In case you were sleeping, Windows 7 officially landed today and is already a record breaker
Mr Postman arrived today with two shiny copies for me, but these didn’t count towards the record set in the UK where Windows 7 became Amazon’s biggest selling pre-order product of all time there.
I have a feeling it might go on to become the best selling OS of all time too. I already posted my comments on Windows 7 way back in Jan and Feb this year based on pre-release versions and, as you probably know from the overwhelmingly positive media reviews, it rocks. So what are you waiting for? Go and get yourself a copy to try it out already!
Neil Berman
Netflix & Windows Media Center meet, and it’s instant romance
Microsoft hinted about this one way back at CES in January and after a long wait it’s finally here. Windows Media Center now has direct Netflix integration and I’m lovin’ it.
The Netflix icon appeared in my Movies section this week and clicking it led to a one minute installation followed by instant gratification. Not much more to say apart from that it integrates seamlessly into the already superb Media Center interface. Will other platforms ever try to catch-up with what is so far and away the best media library experience out there?
Here’s the gallery. A warning for those of you not in the USA, this gallery may make you extremely jealous. Sorry about that, and here’s hoping Netflix goes international!
Neil Berman
Playing the waiting game
Are you hoarding cash waiting to drop some on a Windows 7 PC on October 22? So was I, until I realized it might make more sense to take a different strategy. I think buying a Vista PC right in the next month might be a great idea, and here’s why I’m not mad…
You are probably aware that if you buy a qualifying PC at the moment it might be eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade. Most manufacturers have a pretty clear definition of which of their systems are eligible, so you can check before handing over your hard-earned savings.
A FRESH START
Sounds like a schlep, after all this means installing a whole OS, and yes, it shouldn’t be considered lightly.
However most off the shelf PCs tend to ship with a boatload of bloatware, which few people want and tends to contribute to an overall performance degradation. Installing a fresh OS wipes all of this away and you get a clean system which is likely to perform better.
Normally OS upgrades are done well into the life of a computer, once many applications are all loaded on and working habits are well established. This can be disruptive to smooth running (experiences of upgrades to Snow Leopard and Vista are recent examples of this kind of user pain). But buying an eligible Vista PC in mid-October and going straight to a fresh Windows 7 a few days later sounds like a great plan to me as I probably wouldn’t have loaded on lots of software yet. Plus if you get the physical media it’s an added bonus in case you ever need to re-install.
GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE CHEAP
Deals on Vista PCs should start coming thick and fast as stores look to clear inventory ahead of October 22. Some refurbs may also be eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade, but you should be extra-vigilant when checking the eligibility of these systems. For example it does seem like some systems on Dell’s Outlet site are eligible, make sure you check before you buy though.
CURRENT PLATFORMS ON THEIR WAY OUT ARE STILL CAPABLE FOR MANY USES
The other factor creating downward pressure on current Vista PC inventory will be the increasing availability of the Intel Core i5, i7 and i7 Mobile platforms. It’s likely that HP, Dell and Acer and the wider industry will time many of these system releases with Windows 7, again pushing existing inventory prices south. Those current inventory Intel Core 2 and AMD Phenom/Turion based systems are still capable for what many people need on a day-to-day basis.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?
Ironically it seems, with Windows 7 right around the corner, there may have never been a better time to buy a Vista PC. Just make sure that what you buy is eligible for a free upgrade!
Neil Berman
Update to ‘MSI X340: Now priced-out by the MacBook Air?’ Acer throws an $899 curve ball
Wow this bout just got a whole lot more interesting. After initially pricing the X340 at $1,099 MSI are now listing it at $899…and several mainstream e-tailers are taking orders for $799. That kind of pricing makes the whole proposition turn on its head. Even as a refurb, the MacBook Air Rev A looks too expensive in this company.
On the downside for the X340, initial reviews have been mixed. Praise for its battery life and video performance have been tempered by concerns about chassis quality and a poor keyboard.
There is another curve ball mixing up the X340’s home run plans in the form of Acer’s recently released 13″ AS3935-6504. At 1.3lbs heavier than the X340, it offers a full power P7350 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB RAM, DVD-RW and the same Intel GMA4500MHD 1080-capable GPU. And the Acer looks and feels great.
At 2.9lbs and $799 the X340 would be my choice if running Windows 7 RC, but those needing more power or running the out-of-the-box Vista Home Premium I’d have to recommend the Acer for the greater horsepower. Price/performance-wise the MacBook Air needs to do more to move out third place in this contest. Especially as you could swap out the hard drives in the MSI and Acer with latest gen SSDs and still save megabucks compared to the MBAir.
Neil Berman
Neil Berman published by PMI
So my recent lacks of posts can be explained by:
a) An unhealthy addiction to Halo 3, tinkering with the Windows 7 Beta and wondering whether the BSG finale would be lame or earth shattering finding – we now know
b) Feeling 24/7 ecstatic that the iPhone & iPod Touch will be getting stereo bluetooth. Praise be! Can’t wait to see the wireless cans Apple will hopefully release…where will all those soon-to-be-unwanted white wires go?
c) Writing a Project Management paper which PMI published today
The correct answer is the absent d) All of the above.
Today PMI (Project Management Institute) published my paper entitled “The Project Manager’s Three Critical Factors in Career Development” on their website at www.pmi.org. The paper can be found in the Resources section in the Library under Leadership. Hope you enjoy reading it.
With that said I have been spending an unreasonable amount of time tinkering with the Windows 7 Beta and will post soon about the mainly good and not very much bad. Darn it I can’t believe BSG is over…bring on Caprica!
Neil Berman
Windows 7 Beta Review
I’ve been eager to give the Windows 7 Beta a workout following the demos I saw at CES.
My living room Media Center PC was an ideal candidate. It’s a three year old Pentium 4 which takes care of all our viewing, media and browsing needs on Windows XP Media Center 2005. Microsoft has claimed that Windows 7 is a streamlined OS capable of running on lower spec hardware than Vista, it’s time to see if that’s really true…
Test environment
For reference my PC is running a 2.93GHz P4 with 3GB DDR400 RAM, 500GB hard disk and a low end Geforce 7200GS. Not the most scintillating system by modern standards and probably equivalent to a $250 purchase these days from the refurbished inventory of e-tailers. The version of Windows 7 Beta I have is Build 7000. I’ll refer to it as W7B in this article.
Installations never go smoothly…or do they?
Installation was initially nerveracking but ultimately painless. Nerveracking because I had to split a live primary partition into two, to create a boot partition for the new OS. Painless because once Linux GParted had done its partitioning stuff, Windows 7 Beta installed in superfast time, restarting a couple of times and then it was done. I had backed up my XP partition to another drive just in case, but fortunately all went according to the masterplan and W7B automatically created a dual-boot environment for me. XP booted just like before and I so was all set for my W7B test.
Stopwatch at the ready
The first thing I noticed was a faster boot time. This could have been due to having a fresh install so I initially reserved judgement on that one. However now that three weeks has passed and I’ve installed everything I’m likely to for a while, the swift boot-up lives on. It’s not a life changing improvement but in the region of ten seconds faster than my XP boot sequence once all startup items have completed.
Sounding off
All navigation elements were very responsive: Aero, widgets and snap-to-edge all performed well with no lag. But then I noticed there was no sound. W7B had found my motherboard’s SPDIF output but did not configure it correctly. A quick internet search revealed the latest Vista drivers which duly solved the issue. In fact I now get proper Dolby transmission and far more signal reaching my amp, which means having to apply less gain within the amp therefore achieving a better signal-to-noise ratio than with my XP setup.
Taskbar implemented cum laude
Taskbar, oh glorious taskbar. So much has been written of thee already, what can I add? This really is a great addition in W7B, I can envisage how well it could work once the touch interface gets enabled on the full release. Seeing thumbnail representations of an application’s open windows is a fantastic browsing aid. Being able to jump into application functions directly from thumbnail menus takes everything a step further. Best of all, the thumbnails are dynamic representations so if you are waiting for a window to complete a certain action you can hover over its taskbar icon to view its progress in the thumbnail.
CPU and Resource Management
Having an older spec PC presented a good opportunity to see how W7B would cope with average resources. 
In the initial days following installation I noticed some frantic CPU and disk activity, which I traced to Windows Media Player cataloging my music and video collection. Once that was done, CPU activity became XP-like whilst memory allocation was definitely smarter.
Like Vista, W7B was able to address all 3GB of RAM whilst my 32-bit XP build was never capable of this. W7B also supports ReadyBoost so I threw in a 4GB SDHC card and dedicated the whole thing to the OS. That’s a cheap 4GB at $10, although ReadyBoost doesn’t make use of flash cards in quite the same way as conventional RAM. However the combination keeps my paging file to a minimum and I’ve not experienced memory crunches.
Windows Firewall
The versions of Windows Firewall built into XP and Vista were never taken too seriiously by the security fraternity due their inability to block outbound traffic. So whilst others had difficulty reaching your computer, your computer could reach others…which is a pretty big risk given the amount of nasty malware out there. The W7B Firewall changes all that with firewall rules configurable for incoming and outgoing traffic. This could seriously hurt the likes of ZoneAlarm and others, who have thrived to date on the weakness of Windows Firewall. I run ZoneAlarm on my XP partition, but I haven’t needed to download it for my W7B setup so far.
Internet TV & Media Center
Ever since the touchscreen demo of W7B Media Center I saw at CES, I’ve been aching to try out the integration of Internet TV in the EPG. Until now we’ve needed to open a browser, navigate to NBC’s website, find the news page, find the video page and then start streaming the news. W7B changes this by putting content from nbc.com (and many others) right into the EPG so it’s accessible from within Media Center with the remote control.
The demo of this looked awesome and it’s just as good in my living room. Content takes a little while longer to access than regular TV channels, but it’s a heck of a great feature and the integration is seamless. News, concerts, full episodes are all available and free to access with occasional advertisements for some content.
Snap-to-side
Throwing a widow to the side of the screen results in W7B automatically resizing it to fill half the screen. This makes comparing documents or images super easy. Throwing to the top maximizes the window. Again it’s easy to see how these small but useful enhancements will make life easier once the touch version gets released.
What’s needs work?
Hmmm…I haven’t found anything yet inherent in W7B which consistently fails. My sound sometimes cuts out following a video call, which could be a driver issue. My computer wakes from standby mode much more often than it did in XP, probably due to some strange service which I might not need to be running. Skype is not yet fully compatible. There’s also a registry fix out there for .msi installers which fail – I had an issue installing Office 2007 and when the installer failed W7B automatically downloaded the fix article from Microsoft’s knowledge base…finally intelligent context sensitive help has arrived. After following the instructions in the article to update the problematic registry entry the installer worked.
A game-changer for Microsoft?
Apart from that the whole experience has just worked superbly and I’m happily running W7B as my everyday environment now. The Beta version expires on August 1st, so perhaps this hints at the possible release timing of the full version. Remember that the release version will hopefully be touch-enabled, so that will be a whole new ball-game, and from what I’ve seen so far Microsoft could hit a home run with this one.
Neil Berman
theONbutton@CES – Windows 7 Beta new features hands-on
If you tried to download the Windows 7 Beta yesterday you may have been part of the huge demand which overwhelmed Microsoft’s download servers. Fear not, theONbutton is at hand with an exclusive video of many of the new Windows 7 Beta features to help you make up your mind…
Neil Berman
theONbutton
Turning the world on, one gadget at a time.
