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.

Machines

We have 4 Windows boxes at home. Three are HP 32-bit notebooks and the other one is an HP 64-bit machine – mine. We bought all 4 machines during the course of this year and all came with Windows Vista. We have had no end of trouble with Vista. The machines work fine, but a lot of applications generate exceptions and hang under Vista that work fine on my XP box. So I decided to believe Microsoft's advertizing (probably a big mistake) that indicates that Windows 7 has been thoroughly tested. 

Preparation

My experience with Microsoft's upgrades have been patchy, at best. So I left this task as the very last task that I would perform before I start class on Monday. I figured on doing a complete reinstall if I needed to. Past exeperience, especially moving from NT to XP, taught me that a reinstall was a very likely possibility. That meant I needed to have everything else taken care of before I started.

I have a lot of stuff on my machine. My local drive has 195GB of programs and data on it. I am fastidious, though, about keeping myself up-to-date with the latest versions of software. This means that I did not need to do much in terms of getting the latest versions of software. Norton 360 does my backups for me so I did not need to do a new backup before I did the upgrade. So once I got the DVD, I could go ahead and install.

Upgrade

I started the upgrade on my 64-bit HP Pavilion Entertainment PC at around 4pm on Friday afternoon. I had to deauthorize my iTunes account as one of the preconditions to the install, but that was the only thing that the upgrade process identified as a potential problem. Once that was done, the process started and ran… and ran… and ran… and ran…

Around 10:00pm (6 hours later!) the install utility asked me for the product key, rebooted, and the upgrade was complete. I immediately did the on-line activation and ran Windows Update to get any updates that were necessary.

Windows Update installed several updates (I believe it was 38) and I restarted the machine again.

All told, the upgrade took about 7 hours, which is an insane amount of time.

Outcome

I spent most of Saturday morning testing everything and I had no problems at all. Now that things have settled down, I am very happy with the upgrade. Internet Explorer is working whereas before it was giving a lot of trouble. My machine is performing much better and all the applications I have installed work properly.

As I write this, I have DIRECTV's SuperCast software running with today's football games streaming and it works fine.

I spent Saturday afternoon and evening upgrading the other three machines. None of them has as much stuff on as mine, so they averaged about 4 hours total for the upgrade – still a lot of time. As with mine, they are all performing better and they have also stopped some of the exceptions that were happening.

Things I like

All four machines are performing better and seem more stable. We're not seeing the exceptions we saw before.

Another thing I was worried about is that I was told that a lot of applications would not work with Windows 7. None of my existing applications are affected by that. Everything works fine.

I like the new task bar. It is more organized and it has some useful options.

Networking with the other notebooks on the network is much easier and I have had no problem doing all the Unix stuff I do from my PC.

Things I don't like

This upgrade took a long time. 19 hours of upgrade time across 4 machines is ridiculous.

I was very frustrated that the Quick Launch toolbar now no longer exists and although you can pin things to the taskbar, none of the Quick Launch stuff was pinned to the taskbar for me. That was a pain.

Summary

For the most part, this upgrade went smoothly even if it took an inordinate amount of time. The machines are more stable than they were before and they seem to be faster. Internet Explorer performs much better and even Firefox is behaving pretty decently.

So far so good. I'll follow this up in a week or two with more on how this goes.