Wombat Diet

First impressions of two upgrades:

Windows 7 Professional

After my completely unsuccessful Windows 7 upgrade of a Vista Media Center PC (last post) I tried again with my Lenovo X200 laptop.

This was an altogether more satisfactory experience, eventually — I’m posting this using Windows 7.

I couldn’ t use one of my discounted Windows 7 upgrades on the X200 because it was running Windows Vista Business, and this couldn’t be downgraded to allow Windows 7 Home Premium to be installed. There was nothing for it but to dust off my student email account (I haven’t graduated yet; that’s next month) and register for a £30 upgrade to Windows 7 Professional.

Just getting hold of the software was a hassle.

First, I had to register an ac.uk email address to which an offer would be sent.

The registration site didn’t work from home. I went to the university and it worked from there (so, IP address based restrictions were in place). Digital River, collecting money for Microsoft, then declined my credit card and said I wasn’t eligible to upgrade. I looked again at the conditions and wondered if it had divined that the Windows XP-based university computer I was using wasn’t capable of running Windows 7 — which was one of the conditions. So, I went home again, knowing I had the link to the online store in my inbox. With any luck I could continue.

When I got home I found that the transaction had completed after all, despite Digital River’s announcement to the contrary. I could now download a download tool, and get the files needed to create a Windows 7 install disc. Creating such a disc wasn’t strictly necessary but it seemed like a good idea given some of the problems reported by those trying to use downloads directly.

This should have been simple. I had already found this blog post setting out what to do.

To create an ISO file (i.e., an image that can be burned to a disc) I had to find some proprietary but free software that seemed to have been removed from the web at Microsoft’s behest. When I finally tracked down a copy I then found that the instructions at the post above were incorrect and I didn’t immediately discover a correction posted in the comments. By the time I had a bootable DVD I was down two hours, not counting time spent purchasing and downloading. (Paying for a physical disk seemed so … old fashioned — hah!)

I updated Vista and backed it up, then I ran the Windows 7 upgrade. It took another couple of hours.

This time I had the immense advantage of being able to run a new version of Lenovo’s ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) tool afterwards and get Windows 7 compatible updates of numerous hardware drivers.

Lenovo’s TVSU tool is something I only learned about and appreciated after I’d acquired my ThinkPad. It is to hardware drivers and vendor-specific tools what what Windows Update is to Windows. It’s one of those things that once experienced changes your expectations of how things ought to be.

As far as I know, Lenovo is unique in making it possible to keep device drivers and related software, including the BIOS, updated so easily. Besides Apple that is.

When the dust settled, here’s what I found; again, these are first impressions:

• The Windows 7 update had blown away the Vista / Ubuntu dual boot arrangements for my laptop.
• My desktop wireless gadget which indicated the signal strength and ID of available network access points was also gone. I replaced it with the functional but less attractive Wireless Network Meter from addgadget.com.
• The speed of accessing network storage was dramatically better than Vista.
• I like the Windows 7 user interface changes.
• For now I’ve lost the ability to recover the machine from a local partition using the blue ThinkVantage button, since this partition still contains the Vista boot media and installation kit.
• So far, the only application that has failed to work is ReadyNAS Remote, a utility that allowed me to open a secure connection to my network storage from anywhere on the Internet and to work as if I was locally connected.

Most of what needs to be done now is Lenovo-related housekeeping. I deleted all of the ThinkPad and ThinkVantage applications that were recommended for removal from Vista and I haven’t seen replacements for all of them yet. For example, the ThinkVantage Active Protection System park the disk drive heads whenever a fall is detected.

The elapsed time was half a day least.  Even allowing for multi-tasking, e.g., during the backup before the update, this kind of upgrade is still both a bit of a chore and a somewhat risky activity.

However, it feels good to be shot of Vista (one down, several to go). Vista was a necessary evolutionary stage for Microsoft, if not its customers.

Ubuntu 9.10

As a background activity I upgraded my wiki-box from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Coincidentally, it had just become available.

This time I decided on a clean install as I wished to change the default file system from ext3 to ext4. The applications and data I had were easily backed up. One of Linux’s greatest strengths is the extent to which it permits keeping these things separate from the operating system by means of a /home folder which can be backed up, moved to another disk, and left alone by an operating system update.

The entire operation from downloading Ubuntu 9.10, burning it to a bootable DVD and installing it took not much more than an hour. I expected the download to be slow. It wasn’t. The installation went smoothly, with only one minor issue:

• Once again I had problem with my ATEN KVM switch about (which I have blogged before) causing my Samsung 181T monitor not to be detected correctly. This time there was no Xorg.conf file to edit. And so I discovered that that rigamarole is now optional (Google Ubuntu 9.10 missing xorg.conf for enlightenment). Restoring the old file solved the problem.

All in all, the installation could hardly have been quicker or easier. The improvements in Ubuntu 9.10 have been extensively covered elsewhere (here’s a nice write-up hat includes a short video of  a from scratch installation; and here are instructions for an in-place upgrade).

The moment I liked best was seeing my little cloud icon in the top panel come to life, connecting me to my files on Ubuntu One and then resyncing them. Now I can keep all my contact data in my personal cloud if I wish to, free of charge (Apple charges $60/yr for MobileMe).

Reflection

Windows 7 was the first Microsoft operating system I have installed which I purchased online, downloaded and could have installed as clean install. But it was hardly a frictionless process.

The nominally high cost of Windows 7 and Microsoft’s elaborate schemes to protect it and to segment the market every which way begin to seem like a Maginot line. I think Microsoft should practically give Windows 7 away and charge for cloud services and collect revenue from an online application store. Perhaps they’re headed in that direction and just collecting rents en route while they can, but it doesn’t look like it… yet.

Consider the greatest difference between Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate: the latter can provide an additional level of security through volume encryption. This functionality is included in Ubuntu, at no cost.

Likewise, the difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional: the latter can join a Microsoft network. Ubuntu will do it for free. The same is true of the other differences (network backup and, with additional free software, running virtual Windows XP machines).

Microsoft could hardly be more traditional in its thinking.

Microsoft still has many things going for it, of course, but Ubuntu’s rise has, more and more, a feeling of inexorability. I will be very surprised if Microsoft converts a large number Windows XP users to Windows 7 in the next year.

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