Have you tried Windows 7 yet?
2009.08.14 06:25 PM Filed in: Technology
Some of you know that after a life of being a Mac hater, I became a Mac switcher in February 2008. For some of you, this will be news even today. 
I have to tell you, coming out of the Mac closet was very hard because of the reputation I’d built over the last 20 years of using computers. But at any rate, when I made the switch to my MacBook thanks in very large part to a problematic HP laptop and Windows Vista (pre SP1), one very important security blanket was there for me - Macs for the last few years have been built on an Intel platform and can be configured to dual boot into Windows. This means that if the Mac experiment failed (which it didn’t), I could still go back to Windows and not have the whole thing a waste of money. I could also dual boot to Windows XP to play Age of Empires III (which I haven’t actually played in quite a while - I should pick it up again).
With that background aside, have any of you tried Windows 7 yet? In May, Microsoft started offering the release candidate (i.e. still a beta version but feature complete) for Windows 7 (also referred to as RC1) for free. The catch is that March 1, 2010 it will start shutting down on you every 2 hours, and June 1, 2010 it will expire altogether. (in unison: “It will expire” )
I downloaded and installed the 64-bit version for two reasons. I have 4GB of RAM in my laptop, and I believe that the world needs to make the jump to 64-bit computing. It’s going to happen sooner or later, so we might as well do it now and get the pain over with. It ran very well on my MacBook, very fast, and I really liked the improvements in Windows 7 from Windows Vista. Then I thought I should actually install something. Of course the first thing to do on a Windows computer is install anti-virus. Once I did that, all that glorious speed disappeared in a puff of smoke. I tried the free AVG Anti-Virus, then uninstalled that and tried Avast. Neither gave me a good result. I didn’t know if it was because of Windows 7 itself, being on a 64-bit platform and not fully supported, or because I was running Windows on a Mac. Either way, my user experience was going downhill. I then tried to see if Age of Empires III would run. It wouldn’t, although this again could have been because of the 64-bit environment (although it is supposed to support most 32-bit apps too). Things weren’t looking good. It went further downhill when the included Internet Explorer 8 started causing the OS to blue screen on me. Huh? Really?!? I could reproduce it, too. After a few minutes of surfing, it would blue screen. That was really lame. The Windows partition was promptly deleted and back to Mac OS X I went!
Fast forward now to a week ago. August 6 was my Dad’s birthday (Happy Birthday Dad!), and it was also the birthday of the final Windows 7 release to manufacturer (RTM). Fortunately, I have legitimate access to the RTM. The whole world wanted to get at it though, so downloading was a pain. It finally completed downloading on Friday the 7th, and because of a weekend at the cabin I didn’t get to start trying it until late Sunday the 9th. After repartitioning my MacBook using Boot Camp, I was ready to give Windows 7 (this time the final release) another go. Once again I opted for the 64-bit version for the same reasons as above. After installation (and it is more of a headache to get it installed on a Mac due to changes to the bootable DVD and some driver issues), the first thing I noticed was the wallpaper had changed from RC1. Other than that, it looked about the same.
It was fast, very fast, although I hadn’t installed anything yet at this point. However, a lot more software has been updated with Windows 7 and even 64-bit support between the time RC1 and RTM were released. With this in mind, I gave the free Avast anti-virus a whirl. Wow, this time the computer didn’t slow down at all. As visitors to my site can obviously see, I like to work on video editing. How will that go here?
I’ve been using Final Cut Express 4 (FCE) for Mac, but Adobe has Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) for the Windows environment with a free 30 day trial that I downloaded to take for a spin. I haven’t put anything up on my website here from PE7 (Sean and Karen’s wedding video was in FCE on the Mac), but over the past week I took some of the raw footage and put something together. Very nice! I had some output quality issues at first, but it was just a matter of the settings being a little different than I was used to in Final Cut.
FCE on the Mac doesn’t have Blu-Ray support, which isn’t a big deal for me now but could be nice down the road. Also, exporting to DVD on the Mac means using a separate program, iDVD, which has some very nice menus but very limited video compression settings, low and high. What this means is that the output DVD doesn’t always look as good as it could. If your video is too long for the high quality setting to fit on a DVD, then you go to the low quality setting, potentially leaving up to 2GB free on the disc and compressing your movie way more than it needs to be thus reducing the quality significantly. That is silly - why not use a more dynamic compression setting such that your video is compressed only as much as it needs to be in order to fill the entire disc?
PE7 has DVD and Blu-Ray support built-in and appears to have dynamic compression (i.e. compress only as much as necessary to fill the entire disc to get the best result possible). PE7 also fully utilizes the Intel Core 2 Duo processor when rendering whereas Final Cut Express doesn’t, thus significantly speeding up render times in my observations. There are other things about Premiere Elements 7 that I find myself liking over Final Cut Express 4, but that’s not really the point of this post. The point is that I have found a very capable equivalent for my video projects.
Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t blue screen on me anymore, which is very nice. Neither do Firefox or Google Chrome. The next thing on my list was Age of Empires III. I pretty much wrote it off as incompatible with 64-bit operating systems based on some research I had done at the time, but since everything else was so much improved since the beta version of Windows 7 I gave it a try last night. I still got the warnings when I tried to install that the game has a known incompatibility with Windows 7, but I pushed on anyway. I downloaded and installed the latest patch for the game as I had done before, but this time there was a newer patch available. I downloaded 1.12 when I was testing the beta OS in May, but now they are up to 1.13 released June 10th. This is a good sign. After the patch updating was complete, I then nervously started the game. Hey, the intro screen showed up. Okay, let’s click Play. Here are the intro videos... and I’m in! Woo hoo! I spent a bit of time tweaking the graphics settings for the best results, and it looks great on my MacBook! Okay, let’s actually play a game instead of looking at the main menu screen. I just played the short beginner’s tutorial game, but it all worked great. Yipee!
So now I can get the best of both worlds, which is great. But I have to admit that I’m really impressed with Microsoft - they really made Windows 7 a lot better than Vista was. I was so happy to get away from Vista, and Mac welcomed me with open arms. But now that Windows has improved so drastically, I’m finding myself wondering if I should switch back. Dual booting does tend to be a pain, which is likely why I eventually stopped playing Age of Empires. I’m in Mac OS X right now as I’m writing this because my website is built using Rapid Weaver (a Mac program), but when I’m done here I might just go back into Windows, play a round of Age of Empires, and not rush back into Mac OS X like I used to do in the past. Fortunately the next Mac OS X upgrade (version 10.6, called Snow Leopard) is due out in September, so I won’t have too long to wait before I can (pardon the pun) compare apples to apples and then decide.
I have to tell you, coming out of the Mac closet was very hard because of the reputation I’d built over the last 20 years of using computers. But at any rate, when I made the switch to my MacBook thanks in very large part to a problematic HP laptop and Windows Vista (pre SP1), one very important security blanket was there for me - Macs for the last few years have been built on an Intel platform and can be configured to dual boot into Windows. This means that if the Mac experiment failed (which it didn’t), I could still go back to Windows and not have the whole thing a waste of money. I could also dual boot to Windows XP to play Age of Empires III (which I haven’t actually played in quite a while - I should pick it up again).With that background aside, have any of you tried Windows 7 yet? In May, Microsoft started offering the release candidate (i.e. still a beta version but feature complete) for Windows 7 (also referred to as RC1) for free. The catch is that March 1, 2010 it will start shutting down on you every 2 hours, and June 1, 2010 it will expire altogether. (in unison: “It will expire” )
I downloaded and installed the 64-bit version for two reasons. I have 4GB of RAM in my laptop, and I believe that the world needs to make the jump to 64-bit computing. It’s going to happen sooner or later, so we might as well do it now and get the pain over with. It ran very well on my MacBook, very fast, and I really liked the improvements in Windows 7 from Windows Vista. Then I thought I should actually install something. Of course the first thing to do on a Windows computer is install anti-virus. Once I did that, all that glorious speed disappeared in a puff of smoke. I tried the free AVG Anti-Virus, then uninstalled that and tried Avast. Neither gave me a good result. I didn’t know if it was because of Windows 7 itself, being on a 64-bit platform and not fully supported, or because I was running Windows on a Mac. Either way, my user experience was going downhill. I then tried to see if Age of Empires III would run. It wouldn’t, although this again could have been because of the 64-bit environment (although it is supposed to support most 32-bit apps too). Things weren’t looking good. It went further downhill when the included Internet Explorer 8 started causing the OS to blue screen on me. Huh? Really?!? I could reproduce it, too. After a few minutes of surfing, it would blue screen. That was really lame. The Windows partition was promptly deleted and back to Mac OS X I went!
Fast forward now to a week ago. August 6 was my Dad’s birthday (Happy Birthday Dad!), and it was also the birthday of the final Windows 7 release to manufacturer (RTM). Fortunately, I have legitimate access to the RTM. The whole world wanted to get at it though, so downloading was a pain. It finally completed downloading on Friday the 7th, and because of a weekend at the cabin I didn’t get to start trying it until late Sunday the 9th. After repartitioning my MacBook using Boot Camp, I was ready to give Windows 7 (this time the final release) another go. Once again I opted for the 64-bit version for the same reasons as above. After installation (and it is more of a headache to get it installed on a Mac due to changes to the bootable DVD and some driver issues), the first thing I noticed was the wallpaper had changed from RC1. Other than that, it looked about the same.
It was fast, very fast, although I hadn’t installed anything yet at this point. However, a lot more software has been updated with Windows 7 and even 64-bit support between the time RC1 and RTM were released. With this in mind, I gave the free Avast anti-virus a whirl. Wow, this time the computer didn’t slow down at all. As visitors to my site can obviously see, I like to work on video editing. How will that go here?
I’ve been using Final Cut Express 4 (FCE) for Mac, but Adobe has Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) for the Windows environment with a free 30 day trial that I downloaded to take for a spin. I haven’t put anything up on my website here from PE7 (Sean and Karen’s wedding video was in FCE on the Mac), but over the past week I took some of the raw footage and put something together. Very nice! I had some output quality issues at first, but it was just a matter of the settings being a little different than I was used to in Final Cut.
FCE on the Mac doesn’t have Blu-Ray support, which isn’t a big deal for me now but could be nice down the road. Also, exporting to DVD on the Mac means using a separate program, iDVD, which has some very nice menus but very limited video compression settings, low and high. What this means is that the output DVD doesn’t always look as good as it could. If your video is too long for the high quality setting to fit on a DVD, then you go to the low quality setting, potentially leaving up to 2GB free on the disc and compressing your movie way more than it needs to be thus reducing the quality significantly. That is silly - why not use a more dynamic compression setting such that your video is compressed only as much as it needs to be in order to fill the entire disc?
PE7 has DVD and Blu-Ray support built-in and appears to have dynamic compression (i.e. compress only as much as necessary to fill the entire disc to get the best result possible). PE7 also fully utilizes the Intel Core 2 Duo processor when rendering whereas Final Cut Express doesn’t, thus significantly speeding up render times in my observations. There are other things about Premiere Elements 7 that I find myself liking over Final Cut Express 4, but that’s not really the point of this post. The point is that I have found a very capable equivalent for my video projects.
Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t blue screen on me anymore, which is very nice. Neither do Firefox or Google Chrome. The next thing on my list was Age of Empires III. I pretty much wrote it off as incompatible with 64-bit operating systems based on some research I had done at the time, but since everything else was so much improved since the beta version of Windows 7 I gave it a try last night. I still got the warnings when I tried to install that the game has a known incompatibility with Windows 7, but I pushed on anyway. I downloaded and installed the latest patch for the game as I had done before, but this time there was a newer patch available. I downloaded 1.12 when I was testing the beta OS in May, but now they are up to 1.13 released June 10th. This is a good sign. After the patch updating was complete, I then nervously started the game. Hey, the intro screen showed up. Okay, let’s click Play. Here are the intro videos... and I’m in! Woo hoo! I spent a bit of time tweaking the graphics settings for the best results, and it looks great on my MacBook! Okay, let’s actually play a game instead of looking at the main menu screen. I just played the short beginner’s tutorial game, but it all worked great. Yipee!
So now I can get the best of both worlds, which is great. But I have to admit that I’m really impressed with Microsoft - they really made Windows 7 a lot better than Vista was. I was so happy to get away from Vista, and Mac welcomed me with open arms. But now that Windows has improved so drastically, I’m finding myself wondering if I should switch back. Dual booting does tend to be a pain, which is likely why I eventually stopped playing Age of Empires. I’m in Mac OS X right now as I’m writing this because my website is built using Rapid Weaver (a Mac program), but when I’m done here I might just go back into Windows, play a round of Age of Empires, and not rush back into Mac OS X like I used to do in the past. Fortunately the next Mac OS X upgrade (version 10.6, called Snow Leopard) is due out in September, so I won’t have too long to wait before I can (pardon the pun) compare apples to apples and then decide.