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.