OneAndOneIs2

So I had this computer in need of a new OS...

Ordinarily I'd have just stuck Linux on it and not given it a second thought. However, since it was a complete wipe-and-install, it seemed a good time to take a look at Windows 7.

So I downloaded the ISO (from Microsoft, you understand - it's all legal) and burned it to DVD. And off we go...

The installation environment is all graphical and fairly pretty. It's a shame MS can't take a leaf from Linux's book and make it an actual fully-live environment that you can play around with whilst you wait for the OS to install, but it's a perfectly acceptable way to install an OS.

You have to accept the EULA before you do anything else, of course. It then asks you if you want to install or upgrade an installation. Because I want to wipe the current XP install, I go with the install option. To my surprise, at this point it asks me which partition I want to install to.

Windows offering to allow more than one OS on a machine?? That's not their usual M.O... I assume it's because this is very much a test-OS, but if it makes it through into the real thing so Linux users don't have to make a boot disk and re-write the MBR just to upgrade their Windows version, I will be impressed.

It then tells you it's starting the install process, and sits at 0% for about five minutes. Don't ask me why, it just does. It then motors through the entire 100% in about ten minutes. What the hell, this is a beta, after all.. but at least in Linux I could hit Alt-Function key and find a screen that'll tell me what exactly is going on in the background..

Somewhat oddly for an OS installing from CD and not connected to a network, it wanted to install updates next. Go figure.

Despite warning me that the installation would reboot several times, it's only at the end that it asks for a reboot. Because it doesn't tell me to remove the DVD, I leave it in and because the installer is apparently not clever enough to spot that it's already done its thing, it offers to start the install process all over again.

*sigh*

So out comes the disk and I reboot AGAIN and this time it boots off the hard drive, into the next stage of the process. The display is now a rather higher-res affair. Judging by the lights in my USB keyboard constantly going off and coming back on again, I assume that the USB system is being restarted with impressive regularity. Quite why this needs to be so when there's only a keyboard and mouse plugged into it, I don't know, but I'm glad normal use doesn't power-cycle the hardware quite so much as installation does.

After about ten minutes of watching my keyboard reboot (it's quite a sophisticated keyboard) the monitor dies too, and then comes back and advises me that it's time for another reboot. I restart the machine and we're into the setup process now.

I'm asked for a username and also a name for the machine. It prompts for a password, which is unusually secure for Microsoft, and then for the product key - seems a bit late in the process to be doing this to me! It asks if I want to use recommended settings, which I affirm, and then asks me to check the time, date, and time zone settings. All are fine. At long last, we're taken to the desktop. The whole installation has taken around forty minutes - quite a long process, but a huge improvement over Vista, which I've installed a few times and know to budget hours for.

Just because this is Windows and it likes reboots, I do a restart and time it. It takes 50 seconds to power down, another 50 seconds to boot to the login prompt, and another minute to get from the login prompt to a completed login. That, in my opinion, is bloody slow for a vanilla Windows box with absolutely no services or third-party software installed.

The desktop is nicely uncluttered, a contrast to Vista and the godawful sidebar. However, the new taskbar is taking up a vast amount of screen estate and is really just big, blocky, and ugly. The screen resolution is also set very low, which it has no excuse for as the monitor supports being probed and will tell any computer that asks what settings it can run.

I set the resolution to the maximum and center the picture simply by pressing the "auto" button. The screen looks much better now: The taskbar is still too big, but at least it's a lot smaller than it was. There's not much else I can do until I get online, so I borrow a USB wifi dongle and plug it in. Windows fails to be able to run it out of the box. Tricky, as I have no driver disk...

So I use my laptop to download the driver and a USB flash drive to copy it across. Nice and easy, we're online. W7 now asks me a few networking questions and I tell it to share with the other machines on our LAN. It even gives me a password - a mixed-case random string of text. Not bad.

There are two pieces of hardware that it still has no drivers for. It's quick and easy to have it search for them online, and it successfully installs one driver. The other it is at a loss for. Since everything seems to be working, I have no clue what this non-functioning hardware IS, so I ignore it.

I grab Firefox from the web and install it. It proves laughably easy to copy my profile from my laptop to the W7 computer over the LAN - I was impressed, in fact, at just how easy it was. I was slightly worried that I was able to do the file transfer without giving any login name or password, not even the password W7 itself generated for me, but this I put down to the fact that I was using the same login name and password on both machines. That's fair enough.

Now that I have some usable software, I can start having a play with the OS as a place for actually doing things. The 3-D desktop, which I was underwhelmed by in Vista, is still not good in W7, I'm afraid.

Firstly, the taskbar is transparent. That just doesn't work when it's so damned big: It makes it look like you haven't maximised the window. If they're going to have a big, semi-transparent taskbar, they badly need to make it auto-hide by default. In the end, I had to reduce the transparency to almost nothing in order to stop it being distracting.

Then there's the alt-tab. It tries to be clever and helpful, like most 3-D desktops, and make windows see-through so you can make your selections more easily.

What makes this rather annoying is that as soon as you hit alt-tab, it makes every window vanish except for the one you would switch to. So if, for instance, you're tapping away at your blog in Firefox and then want to just check if anyone's on IM, alt-tabbing to Pidgin makes Firefox vanish and Pidgin appear. Until you let go of the alt key, when firefox suddenly re-appears behind the tiny Pidgin window.

This is confusing and inconsistent behaviour that adds nothing useful. Bluntly: It sucks and it makes me think, yet again, that MS threw 3-D into their GUI because everyone else was doing it and has no clue how to make it do anything useful. Since it's still a graphical resource hog, this just isn't on: If I need to buy an expensive graphics card for something as simple as a desktop GUI, it had better be a damned GOOD desktop GUI. Especially when I could run Compiz on my prehistoric MX400 just fine several years ago!

To make matters worse, fine-tuning the desktop settings to turn OFF the annoying effects is not easy. Not just in the expected lack of choice you have compared to things like Beryl on Linux. No. Me, who's been using Windows since 3.1 days, actually had difficulty in changing the wallpaper. They've done weird things with the "personalise" function, in an effort, I think, to tie the wallpaper into the overall theme.

So, my overall impressions?

Well, they've basically taken Vista, fixed the worst bugs, made it resource-hungry rather than resource-addicted, and given it an over-sized taskbar that tries (and fails) to look a bit more OS X-like. The 3D desktop is still laughable: It needs far too much hardware and does far too little that's useful.

If you have XP and want to upgrade, you should definitely wait until Windows 7 is available and skip Vista altogether.

If you have Vista, you should be outraged that Microsoft is trying to pretend that a set of bug-fixes is a new OS, and demand a free upgrade.

Because ultimately, that's all Windows 7 is: An improved version of a failed OS. It's definitely an improvement, but just about anything would have been. I saw nothing in it to be all that excited about. It deserves to out-do Vista, and I'm sure it will. But whether it'll be the Next Big Thing that MS hope for.. I'm afraid I still have my doubts, guys!

And since it follows on quite nicely, I thought I'd mention that, because W7 was so uninteresting, I wiped it after only a day or two and replaced it with the latest Debian release. I've used Ubuntu on and off for a few years but never used 'pure' Debian, so this was something of a learning curve for me as well.

I booted off the DVD and got a splash screen with a number of options. I chose the graphical install, and was mildly disappointed to see that, unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn't give you a live-CD installation environment either. Sadly, the installation borked at this point so it didn't matter. I switched to another screen and checked the log: There was a report of a bad Md5. The DVD hadn't written properly. Sigh.

I couldn't find the DVD ISO and couldn't be bothered to download it again either. I grabbed the CD ISO instead and tried again. This time, no problems. It gave me an advisory partitioning scheme, which I accepted (7GB root, 1.5GB swap, all the rest for /home) and it began to format the partitions.

One thing I will say: I like ext3 and would have used it regardless, but I was annoyed that I wasn't asked what format the partition should be. Ext partitions take so damned long to set up compared to others.. at least two minutes passed before the hard disk was ready for files to be written to it!

Two minutes later, it was prompting for a root password and asking about the non-root user. It then asked me what server-y options I wanted: DNS, Samba, CUPS, etc. As it happened, I wanted ALL of them! So I checked just about every box and away it went, setting up an OS that was not only a complete desktop, but also a regular swiss-army knife of the computer world.

Less than ten minutes later, it asked me about installing grub and (unlike Windows) told me to take the CD out of the drive so it could reboot properly.

The entire installation took around 15 mins - significantly under half the time to install Windows, and for an OS that does a lot more, I might add..

I booted into a login prompt that had the correct resolution by default (unlike Windows.) The desktop was the slightly-bland affair you expect of a Gnome desktop.

(I'm sorry. I still don't like Gnome. The GUI is boring and only serves to emphasize just how hideously bad the file manager is. I really, really can't overstate just how much I dislike what they've done with Nautilus.)

Anyway..

Time to do a comparison between Windows and Debian on shutdowns, and I found the times here were:
To shutdown: 15 seconds
To boot to the login: 35 seconds
To get from login to logged-in: 15 seconds

So.. it shut down AND restarted in the time it took W7 just to shut down. That's pretty good considering Debian was, by now, running SSH, DNS, Samba, a webserver, a mail server, a print server...

Something else I rather liked was the way the screensaver allows you to leave a message: Simple, but clever! Well done for that one, Gnome devs.

I also liked that the Debian install CD had quite a few packages to install - I was able to get the openSSH server without a net connection, for instance.

However, I then had to get a net connection sorted out. So I plugged it into the router's ethernet and ran through the quick&easy GUI setup for a DHCP network. Job done.

I still couldn't install anything, of course, because apt was only set to install off the CD. So I got into the sources.list file and corrected this, and soon had everything I needed up and running, courtesy of Debian's legendary repository collection.

Including, I might add, a VNC server. Free. Which I am accessing right now from my Vista laptop courtesy of Real VNC.

If you're paying for a service like GoToMyPC, this is something you should bear in mind.

Not the crappy Gnome desktop - just the fact that I can access it from Vista, fast, easy, and completely free!