Ray Jezek’s Blog

I decided to install Windows 7 on my laptop today.  The primary reason for installing beta software on this computer?   Speed.  Bottom line is Vista ran like a dog on my laptop (Lenovo x61) and it was worth it for me to start over in the hopes that Win7 really is as fast as people are saying.  It also helped that Ryan decided to take the Win7 plunge a few days ago and since nothing caught on fire for him I decided it might be safe to give it a go.

So far So Good.

The install was very smooth, took about an hour+, and ran into no problems whatsoever.  Everything but the biometrics scanner came up working on first boot which was pretty impressive considering this was a clean install. 

From a speed perspective Win7 is a huge upgrade.  But then again so is a fresh install of XP, so we will see if I still feel the same way about performance in a month or so.  The start menu is snappy, window cycling is very fast, and coming out of hibernation is about 200% faster than Vista.  With a 5400 RPM drive, disk churn is a killer, and Win7 seems to keep the crunching to a minimum resulting in the OS staying on its toes.

IE8 also seems to be tweaked for performance.  I stopped using IE7 about 6 months ago because I hated waiting a minute and a half for the browser to start up.  Then the painfully slow rendering engine put me over the top and I switched to Firefox.  It was like going from dial-up to broadband when I made the switch.  IE8 seems to be about as fast as Firefox so I think I will hold off on putting FF back on this machine for a few weeks and see how it goes.

Other things I’ve noticed so far (1/2 day of usage):

• Daemon tools doesn’t work – I don’t have a CD drive on this laptop so having a good tool to mount disc images is a must.  While I prefer Daemon tools, PowerISO seems to work in 7 just fine.
• You cannot use the WIN-E shortcut twice in a row.  It seems Win7 will only open up 1 explorer instance at a time.  In order for WIN-E to work a second time the existing explorer window cannot be in the Libraries location.  Even if you navigate away but go back to Libraries folder it wont open another instance.  Very odd.
• UAC is noticeably less obtrusive.  Simply click on “show all processes” in task manager and you’ll quickly realize that you no longer have to “allow” yourself to do the things you’re trying to do (crazy right?).
• My laptop actually runs cooler.  Because less churn is less burn.
• Windows media player doesn’t seem to dock in the taskbar anymore.  You can still access the play and pause buttons by mousing over the icon and waiting a second but this seems a lot less convenient to me.
• Network connections are easier to manage.  Instead of having to click on the network icon in the tray, open a window, and pick the network you want to connect to, you can simply access the list and connect/disconnect right from the system tray.  Very nice.

 I will continue to post additional things as I come across them.  Tomorrow I will get all the dev tools installed and see how everything works with using 7 as a dev platform.

Misc beta, install, performance, windows 7

Yesterday was great and Day 2 was chalk full of windows 7 and Oslo goodness.  The keynote started off right with a demo of Windows 7 and some of the new features that will be included.  Some of the key things that will be introduced in 7:

• Better performance - reduced disk IO, reduced memory consumption, and faster response times from the start menu
• Mountable and bootable VHDs - this is probably the biggest feature in 7 IMO
• Improved program management from the taskbar - you can see more details within program groups and even preview the larger screen
• Customizable taskbar and system tray - you can change what the shutdown button does and which items show up in the system tray and how they notify you
• Tweakable UAC notifications - they added a slider that allows you to change how often and under which circumstances you will see the UAC approval prompt.

After the windows 7 keynote Don Box and Chris Anderson did a little demo of putting a service in the cloud.  These guys are always interesting and they did not fail to entertain.  Probably the funniest part of the demo was when people in the audience started hitting their published service during the keynote since it was running live in the cloud.  The next part of the demo after that happened was showing how to secure a service in the cloud.  LOL

Next it was off to learn about Oslo.  The session was packed and it was a very interesting overview as to what Oslo is and what it is NOT.  The main point is that a model-driven approach is not something new and that we have been doing this all along with technologies from COM to .NET 3.0.  Oslo is a toolset to assist in this process we have been doing this whole time.  Oslo is made up of 3 main parts:

• M - This is a textual language used to describe the models. This is used by devs to create and manipulate models.
• Quadrant - This is a tool for interacting with models and DSLs.  It is a way to overlay visuals over the top of your models.
• Repository - This is simply the database that holds all of the model data.

After getting a taste for Oslo we headed over to the M deep dive.  This was a very short demo that showed how you can use IntelliPad (an M dev tool) to build and populate models.  They also talked about the grammar processor that allows yo to make your own custom syntax for M to allow a more natural language way of manipulating models.

The day ended with the party at universal studios.  It was a Halloween theme with smoke everywhere and zombie-like actors walking around the park trying to scare people.  It was pretty over the top but luckily the bottom part of the park wasn’t full of these characters.  Best ride at the park has to have been the Mummy roller coaster.

.NET, Programming M, Oslo, PDC, PDC 2008, Quadrant, windows 7