Upgrading to Windows 7 – Part Two

August 14th, 2009

With the installation complete it was time to test the critical software I use daily. The first was Microsoft Outlook and as I expected it worked perfectly. So did the rest of the Office suite.

Next on my list were the Java environments that I use, Eclipse and NetBeans. First I checked at java.sun.com for newer versions of Java and found a new release 1.6 r15. I downloaded both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. I uninstalled the version I currently had, 1.6 r13, and then installed the new versions. I installed the 32 bit version first followed by the 64 bit version. Going to a command window I executed “java –version” and got back:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]

Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\neon>java -version

java version "1.6.0_15"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03)

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02, mixed mode)

 

First, I was happy to see that the Server VM was being used and not the Client VM. Then I was puzzled why the version of Windows was 6.1.7600 rather than 7. Steve Ballmer, could you please explain this?

Next I installed Eclipse 3.5 and Netbeans 6.7 and both ran flawlessly. These are both 32 bit applications which is why I knew to have 32 bit Java installed. Since there is no 64 bit Flash for Windows you can only use the 32 bit version of IE and so that is another reason for keeping the 32 bit Java around.

Now it was time to test my remote access to my desktop at school. Dawson uses SonicWall technology for remote access so it is necessary to execute a program called NetExtender. NetExtender refused to connect to the college. When I first switched to Vista at home there was a period of a few months while I waited for a Vista version of NetExtender. When I switched from 32 to 64 it was necessary to replace the 32 bit version with a 64 bit version. I decided the solution might be to uninstall NetExtender and re-install it. I did and it worked. Now Remote Desktop works flawlessly to my machine at school.

Next up was a media server called PS3. As its name implies it is designed to stream a wide range of media formats to a PlayStation 3. When I ran it, the PS3 in my living room could not be found. So I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and the PS3 saw the PS3. However Windows 7 supports DivX, Xvid, and H.264 so I will likely rarely use the PS3 server. Instead I can use Windows 7 as my DLNA server for most of my needs.

An interesting feature I discovered was that when I told Windows Media Player where my music, photos, movies, and videos were on my computer they became available through Windows Explorer by their category. So when I select Pictures in Windows Explorer it shows me all the directories I told Media Player about. My PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 see these folders as well.

Now it was time to deal with the issue of anti-virus software since I could no longer use OneCare (can I get a refund Steve?). First I chose AVG because it was free. It installed without incident and the Action Center, the updated version of the Vista Security center, was happy to see it. The Action Center is a nice improvement as it is the single point of information about all issues such as security and updates.

There were two issues with AVG. The first was an annoyance; it would add a line of text to every email it scanned. I don’t want every email I send to be an advertisement for them. The second was the deal breaker. When downloading files with Windows Explorer the download would hang when it finished. When I closed the download box I immediately go a dialog asking if it could scan the file just downloaded. I suspect that the downloads were completed as the files were in their destination directory but this was too much of an annoyance. Out came AVG.

Next I selected Panda. Installation was smooth and it would not expire until the end of October. No annoying additions to emails and downloads worked flawlessly. The Action Center did whine, I mean give a warning that the format of the communication between itself and Panda was not up to the most recent set of rules for Win 7. But it seemed to work so I was happy.

I asked the technical staff at Dawson if they had a Windows 7 version of McAfee as the college licenses it for all its machines. They told me that the most recent Enterprise version, 8.7i, should work. So I uninstalled Panda and installed McAfee. No problems other than the same complaint from the Action Center about communicating with McAfee.

Then a strange problem cropped up. While streaming media from my Windows 7 computer to my PlayStation 3 the connection between the two would be dropped. Worse was the fact that when this happened the Windows 7 computer lost all access to my home network. I should mention that even before upgrading I was having network issues with the same computer. It would drop its connection randomly only to have it come back after I either rebooted my cable modem, my router, or the computer itself. I thought I was having router issues. The clue that this was not likely the router came from the fact that my Mac was fine with the network even when the Win 7 machine failed.

I ran “ipconfig /all” from a command prompt when the problem occurred and discovered that my computer believed that the media, the Ethernet cable, was disconnected. The light on the router and on the back of the computer said otherwise. The network interface on my P5K SE/EPU motherboard is based on an Atheros chipset. I searched for “Windows 7 atheros problem” and found my answer.

The Atheros interfaces on Asus motherboards occasionally fail to wake up when a computer goes to sleep and so behaves as if the media is disconnected. Not my problem as I don’t put my computer to sleep. Then I came across a number of messages from Windows 7 beta and RC users describing exactly the same problem I was having. No one knew why but there was general agreement on the solution. Turn off the chipset in the BIOS and install a network interface card.

I bought a D-Link DGE-530T for $29 and installed it. Since then the Win 7 computer has never lost its connection to my home network.

All the other software of mine that I have run since the upgrade has run flawlessly. My system used to take a little more than three minutes before I could run any software when started. With Windows 7 it is down to two minutes. Windows 7 will show you a desktop in under a minute but there are still processes being run in the background that forces you to wait another minute before the system is stable and responsive.

The upgrade of my school computer also went quite smoothly. That machine is an older Pentium D 3.4 GHz machine and was running Vista 32 bit. The upgrade to Windows 7 32 bit took a little over 3 hours whereas on my faster home computer it took an hour and a half. The only software that exhibited a problem was my Novell Client. I have come to the conclusion that software that uses the network interface for its work must be re-installed after an upgrade. I re-installed the Novell Client 2 for Vista/Windows 2008 and my connectivity to the college Novell based network was restored.

All in all I am quite pleased with Windows 7. There is still much to discover but what I have seen so far has pleased me. I like the new display of files found when searching in Windows Explorer. I like the Media Player categories working in Windows Explorer. The new task bar presents a new approach to managing multiple programs and multiple documents from a single program that actually improves work flow. The goofy Rolodex view is gone, too.

If you sat out Vista then it is time to junk that old clunker of an operating system called XP (sorry no cash for XP clunker deals). If you did adopt Vista then look at Windows 7 as Vista’s Service Pack 13 and upgrade. I wonder if anyone will line up at midnight on October 21st to get a retail copy of Windows 7?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Novell, Windows 7 | 1 Comment »

Upgrading to Windows 7 – Part One

August 13th, 2009

It is now one week since I upgraded my primary desktop system to Windows 7. I had been an early adopter of Vista and had a number of problems, even an occasional BSOD in the early days. I delayed putting Vista on my school computer because it did not support Novell which is used at Dawson College where I teach. Today I upgraded my school computer and I am fully integrated into the Novell structure. Here is the what and why of what I did, part one.

My department at Dawson College subscribes to a program at Microsoft called the MSDNAA that is a subset of the MSDN subscription program for commercial developers. This gave me access to Windows 7 on August 6th. The first decision I had to make was whether to do an upgrade or a clean install.

In the days of DOS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 an upgrade involved replacing the hard disk boot code and creating a new directory for the DOS utilities. The only time you would do a clean install by reformatting the hard disk, installing the OS, and then re-installing all your apps, was when an application crashed the hard disk so that it would not boot or you caught a nasty file/boot sector deleting virus that crashed the hard disk so that it would not boot.

Then came Windows 3.0. Finally a PC user could delude themselves into thinking they had a system on par with the Mac. Microsoft employed the concept of sharing to the OS in the form of the dynamic link library commonly known as the DLL. A DLL was meant to be a block of executable code that could be shared by many different applications so that software could look and work similarly. To ease the sharing these DLL files were stored within the Windows OS directory structure. Boy, did Bill and the gang get that idea wrong.

Many developers shipped their products with updated versions of commonly used DLL files. Unfortunately there was poor policing of this code and so the APIs of the DLLs were sometimes changed. This effectively broke any program on your system that depended on a particular version of a DLL that had just been replaced by a different developer’s product.

Another problem, one that still exists to some extent even today on both Macs and PCs are programs that don’t delete everything they placed on your hard disk. The system16 folder in Windows 3.0/3.1 would grow with every new piece of software loaded but rarely shrink when the program was removed.

It should be noted that Microsoft now advises against using shared DLLs. They are recommending as a best practice that we go back to the days of DOS when installing a program meant copying all its files into its own folder on the hard disk. This is how Unix/Linux has done it forever.  Thank you to Eugene in a comment below to point out I was wrong in my Unix/Linux comment.

This led to the general rule for any power user of Windows 3.0/3.1 to reformat and re-install Windows every six months. This idea of occasionally tearing down and then rebuilding your home on the PC was looked at as a prudent form of preventative maintenance right up to Windows 2000. Old habits die hard and I still hear, from time to time, that one of my students has just reinstalled Windows XP because the system felt sluggish.

As I progressed though the versions of Windows there was no question of reformatting before installing a new OS. Even if Microsoft allowed an upgrade there would still be lots of DLLs and device drivers left behind that were incompatible with the new OS. As well Microsoft rarely deleted old OS files during an upgrade. They remained never to be used but still taking up space.

There was a time when I thought installing a new OS was an exciting event. Yes, I know I needed to get out more. But these days I have over 50 software packages on my system and I no longer have the interest or time to reload them. I make regular image backups as well as file backups so that I can recover from a catastrophe with a minimum of effort. So there really was no real choice for me, I was going to upgrade rather than do a clean install.

My home system was Vista 64. Switching from 32 to 64 can only be done as a clean install and I had done that two years ago. I inserted the Windows 7 Professional DVD and began the install process. The first screen gives you two choices, check compatibility online or install. Don’t bother with checking for compatibility online as the install choice does a compatibility check anyways. Then you promise to love Microsoft (the EULA) and then you are given the choice to Upgrade or Clean Install. I chose Upgrade.

After a few minutes I received a compatibility report. It told me I must uninstall Microsoft OneCare and I must reboot because the Windows 7 setup added some files to my Vista OS. It also warned me that iTunes would not work (I ignored this and iTunes works fine) and it also gave me some warnings about some other devices such as my Canon scanner. I removed OneCare, rebooted, restarted the Windows 7 setup, and got another compatibility report with only warnings that I chose to ignore.

The starter’s pistol fired and the installation began. On my desktop with an E8500 processor and 4 gigs of RAM it took about an hour and a half. When I did the upgrade on my office computer with a Pentium D 3.2GHz and 3.2 Gig of Ram and using the 32bit version of Windows 7 it took just under three hours.

An interesting event of note is the point at which you enter the licence number. This occurs as just about the last step. I do not know if you could rollback at this point. It almost seems like a decision made to annoy people trying to install Windows 7 with disreputable license numbers that would fail. But after the last reboot I logged in and everything seemed to work.

There was one major change I made to the way I use my computer just prior to the installation. As an old time Windows user I refused to be anything less than an administrator whenever I logged into my computer. Until User Access Control (UAC) appeared in Vista you had to switch users if you needed administrator privileges if your current account did not have them. But old habits die hard and I remained an administrator when I logged in at home and at school.

Well, no more. Just before I upgraded I created an administrator level account and then downgraded my user account to just plain user. This is a best practice that has existed in the world of Unix/Linux. Until Vista came along it was a practice that was a pain to follow through on. With the threat of Trojans and botnets lurking on the Internet it was long overdue on my part to adopt this best practice.

It has been a week at home and a day at my office but no Blue Screens Of Death (are they still blue on Win 7?). Part 2 of this article will look at the very few problems I had with existing software and drivers and how I solved them.

Tags: ,
Posted in Windows 7 | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »