Bulent's IT Talk

Inserting the installation disk and entering the product code plus answering a few less important questions like time zone or keyboard layout are typically just the beginning of a Windows installation.

When Windows reports that the installation has been complete, it usually is when things just start. Endless Windows updates from the Internet, chipset drivers, sound card drivers, network card drivers and most importantly the graphics card drivers need to be installed. These additional installations take much longer than the installation of Windows itself.

My first Windows 7 installation was on my desktop PC. While arguing with my wife on daily issues, I didn’t figure out when exactly I entered the product key.

When Windows 7 restarted the PC for the last time, I rushed to the Control Panel for the damage control.

There were no missing drivers!

Not only all system, graphics, audio and network drivers were installed, Windows 7 found and installed drivers for my Logitech Sphere webcam, USB Bluetooth transmitter and on-board Wi-Fi controller as well.

Updating through Internet took less than five minutes – granted, Windows 7 is still new but remember the retail version was fixed a couple of months ago.

Basically, everything except the Wi-Fi connected HP j6410 printer worked – Shame on HP! Their web site reported that 64 bit Win7 drivers would be ready in a couple of MONTHS!

Second in line was my Asus N90 laptop. Though I bought it recently, it came with Vista Home Premium with an upgrade option to Windows 7 Home Premium.

As I run a small domain at home, home versions are no good for me. The upgrade path would have been to pay for shipping to get an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium and pay to use Anytime Upgrade to move on to Windows 7 Professional. I decided to start from scratch with a clean Windows 7 Professional installation.

Disk in, started to boot and good god, the installer detected wireless networks and asked me the WEP key to connect and download updated installation files. Amazingly enough, it did work when I entered the key!

A very long way from the “Insert a floppy disk with drivers to drive A: and press a key when ready” prompt, isn’t it? And I am talking about XP, not Windows 3.11.

Needless to say, the Asus driver CD is still in its sealed envelope. No devices were missing after the installation. NVIDIA drivers came through Windows Update though.

So far, both machines have been working without any crashes or any other hardware issues. It’s been over three days. I haven’t had any software compatibility issues either. MS-Office, Adobe reader, Flash Player and all other essentials are running just fine. Media Player Classic with its 64 bit Home Cinema version is happily playing all H.264 movies and most importantly World of Warcraft is back in life.

A very big credit goes to Microsoft. Never been easier.

Posted by bulent at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Windows 7 must be the easiest launch among all previous versions of Windows for the techies in Microsoft, while everyone in the marketing department was dripping cold sweat.

Allow me to elaborate.

Vista in marketing terms was a miserable failure.

Vista was released prematurely without proper driver support. Even simple printers, onboard sound cards or webcams didn’t work. Hardware requirements were artificially increased to help new PC sales which made the Vista upgrade very expensive for home users.

Because Vista was rushed, many features which would be visible to end-users were stripped off, the most unfortunate being the Windows (Longhorn) file system. This made Vista only a slightly better-looking XP, without anything more to offer.

On the corporate business side, things were much worse. Poor networking performance left corporate IT departments no choice but continue with XP/Server 2003. Spending a lot of money to upgrade user PC’s to run Vista for lower overall performance wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do.

Shortly, nobody had any compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista.

On top of all these the competition put the final nail in Vista’s coffin. Macs with OS-X stepped in at an unusually reasonable price tag for Apple and combined with Vista’s negative publicity, suddenly they began to sell more.

Vista's name couldn't be saved by making it better with service packs and hotfixes. A replacement was needed.

Interestingly enough, Vista's replacement was nothing else but Vista itself, only in a new package.

Vista was already and partly had become a very good system. It just had to be reverse engineered to drop its artificial marketing load. A reasonable memory usage, faster networking, faster boot times, less annoying UAC and XP compatibility for small businesses. Thanks to Vista, driver support was already in place. Again thanks to the Vista flop, developers had enough time to release betas to public and fix compatibility problems without much pressure from Marketing to launch the product.

In essence, all that techies had to do in addition was to write an improved task bar.

And they all enjoyed the easy and guaranteed success. Whatever they did couldn’t be worse than Vista at its launch anyway.

All Hail Windows 7!

Posted by bulent at 01:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)