In a week where Windows 7 has caused a lot of pain for some people, I’d like to kick them while their down by saying:
I bought an upgrade edition of Windows 7 Home Premium, copy and pasted the disk to an external hard drive in Windows Explorer, clean installed it on a netbook running Windows 7 RC and successfully activated.
I installed Windows 7 using every step that should have meant it wouldn’t work, but it worked perfectly. No problems what-so-ever. Maybe Microsoft is trying that little bit harder to please the Mac users…
ARGH! I know, it’s a Zune!
Don’t worry, I didn’t go out and buy one. I’m in Australia, I can’t. But I did download and try the software on Windows 7!
So here’s my short review: iTunes is better.
Why you ask? It’s completely the user interface’s fault. You know the iTunes interface as a simple, sleek and highly usable. It’s not cluttered, it’s very unified and everything is going to be where you expect no matter what part of the software you navigate to.
I think of the Zune Software like this: it’s fine. Yes it’s totally usable and I could live with it. It has all the features of iTunes (minus the apps and ringtones). It even has some features better than iTunes. The Now Playing window in the Zune Software is pretty cool. Using the Zune.net social network, it grabs data and photos (similar to the Last.fm artist profiles) of the artist you are listening to and turns them into a fantastic screensaver like display. It’s far superior to the iTunes visualizers.
The problem I have is that the Zune software window is like a canvas. Any time you click into a new section, the user interface is wiped away and replaced with something completely different. You click from the Artists tab to the Album tab, and everything moves around. This is incredibly frustrating! While the iTunes sidebar is always there, the Browser is always there whether you’re looking at podcasts, music or movies, Zune doesn’t follow a unified browsing UI! To be fare, it’s something that I could get used to. It’s just something I don’t want to.
The user interface is gorgeous, I’ll put that out there now. Great graphics, great animations. Herein lies the problem. The animations are infuriatingly bad. Not the animations themselves but the rendering. When ever you change tabs, the UI you were looking at glides gracefully out and the new UI glides gracefully in. But the text! Oh god the text! It’s terribly rendered! The animation is fairly short, but not instant. So when the text is blurry and unreadable for about two seconds while it re-renders properly, I feel like bashing my head against the keyboard. How, after three versions of the software can’t the font render properly?
iTunes doesn’t employ fancy animations or transitions, but it is fast and properly rendered! For me, I would gladly ditch the animations and UI of the Zune Software (which doesn’t even follow Microsoft’s design principle) for the ease of use, simplicity and unity of iTunes.
Plus, I have an iPhone. I have no choice.
Dual Booting Windows 7!
11:18 May 23rd, 2009 | Notes
I’ve been meaning to dual boot the Windows 7 RC for a while now, but never got around to it for one reason or another. So this morning I decided I finally would.
Let me tell you, it takes a whole freaking day.
I went into this foolishly thinking that it would take a hour, two hours at max. Boy was I wrong. I began by clearing out my Mac of all the crap I’ve acumulated over the years to get me 50GB of space. I planned to devote just 20GB to 7, because I won’t need that much space. With the space cleared out, I ran Boot Camp Assistant a clicked partition.
“Partitioning Failed”
Crap. I eventaully learned that my drive was too fragmented to create 20GB of continuous space. Here’s where I jumped to conclusions: the Mac doesn’t have defragmentation software built in, therefore the Mac doesn’t get fragmented/it defragments on the fly.
WRONG!
What!? My drive is more fragmented than the chinese government!? NO! How do I fix it?!
Searching around the internet I found a few programs that claimed to defragment my hard drive… for $20. Since I don’t have a card that works on the internet, that idea went out the toilet. So I did the only logical thing, reinstall OS X. It took hours to get my Mac back to it’s original state. Wiping the drive, installing Leopard, partioning the hard drive, migrating my Time Machine backup, installing over a gigabyte of patches. THEN, I installed Windows 7.
The amount of driver problems I had was fairly minimal. The only big problem I had was getting the right driver for my graphics card. Windows Update got it right, then the Boot Camp Assistant installed another driver over the top of it and broke it! System Restore, Unintall Driver, Install Updated Driver.
OK done!
Finally, after about 10 hours I have Windows 7 installed on my Mac. Despite all the pain of going through all of this crap, some more good stuff came out of it. I have a partition I can install anything to, I have Windows 7 installed (duh) and it has speeded up my OS X install by quite a bit!
In the end, all I really have to show for it is that I have a pre-release version of Windows on my Mac.
I feel unclean…
Update on the Australian Student… Netbooks
5:56 May 14th, 2009 | Notes
The latest news from the Department alludes to some big plans by Microsoft and the future of this whole scheme in New South Wales!
Just an update from my ‘sources’. The Student Lenovo Netbooks will be running Windows 7 Release Candidate! Well I can only presume it’s the release candidate, because they wouldn’t be running the full version right? Or would they? There is no doubt that the push for the RC to be put on these computers could only have come from Microsoft themselves. That means that the Education Department must have made a deal with the folks from Redmond (well, the folks from Redmond, in Sydney). It would seam that Microsoft have most likely promised the Education Department the full version on it’s release.
But wouldn’t that mean reinstalling thousands of copies of Windows 7 on computer spread all over the state? Yes it would. Here is where I can draw some interesting conclusions. There is no way that Microsoft would push out the RC on thousands of laptops if it meant a huge logistical nightmare in the near future. The same can be said of the Education Department. Neither of them would want huge hassle of installing new operating systems a few months after they handed out the laptops. In that case, it is not a big jump of logic to assume that the Windows 7 Release Candidate is closer to the final version than we might think. What if the final version only meant a small patch to the release candidate? What if I and many other people with the release candidate would only need buy a product key online, hit Windows Update and be running the final Windows 7 in a few minutes?
From my perspective, there is the only one posibility. If Microsoft wanted each and every student laptop running Windows 7, but knew that it wasn’t to be realeased for several months, what would they do? They wouldn’t install XP or Vista then send out Windows 7 a few months later, as I said previously, too much of a headache. What else would they do? They would send out the release candidate, knowing it was a small task to update to the final release.
It raises the possibility, the Windows 7 RC is very close to final release.
Update on the Australian Student Laptop Plan
7:51 Apr 28th, 2009 | Notes
Heard anything about the Federal Government’s student laptop plan recently? Neither had I.
But thanks to my contacts at the department of education I can confirm some of the specs about the laptops to be handed out to year 9 New South Wales students later this year! Rumors were flying as to what would be installed on the laptops. Such rumors contained Windows 7, Adobe CS4 Master Collection and Office 2007 Professional!
If that was the standard of laptop the government were going to hand out then I would gladly drop back two years and repeat year 9. Unfortunately, no such dream machine is to exist. Today I discovered that the laptops would not run Windows 7, but Windows XP. They would not contain Adobe CS4 Master Collection, rather Photoshop Elements. No Office 2007, instead no mention of Office at all.
What promised to be a machine to “meet the high power needs of students in the 21st century” has turned out to be machine teetering on the dawn of the century, rather then deeply engrossed in it.
Disappointing really. Lucky that I was never going to receive one in the first place I suppose. I’ll post any new information as I get it.
