Learning to use Windows 7

[heiowge]

Update on install of Win 7 in replace of XP on my eeepc (dual booted with Ubuntu 9.04):

Eye candy is nice and it's all very friendly in a "My Name's William and I'll be your friend for this evening. How may I help?" + Plastic Smile type. Screensavers - less than XP and only Bubbles lives up to the OS, the rest are shipped with XP.

Program use: So far my goal has been to try and get the stuff working that I'd use on XP. I started with Windows Movie Maker. Those of you that know me, know I upload youtube vids captured via my webcam using WMM. I haven't found a linux program as easy AND comprehensive (a few ORs though). WMM shipped with XP by default, but not with 7. I found out that the download version (2.6 or Live) both are nicer looking, but have no webcam capture feature unless you're using a camcorder or USB webcam. I'm not. My eeepc one is built in.

...so I tried copying over from XP. It worked, but failed to allow me to capture. I think it's something to do with dlls. No idea there. But the eye candy is nice.

A couple of nice suprises. Firstly, I hear that win7 firewall is more than paper-bag thin, like XP one was. Hurrah. Took them long enough! Next, it actually runs faster than XP on my eeepc. Weird.

Menus - All over the place. Everything is moved. No obvious tree structure. The one in XP was easy. Nautilus is easy. 7 is hard. It's like taking a book, removing the spine and page numbers, then separating it into chapters. Then giving you the random pile. You can see the name of each chapter, but there's no guide as to where things are supposed to go anymore. I'm sure it's probably obvious to those people using Fista for the last 2 years, but not to me. But they are nice to look at and make pretty sounds.

...And we wonder why we use Linux.

The only thing it appears to have over my Gnome setup is that it looks a little nicer (although compiz has more options and better whizzy bits, aero is a lot more polished IMO - the bits that are better are far better, just not a lot of them).

Well that's me looking at win7. More updates as I mess about with it.

[AndyBaxman]

Did you have a party?

Or perhaps it was more like this?

[heiowge]

They were bizarre.

[AndyBaxman]

They were bizarre.

Would you believe the first one was official Microsoft marketing material?

The second was, obviously, a spoof.

Still, can you imaging anyone sad enough to actually arrange a Windows party?

The logical conclusion is that this is a subtle viral marketing campaign. Cheesy ads get distributed ("let's all laugh at MS") while doing a bloody good job of getting Win7 some publicity.

Mind you, with MS you don't really know, there's a good chance they were serious about these "launch parties"

[towy71]

The first one is from a channel devoted to Windows 7 and comments have been locked out! even having the link here makes my blood boil

nice product placement for the Vaio too

second one... could do better

[heiowge]

second one... could do better

Go for it. Love parodies!

[LeeNukes]

heiowge, you lost? Windows 7 has no place here unless in flames

[Ram]

heiowge, you lost? Windows 7 has no place here unless in flames

Long may it burn

[nelz]

heiowge, you lost? Windows 7 has no place here unless in flames

Doesn't it count as another OS?

[heiowge]

I believe it does. I love using Linux, but as I explained in the help thread that spawned this one, I've gotta learn to use win7 whether I like it or not. This thread is just a catelogue of disaster, musings and opinions on what I find.

I'm not expecting Win7 to be superior to Linux. But I'm gonna remain open to any nice surprises.

Either way, whether it impresses or sucks, I will report it here. I suspect I'll see a mix of the two.

[Ram]

Did you have a party?

Or perhaps it was more like this?

Windows 7 is that easy it took over an hour to film a 6 minute video.

[heiowge]

To be fair, they'd frequently have to stop filming while the actors stopped sniggering at the script.

[heiowge]

Another up and another down.

Up for win7 - managed to very easily stream an episode of family guy off my external hd attached to my desktop PC to my eeepc (both with a copy of win7). I know you can do this in Linux, but have failed many times in the past to do so. It probably is very easy, with the odd tutorial, but it was very easy and obvious with win7.

Now Down. My microphone isn't recognised. It is a cheapo technica one for a fiver from tesco, but it suffices me for skype and youtubeing. It's not that there's no driver, there (aparently) is no microphone. Yet Ubuntu sees it and uses it fine. No driver for it available, because technica are so cheepo that they only ship half a dozen drivers total, and nothing for win7 so far.


Whatever ups and downs, I still can't get away from the fact that the desktop feels like a knock-off of KDE4. Hell, the menu even seems to work the same way. I wouldn't mind that, but I use gnome for preference!

Oh, and Xmarks (firefox extension) seems to crash every time I log out of firefox instead of updating my bookmarks and passwords. Firefox on my Linux installs doesn't do that.

[AndyBaxman]

If you are a real hardcore Windows fanboi (AKA Wintard), you can go for a Steve Ballmer Signature Edition.

[heiowge]

Oh dear!