hertenberger.co.za

After being a very happy user of both the Windows 7 Beta and then the Release Candidate for quite a number of months, I have made the switch to the release version of Microsoft‘s latest OS. Truth be told, this is probably the first time I’ve purchased a copy of a Microsoft OS outright, with all previous versions I’ve run being pre-installed on notebooks and desktops I’ve used.

The process was reasonable pain-free and assisted by a remarkably fast installation time: I started off with a dual backup of all my documents, downloads and other temporary rubbish a hard disk accumulates. The folder My Documents contains roughly 15GB of data – mainly PDF‘s, archived mail folders and many, many files I simply migrate from machine to machine to make sure I always have everything I need. The backup of that data quantity took quite some time and I dumped those files to both the Drobo and an external hard drive before proceeding. Each one of those backups ran for a long time – I left G2S on over night and let the job complete.

After having ensured that both copies looked similar to the original (and after opening one or two files just as a confirmation) I slotted the Windows 7 DVD into the drive and rebooted. The Windows 7 installation is blisteringly fast, compares favourably to modern Linux installations and requires virtually no information to proceed. My installation included a format of the existing hard drive and an installation of the 64-bit Ultimate edition. When I next looked at the machine less than 30 minutes later, everything was ready to roll. That included a driver for the wireless network card (which had already found and connected to my home network) and the audio drivers. From a hardware support perspective, the only driver I loaded was the latest NVidia driver that is already certified for Windows 7. Another reboot and the system was ready for use. I connected my external drive and copied My Documents and various bits and pieces back – oddly, the same data quantity copied in a fraction of the time it initially took to back up in the first place. Whether this is due to a complete disk defragmentation, I don’t know. Suffice to say that it was many orders of magnitude faster than the initial copy to exactly the same drive.

With the OS activated, I proceeded to install the remaining applications I needed to get going and started working. The experience promised with the beta and RC has been maintained: Windows 7 is, in my opinion, one of the best operating systems Microsoft has ever released. It’s modern, slick and speedy. Whilst it won’t replace Mac OS X as a current favourite of mine, it has proved crash resistant and pleasant to work with since I started using it. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, you should consider it – though XP was certainly robust and stable, Windows 7 improves tremendously on that platform.

Today is the world-wide release of Microsoft Windows 7 to the general public. For the first time, Microsoft has provided both beta and release candidates of their latest operating system as a general download. I installed first the beta and later the updated release candidate on G2S and have been using that system as my primary workhorse for quite a few months.

From today, the OS is available for purchase with a wide range of variants to choose form and a fair discrepancy in pricing.

Pricing seems to range from just over ZAR 1000 for the Home Basic Edition to about ZAR 2500 for the Ultimate Edition. Many retailers are offering the DSP version for a lot less – in that case, the DSP Home Basic Edition costs about ZAR 850 and DSP Ultimate ZAR 1500. There are also special offers for owners of Vista who have purchased that software only a short time ago.

Choosing a variant depends on what the intended use of the target machine will be. Ultimate is a bit of a waste – the Professional Edition makes far more sense unless AppLocker and BitLocker feature strongly on your list of requirements.

Home Basic offers only partial Aero functionality – considering the fact that recent reports about the performance of WIndows 7 on lower-end systems have indicated that the OS should rather be targeted at newer machines, partial Aero functionality is a waste of time. There are also substantial differences in the delivery of the Media CentreWindows XP functionality, mode and the ability of the OS to connect to a Windows domain. Why Microsoft still chooses to confuse customers with multiple variants of the same software is beyond me: a standard price for the delivery of everything the software contains would lead to a clearer marketing message, less disappointment when the wrong variant is chosen and fewer support headaches. Of course, many features can be enabled on a cheaper variant using a variety of hacks.

With that said, I’m extremely happy with Windows 7 – both the beta and RC versions have performed flawlessly in the past few months and I can confidently state that I’ve experienced no serious issues. Though it’s little more than an update to Vista on the surface, the fixes and updates that have been provided in the Windows 7 core OS certainly lead to a more stable and usable system. Performance is reasonable, though I’m also of the opinion that the use of Windows 7 on a low-powered system should be considered carefully. I’ll be updating my present RC installation with an official copy as soon as I get a hold of a variant that is suitable.

For a detailed comparison chart, refer to the Windows 7 Wikipedia page.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked extensively with Remote Deskop under Windows. Remembering certain key tasks is a difficult thing. For example, remembering that to enter into console mode, it’s best to execute Remote Desktop from the Run menu by entering mstsc /console. That won’t work for systems running Windows 2000, though. And, the /console switch has changed to /admin in later versions of Remote Desktop running on more modern versions of the Windows OS.

But the one thing I simply couldn’t remember was how get the remote system to restart. Obviously, the relevant option doesn’t show up in the Start menu.

In case you have brain-freeze the way I have, it may take you some time to remember that the correct key combination to get to the necessary option is Ctrl-Alt-End instead of Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Choose Shut Down, and then Restart form the subsequent set of options.

I’m busy building and developing a bunch of interfaces from third-party products to talk to SAP via SAP PI. It’s all great fun, until the interaction with the third-party software running on Windows XP had to get going. The interface I’m building reads a text file generated by that software. The text file is written to a directory on the PC and PI polls until it’s ready to pick the file up using ftp.

The interface worked well until PI tried to remove the file: unable to delete the file due to insufficient privileges. I check the ftp server details, checked the ownership of the target directory and ensured all users and their permission were set up correctly. No go.

Trying to change the Read-only attribute of the directory, which was the obvious cause of the issue, caused me a bit of frustration: regardless how often and insistently I tried to turn the attribute off and clicked Apply, the read-only attribute remained.

I found a solution in the Microsoft Knowledgebase under article Q256614. The fix involves the insertion of a new registry key, then modifying the attribute from the command line using the attrib command. All this because folder customization utilizes the Read-only attribute. In my case, the folder was in no way customized and all newly created folders on that system exhibit similar behaviour. It’s an XP system running SP3 and is newly installed.

And the behaviour of that attribute is by design. Fancy that…

The Windows 7 RC is humming along quite nicely, and I promise that this will be the last Microsoft post for a while. The additional download of a Virtual XP environment intrigued me enough to download and install it. I can’t quite understand what the purpose of a Virtual PC running XP in Windows 7 can be, but here goes.

First off, it is a requirement that the target machine has a modern Intel processor capable of Virtualization Technology. Most Intel Core Duo‘s or better have this feature, but to be sure I downloaded Intel‘s CPU identification utility. The utility provides a basic overview of the CPU‘s capabilities

and the all-important Yes for the required virtualization support.

With the basic hardware requirement met, I downloaded the first of two files from Microsoft‘s site. Initially, a support package needs to be installed. The installation is quick, but requires a reboot. After the reboot, the system is ready to accept the installation program to complete the setup of Virtual Windows XP.

A few clicks is all it takes. The setup routine basically installs a virtual machine environment, then populates a pre-built disk image containing a functional Windows XP system.

There is no option to enter a user name for the OS, only a password. The name of the user is…User. That should be difficult to forget. Multiple logons are not possible with the free copy of XP Microsoft provides in the virtual PC environment.

Since we are talking about a vulnerable OS inside another vulnerable OS, it may be prudent to permit this XP to check for updates…

Once the setup has completed, you are left with a guest Windows XP system inside a virtual machine running on top of Windows 7. A nice feature is that the host OS drives are available automatically, permitting easy sharing of files from one environment to another. How this affects the overall security of the system as a whole is a totally different question: Windows 7 requires some form of virus protection, as does XP. That means installing anti-virus measures in the guest OS to ensure that no nasties bite the host. Anti-virus is not exactly a performance improver, and we are talking a basic virtual machine here. Extra functions to handle USB devices, power the VM off and send a Ctrl-Alt-Del to the guest OS are accessible from the Virtual PC menu bar.

I can’t see any corporate wanting to upgrade existing systems to Windows 7 only to run legacy applications inside a virtual machine environment. The headaches that would cause, not to mention the wasted administrative effort is simply not worth contemplating. Then, there’s the issue of the guest and host being very interoperable which makes most security types a bit nervous and requires two anti-virus licenses, at the very least. The virtual machine environment is dedicated to the single instance of XP, so it’s unusable for, say, Ubuntu or anything else, for that matter. It’s a lot of software for a simple XP setup that already runs well enough on a low-end desktop.

In my opinion, the provision of an XP emulation mode is not a bad thing, but the implementation by way of a complete, separate VM makes no sense: wouldn’t it have been possible to simply provide an XP wrapper in the main OS to run programs that require such support? Overall, I’m a bit confused as to what the Virtual XP thing is all about. Take one free copy of Virtualbox, add as many operating systems as you wish on top of your host OS and you have a much better, more flexible solution. With Virtualbox, the guest OS can be backed up, snapshots created and moved around as an image. That’s not possible with the Microsoft Virtual XP environment.

Yesterday’s quick test installation of the new Windows 7 RC OS took place on a 32-bit platform. Today, I bit the bullet, made sure I had a double backup of all documents, downloads and other assorted stuffs and then placed the 64-bit Windows 7 RC DVD into the drive of G2S. Once again, the installation completed without incident, taking less than 30 minutes to get the basic OS up and running.

64-bit. No touch device installed, this is true. That could be interesting…

As with the Beta installation, there are some non-essential devices that require a third-party driver. I haven’t pulled these in yet – in the Beta version, the Vista drivers I had available wouldn’t work.

No matter. The generic NVIDIA driver seems to be working well enough, though I’ll probably load the latest one I have at some time.

Within a period of two hours I had all most-needed applications reinstalled and had all documents restored. Anti-virus too. Don’t forget that… If you got your copy of the Windows 7 RC ISO off a torrent, you may be the victim of a Trojan…

Performance is snappy and so far, no issue as with the Beta. It’s still no replacement for OS X, but it’s streets ahead of Vista…

After today’s quick download of both the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 RC ISO‘s, I decided to check out the 32-bit release by installing it for a quick look. As with the Windows 7 Beta, the installation of the OS is streamlined and reasonably quick. There are very few questions or prompts to respond to and the overall installation takes place without much intervention.

An upgrade option is available, though this purportedly won’t upgrade an existing Windows 7 Beta installation.

I’ll try that out one when I install on G2S, so I can’t comment on that for now. I did a clean installation and, as mentioned above, that does most everything without further intervention. After a single restart, the OS proceeds to set itself up to be ready to run.

There is little new to see once the system starts up and is ready for use. With the exception of a collection of new themes and backgrounds, this is the Windows 7 well-known from the Beta release. It’s still fast and responsive and detects most basic hardware without too much effort. I didn’t fiddle with additional drivers at this point in time – in the Beta, I had some issues with the NVIDIA driver. Here, the generic driver works well enough.

The only other piece of eye-candy I noticed is the animation or glow on the icons in the taskbar. Some very detailed icons (especially for removable devices) make the Explorer windows attractive. The same functionality with the quick list to access open windows remains and the Finder-style search field makes finding programs and files very easy. I expect the changes in Build 7100 are more than skin deep.

That’s basically all there is to see. If this release is anything as stable as the Beta was, Microsoft is making good on the promise to provide something a lot better than Vista. There is some additional media support provided out-of-the-box for the Media Player (specifically Quicktime support) which will reduce the number of additional codecs needing to be installed.

Two notable changes to core Windows applications are identifiable once Write

and Paint

are launched. They include the new Office-style ribbon bar and enhanced user interfaces.

The RC does not change anything the Beta showed, which makes the Beta release even more impressive, in my opinion. Provided the RC shows the same stability as I’ve experienced with the Beta I’ll be very happy to go to the effort of re-installing.

After a few days of exclusivity during which the new Windows 7 RC ISO was available for download only to developers and Technet subscribers, Microsoft has made the software available to the general public. There’s no rush, as both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available for download for quite some time from the official site. I’m rather keen to get the RC as I intend installing Windows 7 on katana II to co-exist with the new Ubuntu 9.0.2 release, so I was eagerly waiting for the download link to appear this morning. The ISO‘s are large, weighing in at roughly 3.5GB for both the 32-bit and the 64-bit version.

I’m not too keen on the Java download manager Microsoft insists on installing to handle the download

I parse the URL out of the download link and give it to DownThemAll to sort out. The direct download link for the 32-bit version is here and for the 64-bit version here.

There is no official way of upgrading an existing Beta installation with the RC, though a workaround is available. The recommended installation method is a fresh installation which involves the backup of all important data. I need to find some time to get the RC installed on G2S and on katana II. Feedback once I’ve done that…