Windows 7

I just installed Windows 7 on my beloved Dell. After having run Win 7 on my home computer for about a month now i felt that the time had come to try it out in some serious scenarios.

To start with it felt really nice. A warm fuzzy feeling as I pimped the colors and background of my spanking new Win 7. And even the sound card worked (the tag-team Vista + Dell had previously disabled the soundcard). I felt happy. That's when the problems started...

I tried to install Daemon tools. After having rebooted, installed, rebooted, installed and rebooted i started to see a pattern. Apparently Daemon Tools won't install on Win 7. No matter what combo of priveliges and compatability modes I gave the program it always ended up in the same loop. I guess a few minutes of googling beforehand would have told me as much. It just won't work. Instead I had to use Virtual CloneDrive (which actually works nicely and I kinda like the UI more than the Daemon UI).

Next stop was the 3G mobile modem. I have the external Huawei 7.2 USB modem from 3 that worked nicely in Vista. The program 3Connect installed ok directly from the modem but after that nothing, not a thing happens when you run the program. No amount of googling could help me there.

Now a bit more frustrated I moved on to install the tools-of-the-trade - Visual Studio 2008. After having blue screened the third time I gave up. It simply won't install, just crashes.

I think I have to go back to Vista... I feel a bit sad...

Keynotes #2 and #3

Introducing Windows 7



After yesterdays focus on the enterprise offerings with Windows Azure todays first keynote was focused on the user experience, the front end, the consumer and a first peek at Windows 7 was given.



The focus of the Windows 7 endeavor is to enable developers to create applications that spans both the PC, the web and the mobile devices. The new Windows 7 combined with the Windows Live platform and the Live Services will bring together functionality in devices and connect the user to their network (social and physical).

The first peek at Windows 7

Most of the features that where presented had to do with improving the user experience when working with Windows, stuff that a lot of users have reported as annoying or 'it should have been this way to begin with' seem to have been fixed in this version of Windows. Among the most noticeable of these are the changes to the taskbar (fully customizeable and with better thumbnails and recent items list and tasks direkctly without opening the actual applications) and to the notifications area (all notifications can now be disabled!).

Among the more interesting features is the ability to easily connect to different devices, home networks and people. Something that Microsoft themselves admitted was notiriously difficult or at leas troublesome in prior versions of Windows.

Other features includes multitouch features for devices that have that enabled (a number of newer not to expensive home pc's are starting to include touch).

For the developers something really cool was anounced: the ability to directly from disk manager create and manage virtual hard drives. Not only that but you can mount them and even boot from them! Now this allows for some really nice scenarios for developers, especialy developers that work a lot with virtual images (such as in MOSS development).

The first pre-beta will be included in the goods, so dell-willing, I will be able to play around with it sometime this week.