Windows 7 questions

[GreNME]

The people who just like tinkering with PCs are trying it and in general are giving it the thumbs up - but will the corporate buyers upgrade?

I certainly hope so. I actually feel that corp. buyers should have gotten on the Vista wagon after SP1, if only for the improvements on the domain-side and group policy when on a 2008 Active Directory (yeah, bunch of stuff that's meaningless to users but very nice for admins). I'm getting tired of places dealing with XP-- I can tear it apart and put it back together in working condition at this point, so I'm pretty much done with the OS as far as my hacker (as in tinkering, not breaking into stuff) tendencies go.

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I'm trying it out, mostly because I lost my XP Pro disc, and that computer really really needed a fresh install. It's nothing that's so fabulous that I'd drop XP on my other computers, but it works fine.

It had a few quirks though, things which I haven't seen others talk about. Things like refusing to see other drives (I have a partition and a separate drive), until I'd allocated the empty one, and forced a letter drive on the separate one. That scared me for a second, because I have a lot of back-up on that separate drive. (It's not my only backup, don't worry!)

That's due to changes in hard drive manufacturing, not the OS itself. Some manufacturers' drives don't identify themselves properly in newer versions of Windows now with the bus and controller chip changes in hard drives (which, apparently, also screws with software RAID). You have to initialize the disk and assign it in order to access it.

The other was it refused to see my network, insisting that it could only connect to other Win 7 computers, which is a lie, of course. I had to look up settings on how to change the workgroup name, cause it doesn't just let you do that like in XP. I'm so silly, I changed my workgroup name away from the default! How dare I? But once I did that, and changed other settings, like letting users change files, rather than just look at them, it works just fine now.

Vista and Win 7 both do that, and it's more to do with the workgroup settings being treated more specifically by the network stack, so connections using UNC paths require the computers being on the same domain or network on a LAN with the default settings. You can open this up if you're determined to, but you get better results just having everything on the same workgroup now anyway. Unlike Win XP, in Vista and Win 7 workgroups actually do improve home or non-domain-based networking.

The thing you noticed about being able to communicate with other Win 7 machines had to do with "home groups," and is a separate thing from the workgroup setting. Home groups allows Win 7 to basically set up a quick and simple peer-to-peer network automatically that both works fairly well (at a basic file-sharing level) and is still relatively secure (won't let strangers connect with impunity like XP). Home groups are designed for the lowest common denominator home computer user, and I don't bother with it myself, and its performance is fairly slick from a "works and is simple" perspective. For the tinkerers and older-school XP power users, this will seem superfluous, and the networking center control panel is going to seem like extra work for those trying to change network settings the same way they did on XP. It takes some getting used to.

One nice thing was that it had the drivers for things already. (I build my own computers.) I was wondering what I would do because I didn't have drivers for Win 7, just XP. But everything seems to work just fine, which is nice for once.

I'd say, if you're happy with XP, don't upgrade. But Win 7 isn't that bad, either. Fortunately, I skipped over the Vista fiasco.

The driver support is very nice. I had similar positive results with Vista, too. Both were able to get the NIC working with no problems, and then find any missing drivers it needed over the internet. When I was running the Win 7 beta and RC on my MacBook Pro, the Boot Camp wifi driver was actually more spotty and poor in performance than the one I let Win 7 install instead. Apparently, Microsoft decided to stick a better 64-bit Airport driver in their Win 7 build than what Apple provides in their Boot Camp package. Coincidence?

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Regarding drives - I was pleased that W7 treats my eSATA docking station that I use for back-ups, as true plug and play .. With XP, I have to open device manager and scan for hardware changes ...