austrian otaku

Yus, I’m still alive but was busy last week. Had a job interview and was looking for a new OS. Which did I choose?

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Windows 7! o_O

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After trying one week to get a 100% working OS 10.5 I gave up. Was quite frustrating to be able to help folks with installing it on there Intel-based PCs with the Vanilla-Kernel while I just won’t work on my AMD-based crap. As I don’t have the money to get a real Mac I had to watch for something else. As Linux isn’t an option (I prefer GUI!) I tried Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 x64 yesterday. Kinda late on the train but after having a lot of trouble with Longhorn/Vista Betas and RCs I didn’t want to join the fun too early. But after playing around with OS X last weekend Vista was just too… ORZ… xD (+ it started to become unreliable and slow with all kind of weird errors.)

Was just installing it on another partition first but deleted the Vista partition soon after that. Had a little problem with the installation though.

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“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.” (iPhone pic)

Worked fine after unplugging the other hard disk for some reason. Setup was quite fast. As is the OS itself, really an upgrade to Vista. Don’t wan’t to bash Vista here. I’m still saying Vista wasn’t that bad as many said. Especially those who were bitching about the speed the most were often folks who had slow CPUs, small HDs, only 2GB of RAM and some Intel 950 integrated graphics crap or something like that. Windows 7 is of course a new installed OS but as I had this system running with a few freshly installed Vista installations I have to say: Good job you have done here MS guys! They really managed to speed things up and the good thing is that 4GB of RAM are standard now while it wasn’t back in 2007 when Vista came out and even random folks have that amount of RAM in there PC now.

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The best thing about that whole thing is the new taskbar/GUI in my opinion.

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In older Windows versions you had lots of open windows which were filling up your taskbar(s). In Win 7 you have one icon for every App. Switching trough them highlights the window/document while the others become transparent. The cool thing is that the Explorer follows this scheme too. The days when your taskbar was cluttered with lots of open folders are finally over.

First I thought “That taskbar thing is far too thick!”, but now I think its a good solution. Some Apple fanboys are going to kill me for sure but I think the Apple Dock would need this function too! edit: Forgot that the Dock gets this function called Dock-Expose in Snow Leopard ^_^

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Always wanting to look on your desktop like Mac-folks were able to day since years? Just point your mouse at the top right area on your Win 7 taskbar. All windows become transparent, and if you want to switch to the desktop just click on the area. Kinda cool, eh? ^_^

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Don’t have anything pinned to the taskbar besides the Explorer atm but this option resembles the quick-launch area of former Windows versions. Never liked that though as I’m always using a Dock/G15-scripts/Start-Menu-Search  to launch apps. Live Messenger let’s you do some basic things from there too.

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Another cool features is called: Libraries. Now you can access folders from different locations with one shortcut. Quite neat and useful. But I recommend to edit the path for the Music/Documents/.. folder cause it’s a little bit tricky to access them with older programs sometimes otherwise. Do you have your music/pictures/documents/… and a different hard drive or partition? If not transfer them to one NOW if you aren’t using some Time Machine like backup solution!

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Remember the old onboard tools from previous Windows versions? Finally Paint, Wordpad, the calculator and so on got a new interface too.

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“Devices and Printers” looks quite useful now too. (+Some icons are quite detailed, but my iPhone does NOT look like that. @_@

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In Vista language-packs for Japanese for example had around 1,2GB, now most language packs have around 50MB and those for Chinese and Japanese have around 120MB each! Hard disks are cheap but saving up space is fine too, right?

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They edited the Performance Index options too. (Weren’t very useful in Vista as nearly every graphics card got the maximum points for example.) Wondering why my hard drive is the worst part according to this. The primary HD is a WD Caviar Black with 32MB cache btw. What do you need to get a better score here? An 10.000RPM HD or a SSD?

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Windows 7 looks quite promising, I’m looking forward to the Final release. Looks like I’m able to survive with a good OS until I’ve saved enough money for the switch xD And finally those XP using folks (weird guys ^_^, besides on a netbook of course) are able to upgrade too.

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Which OS are you using? Do you plan to switch to Windows Seven?

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[polldaddy poll=1795574]

Edit: Just came across an interesting problem: Call of Juraz: Bound in Blood didn’t want to start on Win 7, just got a black screen on the primary monitor.

Solution: At the shortcuts compatibility tab choose run in Vista SP2, disable visual themes, disable desktop composition and “Run as admin”. The theme switches to basic on the second monitor but who cares if the primary one is showing lovely graphics