Well, I said I’d post a few screen grabs showing the subtle changes between vista and win7, here they are.
First up is the Solution Centre
The usual incessant blast of messages have been bundled up into a single system tray icon. Also, that little translucent rectangle next to the time is a “show desktop” quick button.
Then we have the streamlined desktop settings
In here the alignment of multiple monitors is now done by dragging and dropping, it also gives hint to one of the windows quick key combos - something of which many still remain unknown by most users (win+e for explore, win+r for run prompt, win+l for a quick lock of the PC and win+f for the search dialogue being 4 extremely useful combos). A very minimalist interface.
The interface has been cleaned up..
Since there is no longer a difference between the interface when opening and exploring, they have finally tidied away the two options and turned them into a single one. Win7 is full of these little cleanups that vista was just missing.
Tablet edition is basically cooked into the system.
Seems to be quite odd in that it’ll pick up words from mindless scribbles :S It must have an inbuilt bablefish for gibberish!
Here’s the contents of a few messages as I was streaming my installation of Windows7, which I had to cut short the streaming because my GF entered the room and I respect her privacy. Just as I had people picking up the stream after my flatmate got it linked on EVE Radio .
Sorry for those who were cut off so soon!
urgh.. come on microsoft, why can’t I delete a dynamic drive from the setup? do I *really* have to go into another instance of windows to do it? BAD FORM
ok, after some jiggery and pokery with storage and moving data across I’m now *finally* moving with installing win7. Just got the 45 min copy of files to wait now :/
well, after having a play around with the settings and a nose about media centre, the damn thing packed in on me and wouldn’t boot back up again. I think it’s more down to a buggered HDD than the OS. Will explore tonight.
Had plenty of problems, primarily with the fact that I only had sata hdd’s at hand but the machine I was using didn’t have onboard sata. Sadly, the only sata card I have is an Adaptec 1210S which never had vista drivers built and win7 doesn’t have any native support.
I then tried a HDD from an old system, a tiny 10gb and was rejected “windows requires 12gb of free space”.
Found another, but was a dynamic disk and just like vista it refuses to deal with it. This is quite a bad failing really, there should be no reason why you can’t convert it within the setup interface! I had to boot to another OS in order to sort it out before win7 setup (winPE) would even accept the HDD.
To anyone with influence at MS, please get this looked at!
I will be continuing this tonight, as I try to resurrect the damn thing and grab some screenshots. One thing I did notice is that all the changes are very subtle right now.
I know the major interface changes have been omitted right now, but there are still plenty - something I noticed immediately is that the “explore” option when right clicking [my] computer has been eliminated because it is all one view - which it has been since vista.
The display settings interface has been tidied up a bit, I really wish I had got screen caps before it died. It looks a bit more friendly to less experienced users.
Win7 seems to accept vista drivers for hardware quite happily, so maybe the driver hell won’t be as pronounced with this version. I had my sound card (ADI onboard) and Hauppage TV card (PVR350) running quite happily from drivers downloaded from their respective sites.
Windows picked up its own drivers for the 6600GT I was using for the video card, I used an fx5200 when installing it. Wanted to see how it would handle a vid card swap. No problems.
Something I didn’t notice was the performance scoring system, it just let me go straight into the aero style without having to redo anything. Whether this will be in the final version or not remains to be seen.
Media Centre is very usable, with some tweaks here and there - teletext buttons onscreen was a nice touch that I don’t remember being there before. It seems to have lost the double right click to go back to the EPG for some reason.
I just plain didn’t have enough time to go through it as it crashed in media centre and wouldn’t let me get to the task manager before it rebooted on its own and complained about the boot device, halting my playtime.
Also, if you’re thinking about running the beta win7 in virtual PC don’t bother. The VM additions software will blue screen on you and stop it from booting. On the plus side, I got to see the recovery wizard that will run through a diagnosis for you and then spit out its recommendation - in this instance it suggested I do a rollback using system restore, don’t know if it will always suggest that or if it can do other things too.
Expect some screenshots in the near future, until now it’s text only
We all hear plenty of complaints about Windows and how Microsoft has dropped the ball of late; coupled with the traditional bitching over the multitude of flaws in their OS or shit that is just plain missing. But, it’s funny how you never hear anywhere near as many people making suggestions on how to address this!
Something I have mentioned in the past is that active directory has many capabilities that could really improve the home experience. I’ve also pointed out the missed opportunity where MS could have shipped a super wizardised version of active directory with WHS that would have brought many of these great features that I have been using for the past 6 or 7 years now from behind the scenes of an IT department into the home of the average person.
And I really mean super wizardised, of course there can be an advanced mode as well for those who are used to the normal interface and know what they’re doing.
I’ll be randomly highlighting capabilities of AD that I believe could enhance the windows experience and admins have been using to control those pesky users all these years.
This time it’s roaming profiles.
With the release of OSX 10.5, the apple world got a taste of roaming profiles, only it was tethered to the .mac system - which gives the added bonus of it working on any mac with a net connection, a very nice touch but one you have to pay for.
I heard a few people at the time claim that the ability to have your settings travel from one machine to another was “yet more features osx has over windows”.
This is patently untrue - windows has had roaming profiles for a long, long time. Only you would encounter them in a corporate environment rather than in the home.
It’s also quite invisible, unless your IT department decided to not make use of folder redirection and you save everything in your documents folder and the desktop; then you’ll notice it when logging off and logging in as it takes an age to sync your data to or from the server.
In which case, learn basic file management and avoid this by filing away your data instead of splurging it across 15 different locations where 12 of them are copies of the same damn “funny internet pictures and videos” that have been doing the rounds since the dawn of net-time!
Breathe… where was I? Yes.
As homes begin to fill up with different windows based PCs - and there’s nothing stopping MS from building a linux plugin either - the ability to log into any of your machines and your settings move around with you could become an extremely handy feature and it’s about time it moved into the home too.
And it’s easy to make a distinction between a laptop and a desktop within AD, so the desktops can make use of folder redirection to keep your docs on the WHS, reducing logon times and making sure your important docs get backed up! Laptops can then be set up to save a local copy of your files so you’re not tethered to your local network, but your changes get sync’d when you are.
Tell me that’s not a great way of improving the user experience for those encumbered with windows!
And all this technology already exists! The only problem is with the totally retarded decision by microsoft to remove the AD joining capabilities from their windows crippled home versions. Which means an AD bolt-on pack would be needed for those without the “real” versions of windows.
Much is being made of this new release by Google in the tech blog media, with sandwich board style “the end is nigh” predictions for Microsoft and their software empire.
And let me explain just why it won’t be the bringer of death for Microsoft. It’s a very simple and obvious observation that is apparently out of the grasp of more than a few people.
The seat of Microsofts power is really in its server product and the various services that hook into it, fuelled by the cash cow of the CAL. Some of you might not have heard of CAL before - and no, it’s not HAL’s slacker brother - so let me explain.
CAL = Client Access License
Basically, Microsoft have been incredibly devious (make note that they’re not the only one to abuse this system) in forcing you to pay an initial lump sum for their software and then make you pay all over again to actually use it and access the resources they provide.
To use, say active directory based services you need to have a CAL for each machine regardless of whether it is based on windows or not - so if your client is mac, linux or even amiga os based you still have this license to pay for.
Now, MS could lose the browser war, hell it could even lose the desktop OS war and still be raking in the cash. This is because their strongest portfolio is on the server room side and not in the user domain.
For all of the complaints about MS software, I have to give them credit and acknowledge how impressive their server side is. Exchange is a fantastic product and sets a very high benchmark for corporate email systems, the very fact that apple is pandering to it with their iphone shows you how important it is.
Not to mention that the sheer breadth of control that Microsofts server solutions give admins over their corporate users and the degree of tight integration between the services will always provide a strong business case for choosing their solutions.
I’m also a firm believer that much of the capacity of active directory could be exceptionally handy for repairing much of the taint that exists on and around Microsofts desktop OS, their Windows Home Server product was a rediclously missed opportunity - as I commented in this video.
They were worried about canabalising SBS sales, but the only reason to choose SBS is to get your hands on exchange. Omit this from WHS and you wouldn’t dent those sales figures!
If you really want to identify the real threat to Microsoft, you need to be looking towards the linux based LDAP solutions and the rivals to exchange such as zimbra.
They are what would eat away at Microsofts most important revenue stream, a pithy browser simply cannot threaten this. Hell, even the “threat” of cloud computing is pretty much playing into the bank account of Microsoft.
Since, even if we all moved to a cloud based computing experience, MS could still quite as easily power a chunk of that cloud!
So please, stop hyping up the threat of chrome because there simply is no threat.
The thing I am yet to see anyone tackle in the user argument of “which is better windows, linux or mac” is that of the corporate world that makes up a much larger part of the computing world.
Now, I’m not talking about the more specialised world of unix powered data centres and specific applications but that of the integrated small to medium sized business.
These people want easy to use services be they data storage points, CRM packages, office application suites and various collaboration tools that intertwine their tendrils thru all corporate applications and the ubiquitous email system using a myriad of mechanisms to access it.. be it a web browser, a pda/smartphone, a desktop, a thin client or even a bespoke appliance.
Couple this with a need to manage and control all of these machines and services through a single directory mechanism that can alter what people see and access using a single, auditable account (in order to trace what they have been doing and when).
Now, I’ve not had any experience of using ldap outside of a microsoft environment (just 9 years worth of experience being the sysadmin over initially an NT domain, then migrated over to an Acitve Directory one) but I can’t really imagine a small to medium business using anything other than a microsoft active directory model - the many things you can do with active directory and the various services MS develop that hook directly into this make for a formidable opponent to fight when you begin looking for open source alternatives - especially when you don’t really need to pay for highly specialised courses for an end user to be able to use the tools available as well as for the admin team to manage and administrate them.
Remember, there’s more to the cost of a corporate network than the software you buy.
I do notice that many of the “why don’t we use something other than windows” comments are made by people with practically zero experience of actually managing a corporate network.
This isn’t to say that the MS way of doing a corporate network is the best and only way, it’s just that it’s often the most used way because it’s a very easy and yet extensive system - the hardest part is getting your head around their perplexing licensing system, there’s courses that deal with just the licensing alone!
I would love to see the *nix community highlight how you can use *nix to centrally manage and administrate a corporate network in order to cater for your users in the way that group policy, wsus, wds, sharepoint, MOM, active directory, isa, live communications server and exchange already does for the windows world.
Once you can present a manageable alternative to these, then *nix will be ready to take on microsoft in the corporate network, so come on you *nix advocates - educate us as to how you would use *nix to manage a corporate network!
When news about a windows home server (WHS) product broke, I was quite excited about the possibility of average homes being able to utilise active directory and group policy in a very user friendly wizard interface in order to bring some control and parental guidance to a home.
However, in their mad paranoia Microsoft seem to be under the impression that WHS would canabalise small business server (SBS) sales without considering that the only reason why a company would buy SBS in the first place is because of exchange - WHS doesn’t have exchange. Also, many small companies prolly pirate their versions of server 2003 standard and exchange 2003 until they can afford to go legit or they stick with just a workgroup and use the email offering from their hosting/isp company.
Yet, with active directory and group policy coupled with an optional extra of ISA locked into web proxy config WHS could provide homes with the ability to control what people can do on their computers as well as provide a means to log what their kids are doing as well as centrally control windows updates as long as it is configurable using really simple and easy to follow wizards for the novices and an advanced mode for those more accustomed to it. Imagine being able to set a log on time window for your kids? Imagine being able to limit the very applications that they can run…
All those who claim that active directory is overkill for a home is looking at it on a enterprise level (yes, they don’t need things such as federation and RAS) without looking at how the basic functionality of AD can add so much to the windows experience. The simple premise of roaming profiles would be immensely handy and is something that apple has actually added to their .mac accounts as of 10.5.. why not use what has been around for nearly a decade now to fight off the threat that apple is posing in the home market!
I have, over the course of the past 4 or 5 years tried to have a pc running as my TV in some form or another - the sheer capability of a pc, tv tuner and as much networked storage as you can afford makes for a potential entertainment system that puts everything else in the shade.
I have tried usb digital tuners and their buggy as fuck software (avermedia, pointing at you buddies), pci cards sporting analogue tuners (my trusty hauppage pvr300 or my first foray into the tuner market, the voodootv!) with a whole mix of operating systems - be they linux, media center edition 2005, xp with additional software such as snapstreams beyond tv or just the software that came with the tuners across multiple PC’s that have, in one way or another proven to be either not up to spec (don’t bother with snapstream on a P3 IBM netvista… it’s not worth the folicle damage ) or just outright died on me (my beige box called wrekgar who was using a mobo that was knackered anyway).
My reasons for rejecting most of the items I tried are as follows:
Media Center Edition 2005 turned out to be xp home based, and as such I refuse to have that crap on my network, not to mention the shitty tuner support at the time.
Linux was too much of a hassle to bother with, full stop.
XP and the TV software that came with the software - This wasn’t too bad but usually it was a collection of disperate applications in a mishmash of conflicting screens that it wasn’t a pleasant and seamless experience not to mention the constant penalisation for having the audacity to live outside of the US, which means shit like the EPG services perpetually wallow in “coming soon” status.
Snapstream is by far and away the best that I had tried in the past, the only problem was that I never had a pc that could handle it as it did have a bit of an overhead on the machine that would host it, however it still has a number of features that not even the vista revamped media center has. This was back when they first launched their version 3 software.
Now, this past month and a half I found myself gaining possession of a P4 based dell server that was capable of taking vista as well as having a vid card that could meet the aero system requirements - “great” I thought to myself “I’d get to try out vistas media center now” especially as vista can allow you to effectively trial the OS before it goes about crippling itself (gonna do a podcast about what it does when it does begin the “license me” whinge).
So, I got the dell home and slapped in one of my spare 120gb hdds and then plugged the vid card and my old pvr300 card from the stricken husk of wrekgar and began deploying vista from my deployment server (anything to get to play with these services).
The installation environment for vista is certainly a vast improvement over the win2k and xp with the one exception being vistas inability to handle dynamic disks during this stage (I seriously couldn’t believe it that you can’t do a single fucking thing with it and have to either reboot fire up an xp cd or plop it into a pc that does have an os on it to convert it and nuke it! get your act together microsoft).
Apart from that niggle, it’s pretty smooth and I do like that there’s less menus to go thru.
I have to make a point that it would be nice if MS could release a version that auto assumes I’m in the UK rather than the US, if you can’t do the smallest of changes to your OS location defaults and insist on deploying the US version of the OS then give us american prices cause you can’t even hide behind the translation excuse ya thieving gets.
Once the installation is over and I’m now logged in, we begin the search for working drivers - which is not as bad as it was on release because the lazy 3rd party lot have finally put out some drivers that don’t feel like rush jobs and don’t give your vista install an enema whenever it borks out on you.
After getting all of my drivers installed, I slide my mouse over to the media center icon and start ploughing thru the setup interfaces.
As much as it goes against my cynical being, I have to give them credit when it is deserved, it is very easy to go thru the setup and I finally get to have a working EPG as well, bonus!
Once it is, quite surprisingly painlessly, set up the navigation menus are well put together and you can see how they are positioning the xbox360 as the set top box du joir due to the built in extender (something that is confirmed at their recently unveiled home server flash site), I do wish that they had swapped around the “live tv” and the “guide” buttons because I just don’t use the “live tv”.
My biggest gripe is coming up now, this is the navigation of the program guide section, quite often I end up going from playing ping pong between several hours in the future and back to the present time again when trying to click on the directional button that is only meant to skip you forward 1 program at a time on the guide rather than spin off to several hours into the future (I can click on the button when I’m looking at things at 11pm and it’ll scroll off to 6am!).
Other than that, it’s very easy to select a program to watch, to schedule a program for recording or to put the whole series on record (tho this just looks for the program name and will trap any repeats in between, you have been warned). This does lead me to one slight UI niggle that I noticed was that once you have set a program for recording the series, it’s not immediately noticable how to stop recording the entire series as the only button is for stopping that one recording, putting this out to a seperate “stop recording series” under the “stop recording” button would have made the interface so much nicer and reduce newbie confusion. Little touches make for an overall nicer experience, apple figured this out surely you can too microsoft!
The recording format is an mpeg2 based codec and pumps files out with a format of dvr-ms, it also keeps a load of meta data including the program info from the EPG, which is a nice touch. The quality is as you would expect from mpeg2 and the major limitation is going to be your signal quality - if you’re using an indoor aerial then expect it to be of poorer quality than that of an outdoor one.
However, as to be expected due to using mpeg2 the file sizes are quite scary - 1.2 to 1.6gb for a 30 minute recording can easily swallow up your hdd space, which can cause performance issues since we’re talking about the C: drive in most cases - it’s never wise to run out of hdd space on C when it comes to windows and its demand to save everything to your desktop/documents folder as well as using the temp folder regardless of where you are working (rar and zip fold being unpacked/compressed are very guilty of this!).
It does have the setting where you can keep these recordings for X amount of time or to keep them until they need to be deleted in order to make space for the next recording, being a natural horder of videos I produce I would have much rather they offered the ability to compress the files within the application so that I could dump them to my network storage in a more manageable size.
Quite gleefully I am yet to find any DRM infections on the files it pumped out and it does allow me to go ahead and compress them without hitting a brick wall, tho because of the lack of inbuilt compression options you do have to sift around the net for apps to do the job for you. The best way to do this on windows xp is to use an application called AutoDVRconverter to strip out the bumph that media center adds to the file in order to turn it into a normal mpeg2 file for you to throw over to your encoding application, which in my case was divx since it is the one I have paid for
This begs the question that can the normal “user” be arsed with this?
I highly doubt it and so they will find themselves having to make the tough choices of keeping which recordings around or using the DVD burn option - which, for someone who doesn’t want to have self recorded dvd’s piling up (still have memories of my once large collection of vhs tapes that I had to decide to either chuck or convert to divx) especially when the home network is just perfect for a media library that is available at the click of a few buttons rather than having to stand infront of a perpetually growing bookshelf trying to think of one to watch, only to find either the disc missing or the wrong one in the box it’s just not an option.
Now, my other largest gripe is with the actual recording itself. Quite often it will either record a few minutes of the previous program or miss of the first few moments of the program you want to record. Now, I do accept that this isn’t always MC’s fault, schedules don’t always follow what the guide says and it’s like blaming a captain of a boat for choppy water.
Still, it is an annoyance and I’d be interested to hear what other peoples experiences have been with either their own vista installs or with other devices like tivo and sky+ to see if this is also partly down to the scheduling system as well.
This has all been with using an analogue tuner, I’m yet to see if it would play with my digital tuner (a usb avermedia box) tho the main reason has been that freeview with an indoor aerial just doesn’t work and our external aerial is a bit shit and so I have been tempted to simply stick with my analogue tuner for now.
Also, I have purposefully stayed away from the plug ins because I wanted to experience the out of the box features as well as the simple fact that many normal people won’t ever bother with the addons because they would prolly feel too scared of breaking it and maybe just don’t understand the concept well enough.
So far, media center has a polished feel to it but still has a few imperfections that could get in the way of truly enjoying the experience as well as not having some of the more advanced features of the likes of beyondtv (remote scheduling via the net as one example) that would really make microsofts offering blow plenty of the other options out of the water, and they still might make an appearance in the future tho I wouldn’t hold my breath and would more than likely have to look for plugins (which may end up costing money) to give it that extra functionality.
Now, as a whole I have enjoyed using it especially when I use my MX Air mouse as a damn fine remote control for it (even if my GF felt too intimidated to use it, tho part of that will have been down to the mouse I used ) and it has left me asking the question, do I simply spend on the license for vista and continue using it or should I consider nuking the vista install and plonk another evaluation of vista onto it and then try out beyondtv - especially as one of the killer features of snapstreams product is to choose your recording format.
As it is, I am still not fully won over enough to immediately go out and buy a copy of vista, especially as the cost of their “flagship” os is a scary amount, tho it’s something I’m still gonna have to spend on when I bring that machine out of “evaluation” and into a live system, tho the phoning home nature of vista is something that still creeps me out enough to keep with xp as my platform of choice.
If you guys have any suggestions or comments please lemmie know, as always the input of others is very welcome
This work in progress of a project is not over by any means.. I’ll be updating it with my experiences of beyondtv once I get my lazy arse up to rebuilding the machine.
