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Moving from 32 bit Windows XP on 2003 hardware to 64 bit Windows 7 in a 2010 box

2-19-10


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BACK to eMachines ET1331G-03W User's Log...

Although my life in general isn't going all that great, my new PC has been working well so far. My main gripes have to do with really dumb changes Microsoft seems to have made to its software interfaces, which tend to slow you down, frustrate, and annoy you to no end.


Luckily, not all the changes are for the worse.

Near lightning quick on and off states

Windows 7 shuts down with blinding speed compared to Windows XP. Pretty much just as fast as Ubuntu 9.10 (only Ubuntu still asks for shut down confirmation first, unlike Windows 7).


Windows 7 also boots faster than Ubuntu 9.10. Although that particular comparison might not be a fair one, with my judgment being based on Ubuntu running on a 1 GB Compaq PC from 2003, and Windows running on a 2010 PC with 6 GB RAM.

Impressive background processing power

The eMachines hardware thankfully has the power to allow W7 to index my 6-8 GB archive of net research in the background as I surf or do other things, with just a barely perceptible effect on the PC's performance.


W7 has been disk churning at the index job for a couple weeks now. I have no idea how long it'll take to completely index my archives-- but I've been compiling those since the early to mid-1990s. I've wanted to have those files at my searching fingertips for over a decade, but no computer I owned was ever up to indexing them in a practical manner: no Mac, and no PC. Not even over several generations of both platforms.


Plus, I easily add around a thousand new URLs and dozens of newly saved web page files to the archive every week. It used to be hundreds of new page files per week, but I've cut back on those to rely more on the URLs, as URLs seem to have become a little more reliable than they were in the early days of the net, plus I dislike citing a dead URL as a reference, even if I do still possess a saved copy of the original information. So once the URL goes dead, I'm less likely to include its page as a reference anywhere.

Impressive flaws in Windows 7's user interface (OUCH!)

I finally figured out how to turn off W7's damnable transparent window borders, which can make it tough to read your window names. Microsoft's OS X envy is a real pain for people like me. W7 also forces long experienced Windows users to look all over the damn place for menus and menu items which used to be easily found. Instead of being plainly labeled “File” or “Edit” or whatever, now menus often are only marked by some inscrutable icon, so you've got to play games checking out the icons like one of those gambling scams where a ball is hid under one walnut shell out of three. Sheesh!


If I wanted to play where's the damn menu option, I'd be using OS X.


To make interface matters worse, instead of all the menus being towards the left side of the top window bar, now some are on the left, and some are on the right. Damn it!


And some downright vital menu options have disappeared altogether, from at least some applications: like Undo. Yes: Undo is gone from WordPad---


UPDATE: Well, turns out I was wrong about Undo being removed. But damn if it didn't take me weeks to find it! I opened WordPad for maybe the 200th time since purchasing this machine, just to make sure I was being accurate here, and noticed that (on the left) there's a second menu bar row above the first in the app. What the hell!? This second menu bar is actually in the same part of the window which normally contains the file name. And of course the options are via icon rather than text.


Apparently the reason I never saw it before was that Windows 7's stupid window transparency was turned on by default, and so that area was usually blacked out or faded out, making the icons virtually invisible. And having a high res LCD display helped make it tough to see, too.


I wonder what other new discoveries I might make, now that I've turned off the ridiculous window transparency that's turned on by default in Windows 7? END UPDATE.

Impressive 32 bit software compatibility in 64 bit Windows 7 (Nice!)

Early on I was concerned about finding free software to use in this 64 bit operating system similar to what I'd used in the 32 bit XP. I'd read something about W7 offering an XP compatibility mode for that-- but then discovered that virtual environment is not exactly part of the level of W7 which came with my PC-- but an extra cost option. Yikes!


But apparently you only need that XP mode for particular items-- not nearly all. For so far every 32 bit program I've downloaded and installed appears to be working fine. That's a huge relief-- because the selection of free 64 bit apps for W7 seems sparse indeed at this early date.


However, that's not to say W7 runs old 32 bit programs perfectly. No, it sequesters them away from 64 bit programs somehow-- holds them sort of at arm's length, in regards to the operating system. So the apps basically work; but they often won't work as seamlessly for you as 64 bit versions would. Especially in terms of file management.


In Open Office for example, the 'Save as' dialog box won't offer up the existing file's name as a default for you to edit, as I was accustomed to doing across the board in Windows XP. This can be pretty damned inconvenient.


I noticed a similar problem in Ubuntu 9.10.


Too, W7 seems to ignore 32 bit apps for inclusion in the pop up menu allowing you to choose what app to open a file with. That means I can't open my 32 bit HTML Kit files from my folder windows, but must instead do so from inside HTML Kit itself. I find this fairly annoying and a definite productivity reducer.

I want to be cautious regarding software which breaks the rules

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a program I used a lot in XP, and really need to continue using in W7. However, no way would I try installing my old APE 4 on this W7 machine. Because APE is definitely not your normal 32 bit app. I believe Adobe uses its own virtual memory scheme in APE: that is, Adobe ignores Windows' normal system, in preference to using its own proprietary measures, apparently for better performance in graphic editing.


While that may make for faster responses to users, it also makes for greater risks to your machine, as evidenced by APE going 'ape' on my Windows XP hard drive months back-- an event which seemed to be one of the major factors leading to the ruin of that machine-- and my need to migrate to this newer one.


Yes, I was woefully short of RAM on that older PC, possessing much less than 1 GB. And I was editing a very large image in paint/bitmap terms. And those two things combined to bring about disaster one day.


But I fail to understand why Adobe programmers couldn't build in safeguards for that sort of thing, and simply inform me that the image was too large for the resources at hand-- rather than trash my hard disk. I've written graphics programs myself in decades past, and see no good reason not to have the software compare available resources against the desired action at strategic points in editing, and abort such moves before they trash someone's hard drive.


I also know that leaving out such occasional comparisons speeds up the software. So it seems Adobe believes the extra speed is worth the hard disk calamity risk.


So anyway, although I now have more than six times the RAM I did before, no way I'm willing to try APE 4 on my W7 PC. But I have to have image editing capability. And last time I tried Gimp, it crashed too easily and frequently. Plus, I've racked up many hair-pulling hours in APE, and so have some skill with it now. So I found a good deal on APE 8 and ordered it, for about $50.00.

The Windows 7 email client mess

I've ended up sticking with Windows Live Mail for a while, due to Mozilla Thunderbird's appalling lack of ease of use. That greatly reduced my confidence in the app across the board, including in regards to security.


However, the more I use Live Mail, the less I like it. It too suffers from the same screwed up user interface as WordPad, only worse. It makes me really miss the hell out of Outlook Express.


Believe it or not, you cannot save messages as separate text files in Live Mail. I just now opened it again to make sure I hadn't missed an extra row of menus somewhere due to the default window transparency of W7, like I had in WordPad. But no, I hadn't.


Yes, you can save messages in whatever proprietary database format Microsoft uses for Live Mail, but not outside of it. And in XP's Outlook I routinely saved many messages as plain text so that I could back them up on other disks, and not lose everything if/when my email client went belly up (or my whole PC did). I also liked saving some messages separately due to them being unusual items, like info about online orders, or tech details about new web sites I was setting up.


Now though, in Live Mail, I have to select all, copy, and then paste to WordPad or elsewhere to save a message outside of Live Mail, in yet another productivity sucking change between Windows XP and Windows 7.


Live Mail has already convinced me NOT to enter my full list of email contacts into it, but rather into my web-based Yahoo mail instead (well, Live Mail also had help on that point from all the desktop PC thrashing about I've had to do lately, with my XP imploding, my ill-fated trial of Ubuntu, etc.).


So in email clients too, Microsoft seems to have wanted to emulate OS X with Windows 7. For OS X has plenty of problems in regards to its default email client as well. For instance, my mom's Snow Leopard update killed her Mail app's capacity to send mail, and it appears only some future bug fix from Apple can enable it again. But apparently Microsoft is hellbent on not letting Apple lead the way in such mediocrities!


I'm looking forward to UN-installing Live Mail, and all the useless other junk Microsoft made me take with it. But first I'll have to work out an alternative way to access that particular non-web-based email address...

More essential software trials and tribulations

Just days back I finally got around to installing an FTP app in W7, for use in updating my web site. In XP I used CoreFTP, which seemed to work pretty well except for those times you tried to download a couple thousand files at once with it (e.g., an entire web site). But I felt compelled to try something different this go round, and so am giving Filezilla a trial run. I surely like the notion of free open source software, even if few examples of it have so far worked as well as I hoped when tested (Firefox good; Thunderbird bad; Gimp and Ubuntu OK to a point, but still woefully inadequate; Blender possibly fantastic, but with a sheer vertical learning curve...).


Filezilla set up pretty easily and all-- but has you drag and drop files from one window pane to another for initiating transfers. That seems needlessly problematic for cases where you might be moving a 1000 files though. Hmmm.


I'm badly needing an app which would streamline and automate many web site editing chores for me, as well as help me use CSS without having to know how to do it manually. Dreamweaver is supposed to be the top dog for this, but it costs quite a bit. Plus is probably vast overkill for what I want and need, too. I've already tried several free apps billed as being possible substitutes for Dreamweaver-- but boy, do they suck!


The dearth of viable substitutes doesn't do anything to relieve my needs/wants though. So I did more research. And found that Microsoft has been working on a Dreamweaver substitute of its own, going on four versions now (the fourth I assume being presently in development).


So now I'm looking for a good deal on something called Expression Web 3.

One last interface gripe from someone who has been using computers for over 30 years now...

By the way, here's one more annoyance with Windows 7: even here in 2010, well into the 21st century, a human being still can't properly name a computer file grammatically speaking: many perfectly ordinary characters are still banned, like colons and question and quotation marks.


I often would vastly prefer the ability to include a colon or question/quotation mark (etc.) in a file name, but I'm simply not allowed to. It's been like this by and large since the very first personal computers I believe. There's been some differences between Macs and PCs from time to time on file name conventions, but usually not large ones. Except for the years when Macs allowed you file names around 31 characters long, while PCs only allowed 5 or 8 I think. Wow! It took Microsoft an amazingly long time to catch up to Apple on that one thing. Now of course, both platforms allow you longer names than 31 characters I believe. But certain punctuation marks are still forbidden (sigh).

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Copyright © 2010 by J.R. Mooneyham. All rights reserved.