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The Worm has Turned again - part 2 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2009

Windows 7 - out of the frying pan!

Windows 7, billed as the life saver and desperately brought forward to stem the loss of blood from the Vista wound, seems a bit of a Band Aid. Claimed to be quicker, the benchmark for start-up improves by a second or two in 47 seconds - try that against our Vista which now grinds for well over three minutes on a massively powerful computer. To rub salt in the wound there seems to be an upgrade every other day to 'finish' the program properly (after so long?). This slows down the shutdown, then slows the reboot the next day and, to cap it all, usually has to be done twice because the internet does not come back on first time around. In a recent incident, a client had to wait more than 20 minutes for confirmation of a diary date while we (and Windows) messed about updating and generally jiggering the internet settings.

A recent review in PC Pro featured 14 pages on Windows 7. Absolutely nothing caught our attention as being a useful improvement.

The claimed speed improvements were from 50 seconds down to 47.2 seconds on start-up, hardly ground-breaking stuff! They claim to have introduced parallelism of driver activation, to assist booting. So here we are years after the launch of Vista and they have just got around to (possibly) solving the 'colour management switch off on booting' problem. They claim that the OS will now go to sleep or hibernate more cleanly. We take it with a pinch of salt; the beta version of W7 was not shutting down cleanly, let alone hibernating.

The Mac shows how it should be; it hibernates in seconds (literally) and is back, ready to go, before you can blink when you open the lap top lid. There is nothing then of interest to a working graphics or photographic professional in W7. Except, that is, the fact that having fallen out with the European Union Commission, Microsoft has refused to launch a European upgrade route from Vista to Windows 7 (it's to do with the spat about having Internet Explorer bundled). This means that you have to re-install from a box of tricks that says 'upgrade' on the outside. Re-install means that all files on your C-Drive, your emails, address books, settings preferences, and goodness knows what else, will not be there when you fire up your shiny new Windows 7 installation - this is NOT upgrading in any normal sense of the word!

The vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed a rider because 'of the many reports of problems with Vista.'. 'We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Microsoft, but the problems with this particular [operating] system are known nationwide,' Hinojosa said during a Senate session debating the rider Wednesday evening, 'And the XP operating system is working very well.'

The rider requires state agencies to get the written approval of the Legislative Budget Board before purchasing Vista licenses, upgrades or even new PCs with Vista pre-installed on it. Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat from McAllen

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:50

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