I downloaded Windows 7 earlier and will install it later on a spare machine.
Here’s a quick summary of where to get it and what you need to know, in the form of a wiki by WIRED magazine.
The best surprise new feature, according to Gizmodo, is the ability to stream one’s media via the web. In principle, I can do this already with WebGuide, a free add-in for Vista Media Centre. While it’s fun to demonstrate using WebGuide via an iPhone, in practice this works so poorly that I rarely use it. For one thing the media centre sleeps more than the cat; I could get organized and figure out how to send a magic packet to wake it up if it wasn’t interminably, mind numbingly slow. It will be interesting to see if this is much improved.
Lately, Vista on my Samsung laptop has made me feel like gnawing the table while I wait for it. It’s not a low-powered machine (2GHz with 2Gb RAM), nor does it have much installed. It’s the usual story… Guess why your machine has become so slow? (And you want a slower, lighter, less powerful one?!)
Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh-away. It was moderately funny years ago, part of the price of progress, or so it seemed.
You would think that Microsoft would have made it possible to identify at once which tasks belongs to the operating system and which belong to which 3rd party applications. Fat chance!
This satirical video We-SYP (We Share Your Pain) outlines what should have been Microsoft’s new approach to solving bad coding practices; instead it just changes the product name and hopes for the best. Windows 7 is really an updated version of Vista, what it should have been in the first place.
Should there be a word for the eons of time and electrical power wasted by humanity while waiting for Microsoft operating systems to finish disk thrashing? It amounts to a non-trivial contribution to global emissions of carbon and cortisol. The environmental impact of data centers has been in the news (e.g., here in The Guardian) but these are efficient compared to PCs.
There have been moments lately when I’ve almost been ready to contemplate switching to Apple OSX, but Apple’s computers just don’t appeal to me at all, nor do its keyboards nor its prices. Apple could have hurt Microsoft much more than it has — and the early release of Windows 7 to the public is surely to help stem the rot:
An Apple media tablet on June 9th or shortly after, however, isn’t out of the question! It looks as if we’ll see an interesting battle between Apple and Amazon soon.
Meanwhile, I am happy so far with the recently released Ubuntu 9.04. More or less.
Ubuntu now supports the Asus EEE PCs fully but on my Asus 1000 EEE PC I am still running a modified and now outdated distribution: Ubuntu-eee, which has been renamed, of all things, Easy Peasy.
I am not sufficiently enamoured of this machine to spend time trying to optimize it further with this or that custom distribution (I don’t much like Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix; Eeebuntu’s Standard Desktop looks better but it’s still based on Ubuntu 8.10). I feel more inclined now simply to require than any machine I ever buy again works with Ubuntu with full hardware support, out of the box. There’s a market for this, as System76 and EfficientPC are demonstrating.
There is time for one, possibly two, more Ubuntu iterations before Windows 7 ships. Perhaps we’ll see a decent Linux-powered media tablet by then?
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