Windows

Windows 7 Not A Fabulous Experience For All

Posted by on Nov 3, 2009 | 10 Comments

Gnomie Mutilated Messiah writes:

Hey, Chris! Hope you’re doing well!

I’ve been watching your videos about Windows 7 and I’ve seen a lot of praise for it. With all the chatter going around about how “Windows 7 is fantastic,” I decided to borrow a friend’s DVD and install it with the 30-day timer running (Home Premium 32 bit) and give it a test drive on my PC.

While I liked some features and the fact my Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle (Broadcom chip) actually worked great with Windows 7 over Windows Vista, I ended up going back to Vista! (Yes, I know! Shock! Horror!)

My reasons:

  • OpenAL and ALchemy didn’t work even remotely correctly. Native OpenAL sound games had next to no effects — if any at all — and ALchemy just didn’t want to play at all. Unfortunately, knowing Creative, I won’t see an OpenAL update for my system for quite some time.
  • Gadgets were driving me mad. The resolution kept changing on my monitor when I came back to the desktop and, even sometimes while just booting up, icons would move around the screen there’s no lock feature
  • The speaker icon in the corner always seems to claim at bootup that the audio service isn’t running when it is.
  • Games Explorer was a great addition to Windows Vista. I liked the one place for all my links and information, etc. But as we know in gaming sometimes you have to edit a link or add a menu item (examples: add -console command to a game to get the console up or add the Add-on folder for World of Warcraft), but the ability to do all that was taken away with the Windows 7 version.
  • No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get two installers running from both my DVD drives running at the same time. It’s not like an installshield error, but just a complete lockup. I was attempting to install World of Warcraft in my Optarc DVD drive and I put my Penumbra collection DVD in the Samsung DVD drive and the installer would not run. Then as soon as the WoW installer completed and exited, it popped up. I’ve always been able to do dual installing as long as they weren’t both installshield based since Windows 2000. It’s weird to me that now I can’t.

Windows 7 did reduce my bootup times by about 15 or so seconds over Vista and even installed on my PC faster, but I’m back to Vista for now. I’m sure I’ll buy Windows 7 when service pack 1 hits, but I’m in no hurry.

  • Kpalsm

    I’ll post my thoughts on your issues with Windows 7. These are all while using the 32-bit version of various beta builds.

    The first point you made about OpenAL and ALchemy I don’t know what to say about, because I used ALchemy for World of Warcraft and it worked just fine for me.

    Never had a single issue with Gadgets or screen resolution changing. The only time my screen resolution changes is when I play a game which ONLY runs in 640×480, and my desktop icons are always where I left them when it resizes. Don’t know why you had problems with this.

    Never had any issues with the audio service claiming to not be running. In fact I had more problems with this in Vista Ultimate than I have in Windows 7, and I’m still only using the RC. In Vista the bootup sound wouldn’t play because the audio service in fact was not running until the volume icon would pop up, because Vista took forever to recognize my sound card and initialize it.

    I haven’t really been gaming very much lately, but when I was (using Vista) I never used the Games Explorer, although my roommate downstairs running Vista does use it. I always thought it was silly since you can just hit the Start button on your keyboard, type the first word of a game and it pops up in the search function, then hit enter and the game opens. Very simple. Haven’t needed to use special command line commands for a game since Counter-Strike 1.3, back before Steam existed, to run the game windowed.

    Finally, for the two installers at once thing, everything I’ve learned about computers since I started using them (relatively short time ago, since 2000 with Windows ME) tells me that running anything while an installer is running could cause problems, so running two installers at once sounds like a horrible idea. The fact that you evidentally can’t run two at once in Windows 7 sounds like more of a “foolproofing” mechanism; that is it’s done on purpose to try and avert people doing it and causing problems with one or both installs.

    All in all, my experience with Windows 7 has been VERY positive; it seems to me like you may have had a bum install? It’s much faster than Vista, more stable, even more compatable with things (hardware wise, perhaps not software, yet), and at least to me, is just plain prettier. I’ve been using beta versions since it went totally public with build 7000, upgrading at every subsequent build, and I have no issues with anything right up to the RC, so I’m not even going to bother buying the RTM until I have to, when the beta key expires in March 2010, or until I build a new computer, whichever comes first. It’s rock solid and I like it much more than Vista (which I ditched for XP after buying this laptop in 2007, by the way).

  • Kpalsm

    Oops, didn’t realize until after I posted my comment that this was just an email to Chris Pirillo so addressing my comment to Chris wasn’t appropriate (I didn’t even notice it was Chris who posted it). Other than some incorrect addressing my points still stand though! I haven’t been this happy with a Windows OS since 98. 98 was a good Windows OS. Fast, stable, has Plug And Play support, everything just worked with it as long as you had the driver, because any windows driver at that point was built for 98 or an OS directly compatable with 98. I honestly think that Windows 7 is the new 98 (perhaps not quite as good as 98 was but a lot better than anything else since, save perhaps 2000)!

  • dAmAgEd GoOdS

    While I agree that the initial release of Win7 does have a few minor kinks to work out, the overall benefit in speed and ease of use make it a clear choice for me. I myself have done several installs and have not seen the kinds of problems MM is describing. Waiting for the first SP may be to some benefit in that kind of case for sure. I may point out though that in my years of experience wth Win PCs, though it may work sometimes, dual installing is never a good idea.

  • http://www.computer-help.net Davis McCarn

    While I am sure there will be numerous gotcha’s (like no drivers for Intel 8xx graphics chips), the lurking one is the new Libraries feature. For the first time since the inception of MS-Dos, there is a new type of directory entry to deal with and, far more importantly, Libraries are only pointers to the files true location(s) meaning multitudes of users with no backups as they won’t even know that the file is not where they think it is.
    Yikes!

  • http://secondvarietygames.com/ shihonage

    I’ve said it for a while – Vista SP2 is far more stable and migration-friendly than Windows 7. It’s got all the core improvements of 7, plus the ability to use the old XP UI design, color themes, and you can upgrade to it from XP.

  • Douglas Hornick

    I bought Windows 7 Pro last week after having played with the RC’s and I’m happy with it. I have not messed with the gadgets yet so I have not been able to confirm any resolution changes but the other two things MM mentions, the icons moving around and the audio service, I can confirm. It’s not a show stopper but I like to have my icons stay where I put them and not depend on arranging them by type, name, size or date. I’m sure these two things can be sorted out by the first service pack. I’ve noticed that Skype will sometimes knock Aero down to basic so I will lose the tiny windowing effect of the task bar icons, a feature that I love and have grown to depend on. Once Skype is shutdown Aero comes back. Only seems to happen sometimes though so I’m not sure what in particular will set it off.

  • http://www.ronknights.com/ Ron Knights

    I always love a review when someone “borrowed software from a friend.”

    Translation: I pirated a copy!

    In my own opinion, the reasons for not liking Windows 7 are pretty lame.

    Of course, I don’t play games.

    I don’t use a lot of gadgets.

    And I’ll never try to run 2 installers at once.

  • http://www.timhampton.com Tim Hampton

    I upgraded my XP laptop to Win7 Ultimate using a BizSpark subscription, and I haven’t experienced any unfixable problems with the OS. There was one snafu where I needed to search out the sound driver because the Microsoft driver (which was newer), didn’t see the on-board sound card. Other than that it’s worked like a charm. I wish it was powerful enough to run Aero, but alas the video card is not stout enough.

    By and large, Win7 is a huge improvement over Vista. I think Microsoft finally found their lucky number with Windows 7.

  • BIGg

    I love my Vista. No problems at all. Not with software or hardware. Legacy or new.
    Networking and wireless are so easy my wife set hers up herself (those who know her can’t believe it).
    My boss was afraid of Vista after all the horror stories, but he’s had no problems. Even his old scanner installed itself.
    IT departments had every reason to be leery, but home users?
    I’ll probably skip 7 unless something happens to my laptop.

  • Backlin

    While I agree that installing more than one thing can be quite dangerous, I don’t agree that having anything else going on in the background while installing something is all that bad, especially when dual cores are mainstream.

    And I was a little annoyed by the Games window as well, but I can always go back to using search or the Start Menu. I’ve been doing it that way for years, it won’t take much to go back.