Feb 19

The Windows 7 experience

It’s been a while since I’ve posted things here. I installed Windows 7 a few weeks ago and I think it’s “OK”, nothing more really. If I was forced to downgrade to Windows XP I wouldn’t mind.

The reason for this? Well, for some reason my laptop has the somewhat known “black screen timeout on boot” glitch. I’ve read you can fix this easily by changing your solid background to something else (a wallpaper for example), I have wallpaper.. didn’t fix it. Another solution is making sure you’ve got the latest video drivers, let me tell you: Asus does not have drivers for Vista nor 7 for my laptop (Asus A7Jc) which I bought in 2006 so I’m stuck with the Windows Update drivers as I can’t be bothered to install custom drivers such as the omega ones.

Another weird thing is I got this invisible window in the middle of my desktop, which is on top all the time. It doesn’t show up on the taskbar or task manager. Even weirder is that it disappears after a while but I also found that “clicking” on the invisible window and hitting ALT+F4 does the trick as well.

Windows 7 is great and I’m confident that I’ll stick to this OS for a long time but there are still some applications who do not run correctly such as Ultramon and Dscaler. It took me a while to make Dscaler work but luckily once it did, I didn’t get any errors anymore.

Then last night Windows Live Messenger started to act weird (I’ve got MSGplus Live installed), I got disconnected from the internet for a second and after that every single time I logged on to WLM the client crashed. I could only guess why it was working one moment and the next it refused to do anything decent. In the end I think some Windows Update broke “contacts on desktop”, after uninstalling and reinstalling MsgPlus Live the crashes were gone.

Now, you might think I don’t have anything positive to say but I’m pretty sure stuff like the above could benefit anyone who has these errors so they can get a quick and simple solution as I tried to look for them on the internet but failed to find anything that worked.

All in all, visually Windows 7 is a huge step forward. You can see that the Redmond folks worked hard to make W7 an easy to use operating system.

Aug 28

Microsoft, stop being stupid

What do I read now? “Microsoft to force MSN Messengers users to upgrade to Windows Live Messenger 2009”. Why?! First of all, WLM2009 sucks in comparison to WLM8.5, the layout sucks, the mem usage sucks, I could go on forever.

It’s already annoying enough to have to say no to the upgrade, every week I get some annoying dialog box with “New version available” and only options are download now or remind me in a week… Why a week? Hell, why no remind me in a thousand years or just don’t remind me anymore? What’s with Microsoft and forcing people to upgrade stuff, and annoy people who could care less of upgrading?

The same has happened to Windows XP users, you want DirectX 10 (and Halo 2)? Go buy Vista (or Windows 7 soon). I don’t get it, all these measures to force people to buy new Microsoft products or upgrade existing and perfectly working software. Haven’t they learned that the more you force people to do something, the more resistance you’ll get? If I’m forced to upgrade the messenger I am sure to be looking for a crack so I can continue using 8.5 instead of version 14.

Another Microfail thing is their browser comparison, just take a look at it, it’s completely subjective. They make IE8 look like it’s the God of webbrowsers. Firefox and Chrome are just puny little browsers with crap compatibility and ease of use. Wrong, MS, wrong! They’ve just slapped the whole opensource community in the face by publicizing that page. Way to get people against you MS, congratulations!