4 seconds to start and another second or two to download my home page which is on my local network.  Firefox is even slower. Chrome is literally instant. The load time is imperceptible.

There are some things, though, that don't work with Chrome. Hosting a web meeting using AT&T's web meeting software does not work, but Webex does. Most plugins work as expected, but occasionally I run into pages that don't and I am forced to switch to Internet Explorer to work around those.

Another big thing with Chrome is that even though I use it on all my workstations, I have never had it crash or hang. I cannot say the same for either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

More than 90% of my browsing is now done using Chrome and it just works. What's interesting is that Chrome is new software and it is more stable than Internet Explorer or Firefox. If this is any indication of what is still to come, I think Google is onto something.

Conclusion

I am very satisfied with the improvements in Windows 7. I would be very happy if I could replace XP on my workstation at work with Windows 7. There are some nice features that I have gotten used to. I prefer the Windows 7 task bar. I also like being able to drag windows to the side of the screen and have Windows figure out that I want the windows tiled next to each other. Mostly, though, I am happier about the stability and I have nothing that I have tried to run that does not work on Windows 7, so I am pretty satisfied with it. I feel like it is generally faster than Vista was, but I could not substantiate that with empirical data, so it is really a feeling more than something I can substantiate.

I am extremely satisfied with Chrome and I am now running it on my Linux boxes as well. It's fast, and it works. It has become my browser of choice.

Internet Explorer 9

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a significant re-investment in Internet Explorer. After just three weeks of development, they are talking about Internet Explorer 9 and its new features. When I read the announcement, I didn't think it said much so I was wondering why it was that Microsoft was in such a hurry to get what I thought was a very half-baked announcement out there.

The crux of the news is that Internet Explorer 9 is going to contain some significant enhancements to the way that it uses hardware and this should make it perform much better. It is also going to be far more standards-compliant, and we're not just talking Microsoft standards, if Steven Sinofsky is to be believed.

My take was that if I could just get it to stop crashing, that would be a good start. All the problems I have had with Internet Explorer have resulted in me installing virtually every browser out there, including Safari, FireFox, Opera, and, more recently, Google Chrome. Actually, IE8 is much better now on Windows 7, but I have been fishing for something else for a while.

Google Chrome Browser 

Yes, for those of you that are not aware of it, Google has its own browser, too, called Google Chrome, and it is available for all Windows platforms. There have been 30 million downloads of the software and I have been using it now for quite a while. It works well on Windows 7, too.

Actually, Chrome is my favorite browser, largely because it works with everything and it is much faster than any of the others. The pages on my DSL line at home are there instantly. I have not found anything that Chrome does not do… very well.

Google Chrome OS

The reason Chrome is so interesting is because of Google's announcement in July that it was entering the Operating System market. Google firmly believes that the future of computing is in the cloud. Their operating system, to be named Chrome OS, is intended to run on netbooks and the Chrome Browser is intended to be the interface that is used to do everything. Applications will be hosted in the Chrome Browser as web apps, and the operating system will be free and open source.

On Thursday, Google released the code for Chrome OS as open source and announced more information about it. It's being based on Linux and will be released to consumers a year from now.  From the post, Google is trying to address 3 issues with Chrome OS:

1. Simplifying user experience by making everything a web app and avoiding the need for users to have to install and manage programs;
2. Improve security by running everything inside the Chrome browser; and
3. Significantly improve performance by improving startup speed to a matter of seconds.

Is Chrome OS Already Tarnished?

Tom Krazit of CNET attended the announcement meeting and posted a detailed account of the meeting. One aspect of his post raised some concerns. According to Krazit, Google is going to specify components for Chrome OS netbooks and existing netbooks will not work. Furthermore, Chrome OS will not run on hard drives; it needs solid state drives. That means that you can forget running Chrome OS on your existing notebook. 

Bottom line: You have to buy a brand new netbook to run Chrome OS. 

In this economy, Google expects us to go out an buy new hardware to run their OS when many of us have gone through upgrade processes recently to support Vista/Windows 7? That makes no sense. My kids, my wife and I would all probably switch to Chrome OS on netbooks if it was supported on existing hardware. We are all at least 3 years from buying new hardware so Chrome OS will have to wait.

Of course… I will get a new netbook with Chrome OS because I am a technology junky, but my point is that I don't believe the market can bear this right now. 

The Timing of Microsoft's Announcement

I started out this post talking about Internet Explorer 9 and how I thought Microsoft's announcement is half-baked. They showed up at their Professional Developers Conference in LA and Steven Sinofsky was demonstrating IE9 without the normal fanfare that is associated with a new product launch.

It was only when I read Tom Krazit's post that it suddenly dawned on me why this was so important. Microsoft is still on its heels with the internet. Microsoft never took the internet seriously when it first started because they never saw it as a viable mechanism for making money. They woke up to that late in the 90s and built Internet Explorer to fight Netscape because they saw Netscape as a potential threat to their dominance on the desktop.

Remember: Microsoft makes money out of two products: 1) Windows and 2) Office. Everything else is chump-change, comparatively speaking. Threaten Windows or Office revenue, and Microsoft has serious worries.

Google is not just threatening Windows with Chrome OS; They are also threatening Office. If their operating system will store everything remotely and all apps are web apps, Microsoft has a serious problem if Chrome takes off.

Google made it clear in July that this announcement would be coming. They also indicated they were communicating with partners about hardware.  Microsoft has to be worried because no one there thought that Google would still be a serious internet company in 2010, but Google is very much there, and growing, albeit much more slowly than earlier. 

The fact that Chrome OS is going to require new hardware is exactly the reason that Microsoft made what is going to prove to be a very, very important move. If IE9 is able to do all that Steven Sinofsky says it will, especially in terms of the standards compliance, Google could be in trouble. At least with IE9 I will be able to use my existing machine. With Chrome OS, I have to buy new hardware. Microsoft may just have been given the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card it needs. You can bet they will use this time to get ahead and Google will be left playing catch-up.