Robert’s Ramblings

I wrote recently that Microsoft might be forced to stop selling Word because of a court ruling against them over an XML patent. Yesterday, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stayed the injunction against Microsoft pending an appeal. This means that Microsoft gets to continue selling Word until the appeal is adjudicated. I bet that they are reprogramming Word to make sure that they will not have to stop selling it should they lose the appeal. Either that, or they are negotiating a settlement. In either case, all the back-to-school shoppers can continue buying their student versions of Microsoft Office without any problem.

I also wrote that I was upgrading some Mac Minis to the new 10.6 (known as Snow Leopard) version of the Mac OS. The good news is that the upgrade was inexpensive and relatively painless. It took slightly over an hour to upgrade each Mac. I had no glitches or problems and can report that the Macs are working fine and appear slightly faster. I cannot quantify this for you, but it is the feeling I get from using them. One thing that I am disappointed in is that I have yet to get the Exchange synchronization to work. It does not recognize my server in the office using a direct LAN connection and it does not recognize it from home using a fast Internet connection on both ends. I have not given up on making it work. It is the reason I upgraded. I suspect that there is a filter or firewall in the way that is not allowing the Mac Mail traffic to reach the server. I have one of Alonso Consulting’s best techs working on it.

One thing that I have not written about that much is Windows 7. I think the reason for this is that Windows Vista has been such a disappointment. Vista was and is beautiful and also graceful in the way it works, but it is a resource pig that is unacceptably slow. I have used Vista on two Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 machines running at 2.4 Ghz with four cores and it sometimes took nearly half a minute to right click on a file to move or copy it. This is just the right click, never mind the copy and/or move which often did not work for inexplicable reasons. I found that a small Aspire netbook running Windows XP Home on a low powered Intel Atom processor often outperformed the faster machine running Vista. That is really pathetic performance for Vista.

Well, I am happy to report that I have upgraded three Vista machines to the Windows 7 and the performance has improved noticeably. The user interface for Windows 7 is still beautiful and elegant, but I found Vista’s more so. Maybe Window 7’s user interface will grow on me over time. I have found that devices work very well with the new operating system and that it was able to correctly identify everything connected to my machine. It shows even external hard drives by the name of the drive. For example, a My Book, shows up named as such in the “Devices and Printers” application. Other devices that are correctly identified are an Apple iPhone, various HP printers, the type of mouse, fingerprint reader and the monitor that I use. The version of Windows 7 that I installed is the Ultimate version and it is the final release that will be on sale in late October. I was able to download it from Microsoft because of Alonso Consulting’s  partner status with Microsoft.

 

Here is the bad news, it took over two hours for the upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate. There were a few Dell applications on my system that the upgrade advised me to uninstall. It also did not like the version of Adobe Encore, iTunes and Norton Ghost that I had on my system. This is unfortunate since I use, Norton Ghost for my automated backup every week. When it advised me to uninstall all these apps, I removed the Dell apps and left the others. I also took out a few others that I knew I did not use. I needed a restart after the uninstalls and forgot about it. After going through the system check for about 20 minutes, I was told that the upgrade could not be performed until I rebooted. I rebooted and ran through the same system check for a third time before experiencing over two hours of the upgrade process including a few automated reboots. The Mac upgrade also took over an hour, but it was a little smoother.

On a Toshiba laptop that I upgraded, I was informed that the upgrade could not continue because the Vista that was installed was not Service Pack 1. I had to download that, install it and wait over an hour during that process and then upgrade to Windows 7. That really made me angry. I think the upgrade should work with any version of Vista and with any service pack level. I was also not pleased that I could not upgrade from the 32 bit version of Vista to the 64 bit version of Windows 7. To make that move requires a complete reinstall. Both of the Q6600 machines will support the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and Vista, but were sold to me with the 32 bit version.

That is all the news for now. I will update this blog as I discover more about the Mac Snow Leopard and Windows 7 upgrades.