Windoiws 7, going back to Vista is painful

What did I need Windows 7 for?

This is one sadder but wiser beaver after my brief affair with Windows 7 which is not ready for prime time. How easy it is to get distracted by a pretty face eh?

I’ve always been that way.

I took the original Windows beta home over Christmas to play with for three years in a row until Windows 3. Will, James and I became an official Windows for Workgroups Beta site in 1992 with a fun three-computer home network.

I bought a server from a friend in Halifax and installed Window NT beta over a weekend at Island Computer. I wanted to surprise everyone on Monday morning. “Hey what’s that new server doing on the network.” Collin Affleck, my # 2, was not amused.

Windows 7 is where Vista was two years ago: a brand new operating system with only limited driver and software support. Most people don’t need the pain of trying out new operating systems. I have gotten over my flirtation for awhile at least.

Let’s face it. Vista 64 SP1 on a decent machine smokes. My Dell XPS 630 Quad does 4 non-threaded or multi-threaded tasks at once without stalling. It will process HD video nicely. The best part is all my HP printers are now working after a year of agony in 2007 – 2008.

Back in the USSR

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrtnnLor2UM

Performance improvement

One of the cool things I got used in Windows 7 was Aero Glass. In the original Vista my computer felt like slow motion when I used it. Back in Vista 64, glass is faster than the classic interface which was my experience with Windows 7 as well. Go figure – pretty and faster all in one package.

Windows 7 does not speed up old machines. It’s the story of new wine goes in new bottles. The stories I read on putting it on old laptops are interesting. HP advised against putting it on my 2 year old laptop. The video and audio drivers were not compatible and they weren’t even thinking of updating them.

Windows 7 v. Vista - not much improvement in speed

What the CNET, PC World and ComputerWorld tests are showing is only modest improvement in speed on Windows 7. The final shipping version will no doubt have tweaks to improve things even more.

The largest difference was 4 points–102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. Our other two test machines showed similarly minor performance improvements: A Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop improved by 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop improved by 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7. PC World

Applications performance

Processing speed is only a small fraction of the time. I was wasting time everyday nursing print jobs, video editing and sound editing. Even getting the mail was torture some days. That’s not performance.

Outlook 2007 was balking at Windows 7. With Windows 7, Outlook 2007 refused to look at Windows Live or Hotmail. To make Outlook work, I had to disable all add-ins.

Adobe is very slow updating their product catalog. Adobe Premier Elements, Photoshop and Acrobat all balked with Windows 7. They work quite well in Vista 64 although 64-bit support doesn’t work in Vista. I found the Windows IE 8 64-bit would not load Acrobat or Flash files and there were no updates.

Adobe has major market share but it never seems state of the art. Back in 2006, they had cogent if not advanced arguments for avoiding 64 bit.

They remind me of Lotus and WordPerfect who dug their heels in when Windows was released in the early 90’s. There is no good argument for not moving forward with technology in my mind. That is, unless declining market share is a business goal.

Mackie firewire drivers were just delivered in February 2009. The Windows 7 drivers will probably arrive sometime in 2010.

Likewise, Sonar is now Vista 64-bit with the code and some but not all of the vst modules.

It takes time for software developers to catch up to Windows which in turn has to catch up to Intel and other chip manufacturers. Just because something is new does not mean it is better. It is exciting though.