up here. Some, of course, have already been running Windows 7, which I obtained from my Technet account, and have been using in articles on Windows 7.

There’s not really a lot I can add to the hoopla about Windows 7. Like any new OS release from Microsoft, there is good and bad. But for our weekly LAN party group, I’m looking forward to moving everyone to 64-bit Windows 7.

Four of five gaming rigs in the basement lab are now running Windows 7.

Windows 7 & Gaming: So Far

I’ve been running games on Windows 7 since the release candidate. Bear in mind that most of my games are either fairly new or, if older titles, have been re-purchased from Steam or Good Old Games. I’ve run into relatively few issues. The most common problem between different titles, oddly enough, is the inability to play the startup video. This is true with Blood Bowl and the updated, free-to-play Dungeons and Dragons Online. As far as problems go, this is pretty minor.

Here’s a partial list of games I’ve played under Windows 7. These are games I’ve actually played fairly extensively, not just fired up and checked to see if they ran:

• Anno 1404
• Left 4 Dead
• Mass Effect (needed to install the free DLC to get it to work — but this may have been a Radeon HD 5870 driver problem.)
• Plants Vs. Zombies
• Risen
• Dungeons and Dragons Online
• Demigod
• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Section 8
• Prototype
• Red Faction: Guerrilla
• Blood Bowl

None of these are particularly old titles. All of these run on Windows 7 64-bit.

Friday Night Follies & the Windows 7 Launch Party

The usual crew was on hand, plus Robert Heron from HDNation. We played D&D online for about five hours.

I’d mentioned earlier that four of five of the gaming systems were running Windows 7. By that, I meant the actual release version; the fifth system is still on the release candidate. All are running the 64-bit version.

We did run into a couple of glitches, but I’m not convinced they were Windows 7 related. D&D Online crashed to the desktop on a couple of systems. Another odd quirk: occasionally the game would spontaneously change resolutions, and you’d see a “window” on your desktop. I put the word “window” in quotes, because it wasn’t a real window. You could see the desktop underneath, but the game was still running in full screen, exclusive. Fixing the problem was easy: press ALT-ENTER twice. The first time would put it in true windowed mode, the second time would kick it back into its original resolution in full screen mode.

The reason I’m unconvinced that this is a Windows 7 specific issue is that we saw the same behavior on at least one Windows Vista system a couple of weeks back. The problems seem to manifest mostly on systems running ATI graphics, though I haven’t tested this extensively to be completely sure — only one of the systems is running an Nvidia-based card (a BFG 275 GTX OC), and it had relatively few issues.

Next steps is to install Windows 7 on some of the other family systems, and see how those fare. One thing is for sure: XP and Vista are done in the Case House. I’ll keep a couple of Vista and XP partition backups, just for testing. But we’ll be a Windows 7 household going forward.

That’s happening with Windows 7, with the actual official launch date still ten days off. The most visible slam against Windows was from my old boss, Jim Louderback, who wrote of his woes with Microsoft’s new OS, stating that Windows 7 is Vista all over again. Whoa, now that’s harsh.

The Curmudgeons are Wrong

We’ll no doubt see more people taking potshots at Windows 7 as the launch process continues. And I’m not going to to a point-by-point counter to Jim’s article. He clearly ran into some technical issues, but his experience has been counter to just about everything written about the OS. Heck, even Walt Mossberg, who never met a MacOS he didn’t like, thinks Windows 7 is a pretty big deal.

(It probably comes as no shock that the Mac Faithful are starting to take potshots at Mossberg’s review.)

It’s always interesting to me to see the constant back and forth about new software. While my experiences with Windows 7 has been almost uniformly positive, I can certainly understand how people can run into issues with complex operating system, be it Windows, MacOS, Linux or anything else that requires supporting the vast array of hardware and software that people want to use.

I like to think historically. I’m reminded of ongoing arguments that I had on the old Compuserve OS/2 forums (talk about dating myself.) Brad Wardell and I carried on a spirited discussion about whether OS/2 or Windows 95 was better. He argued that OS/2 was technically superior to Windows 95. I argued that Windows 95 had an undeniable momentum, including substantial support from hardware and software developers.

We were both right, but we also know who won that battle.

Today, of course, the world is more complex. MacOS has made some pretty serious inroads, particularly among laptops. It’s unlikely that MacOS will ever overtake Windows in terms of unit sales, but it’s also true that Apple’s success has been a spur to Microsoft to do better. Competition is never a bad thing.

The real problem Microsoft is facing is not whether or not Windows 7 is a good OS, although I believe it’s the best desktop OS that Redmond has ever shipped. The problem isn’t the competition from Apple or Linux. The problem is competition from Microsoft itself.

Windows XP was, by any measure, a hugely successful product for Microsoft. It’s been around for almost eight years, officially launching October 25^th, 200.

People forget all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Windows XP shipped. Complaints abounded, whether it was the painful transition from Windows 3.1, the big jump in hardware requirements, issues with software compatibility or the lack of 32-bit drivers.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Then came Vista.

Yes, I’m being snarky. A little.

So the Windows 7 House Party Kit arrived. Now, I signed up through an email blast I received, well before that lame ”Hosting Your Party” video hit the street. Since I host our Friday Night Follies LAN party most weeks, I thought that having some weird theme like this to one of them might be mildly amusing.

So I signed up without really reading the fine print. I didn’t realize Microsoft would actually, you know, send stuff. That is, until I received the notice that my House Party Kit was in the mail (well, on a UPS truck, actually.)

So the box arrived today.

Oooohhhh. Shiny!

What was in the box was a mix of mildly useful, actually useful, pretty cool and pretty lame. Let’s start with the lame.

In the box were various items, including this item, which is supposedly a “table top centerpiece.” Now, if I were putting this together, I’d have something visually striking for a center piece… maybe an action figure of Steve Ballmer drop kicking an iMac or maybe a foot tall MacOS logo inside a red circle with a slash through it. Instead, you get two visually bland pieces of cardboard cut so that you can make them stand up.

A center piece that cries out to be replaced.

Lame.

Also lame is this.

It's all Greek to Me...

In the box are a set of thank you cards that, I suppose, you’re supposed to hand out to people who come to your party. On the cards is web address for additional offers.

That’s not the lame part. The lame part is that the page that’s up is only a placeholder. Now, I realize that the official party and Windows 7 launch date is a couple of weeks off, so having a placeholder page might be needed. But actually having greeked text? Come on, have some kind of cool countdown animation or something.

Lame.

What follows are impressions of using the D300s. I’m comparing it mainly to the D300 I’ve been using for the past eighteen months. I may also comment a bit on the D90, since I used that fairly extensively last during the first few months of 2009, but most of my comparisons are to the D300.

This is also not meant to be an exhaustive review, but a set of impressions based on what interests me as a photographer.

Context: My Photographic Interests

For the past several years, I’ve been shooting indoor volleyball. My oldest daughter was on her high school varsity team, but she’s heading off to university in a week or so. Shooting indoor sports means shooting in venues with poor, uneven lighting. You also need to shoot at high shutter speeds. The combination of crappy lighting and fast motion necessarily means shooting at high ISOs with fast lenses.

Volleyball: Fast and Furious

When Elizabeth entered her senior year, I thought that it would be my last year shooting action shots in low light. My younger daughter, Emily proved me wrong. She decided to join the school marching band as a member of the Color Guard and went on to participate in Winter Guard, which involves indoor competition in – you guessed it – venues with crappy, uneven lighting.

Winter Guard: Four to Eight Minutes of Indoor Action

I’m one of those people whose virtual desktop is as messy as my real world desktop. Yes, I’m one of those terrible users who love to have launch icons for every possible app on their desktop. I also like to have key folders on my desktop. (Note that I don’t hold a candle to Patrick Norton. I once saw his Windows desktop, and it overflowed with icons. I wonder how many browser tabs he opens?)

The Windows 7 taskbar helps mitigate this a bit, but I still prefer to have stuff on my desktop rather than the taskbar. For one thing, my taskbar would be unmanageable, so I only put a few things in it. The real problem is not having large numbers of icons on the desktop. The problem is keeping them organized.

Sure, Windows offers a number of sort options: name, size, item type, date modified. But those options are of limited utility in keeping a large number of desktop icons organized.

Enter http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ Fences.

Fences organizes my desktop icons.

Fences is a free utility from http://www.stardock.com Stardock Systems. Right now, it’s at version 0.99, but certainly seems pretty bug free. I’m using it under Windows 7, but it works in Vista and Windows XP as well.

Fences is simply a way of keeping your desktop icons organized. It’s not a virtual desktop system. The individual fences around the icons behave a little like any window. You can resize by dragging corners, drag an icon from one fenced off area to another or move them around by grabbing the title bar. In other ways, they don’t behave like a normal window. A fence can never be on top of other windows, for example – they live at the desktop level.

And if you need to see your whole desktop, just double-click on a blank spot. The Fences fade away. Another double-click brings them back. Note that your application windows remain in place. Similarly, if you click on the right lower corner (the small button that minimizes all your apps), your apps are, in fact, minimized — but the fences are still visible.

When you install Fences, you can just take the default layout. After the installation, you can customize the app for different layouts, change the transparency level, enable title bars all the time, only on mouseover or never. As it stands, the free version is quite customizable, and certainly easy to use. You can relabel the default fence titles, too.

Customize layouts, colors, transparencies and labels.

In the end, Fences is a brilliant little utility, although it definitely has that add-on feel. The look and behavior isn’t quite Windows native. I’d love to see a fence for minimized apps, but that might confuse some users if a fence appears and disappears. Using multiple monitors is a bit confusing at first. Fences can live on the second display, but all the autolayout options only put fences on the primary monitor.  But if you’re like me, and have dozens of icons on your desktop, Fences is an invaluable tool.

As is also usual with these sorts of events, both Microsoft and Intel representatives spent time dodging pesky, “off message” questions from mainstream media. Questions about AMD, Apple and other similar topics were deftly and sometimes not-so-deftly dodged.

While what was all very amusing, the tech content is worth talking about. I’m going to touch on a couple of topics near and dear to my heart: multicore performance and energy efficiency.

It’s All about Power

Before you can go about making an operating system power efficient, the OS has to have a pretty deep understanding of the underlying hardware, and how it uses power. Learning all this required building a lot of hooks into Windows to meter power usage.

Microsoft has been capturing this data for years, using tools and hooks built into Windows XP, Vista and now Windows 7. During those releases, the tools and granularity of the data captured improved over time. Microsoft can now capture power data from the CPU, chipsets, individual components, down to the I/O device level (eg, power usage or behavior of an individual device attached to a particular USB port.)

Metering Platform Power Use

But how much feedback is enough? When does it become too much? Then there’s the problem of feedback accuracy. What if what you’re being told is just wrong?

One of the quirks of Windows – and this seems to be true of all versions I’ve used, going back to at least Windows 95, is the highly annoying “your application is not responding.” The app window will then gray out, and you can’t click on it or do anything useful with it.

But the application often is still working. Sometimes it’s in some kind of deadlock state, sometimes it’s just frozen, but mostly, it’s just grinding away on… something. Or it’s waiting for… something. I’ve noticed this happen most often when some heavy duty I/O is occurring, but it can also happen when the system seems completely quiescent.

I’ve often killed an application or process that’s in this state without realizing it was still doing actual work. Lately, whenever that message pops up, I just click the “wait for the app to respond” choice.

Another type of feedback are error messages. Lately, I’ve run into an odd issue with Firefox 3.5.2. It won’t completely quit when I tell it to. All the windows close, but the Firefox*32 process is still running. When I try to launch Firefox again, it tells me “Firefox is still running, you need to quit Firefox before starting.”

Uh, no, Firefox is not running, the kernel process is somehow still stuck in memory. I have to manually kill the process before I can launch Firefox again. It’s almost enough to make me shift to Google Chrome, except that Chrome is so minimalist that making it do what I want it to do creates its own set of annoyances.

In the previous two articles, I wrote about clean installs of 64-bit Windows 7 onto pretty high end hardware. Not everyone has a Core i7 and 12GB of RAM, however. And more than a few users will want to take the upgrade path (as opposed to a clean install) from 32-bit Windows.

So this time, we’re taking the upgrade path. I upgraded one of the gaming rigs that’s used for the Friday Night Follies LAN parties. This particular system has been running Vista Home Premium for about a year now.

So how did the upgrade go?

As I noted, I wanted to see how a 32-bit Windows 7 upgrade would go on fairly mundane hardware. Let’s take a look at the system specs for this particular system:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 running at 3.16GHz
• Gigabyte GA-33M-DS2R micro-ATX motherboard running the Intel G33 chipset
• 2GB Kingston DDR2 @ 800MHz
• AMD Radeon HD 4870 graphics card w/1GB video memory
• 320GB Western Digital 7200RPM hard drive
• Lite-On 16x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
• Onboard Audio
• Silverstone SG03 MicroATX small form factor case
• Seasonic 600W PSU

Overall, this is a compact little system that delivers enough CPU and graphics horsepower for most modern games. But it is by no means bleeding edge, with “only” a dual core processor and 2GB of RAM.

Well, it had 2GB of RAM. The first thing I did was upgrade the memory to 4GB. While Windows 7 would run just fine in 2GB, some of the newer games do a little better with more memory. However, all the other parts in the system were left as-is.

So I pop the Windows 7 Home Premium disc into the system, and was told by Setup that “Upgrade is Disabled.” After a moment of head scratching, I realized I’d popped in the 64-bit version. As we all know, if you want to move from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, it has to be a clean install. After shuffling some discs, I discovered the DVD I’d burned 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

I walked through the setup process for the upgrade. The setup advisor informed me that Windows mail was no longer included with Windows 7, but that Setup would save off my mail settings. That was reassuring, but I didn’t really need it with this particular system, since I’d never actually used Windows mail on it.

The Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturing) is gradually making its way into the hands of users. Subscribers to Microsoft’s TechNet and MSDN already have it in hand, but it will be several months before most users can actually pick up a copy.

I’ve got a Windows 7 reference system running, and it’s humming along nicely. I don’t have much on it yet, although I just downloaded the Windows XP Mode release candidate), which I’ll be checking out for a freelance assignment.

Of course, having the shipping version in hand leads me to my next step: upgrading my primary production system to Windows 7. I’m running the Win7 release candidate now. Since it’s my production system, it’s a little complicated. So here’s what I’m doing to prep for installing Windows 7 RTM on my main machine.

Before I dive into how I’m prepping my production system, I want to mention an interesting oddity I encountered when I attempted a clean install onto the Windows 7 reference system. That system has two physical hard drives. Both had no partitions on them when I booted from the Windows 7 DVD. The primary (first SATA) drive is a 7,200RPM Seagate 7200.10; the secondary drive is a 5400RPM WD GreenPower RE2.

When I installed Windows 7 the first time, it spread itself over both physical drives. The 100MB System Reserved partition and the boot loader was on the primary boot drive, but the rest of Windows 7 was on the secondary drive. This makes my plan to use the secondary drive only for partition backup and test application files problematic. So I had to disconnect that drive, reinstall Windows 7 RTM, then reconnect the drive.

Some people don’t care to have the System Recovery Partition at all. You can prevent this small partition from being created at all by following these handy steps.

Now, back to prepping an existing system for Windows 7.

The good news is that I’m installing the RTM over an existing Windows 7 RC installation. When you do that, you get a new, completely clean install. At the same time, Windows Setup will preserve your existing installation, so you can always retrieve stuff you may have forgotten to back up.

First, of course, is to back up all the stuff that needs backup. Note that I’ve got install files or the install discs for most applications. On the other hand, I want to spare myself some download time for apps I don’t have install files or discs. Then, of course, there’s all the data that needs backup. These include:

• Steam Games. I have a lot of games I’ve gotten from Valve’s Steam online distribution service. Steam has a nifty backup feature, so it’s easy to make backups of all your games. (It’s in the Steam application file menu: Back up my games.) Unfortunately, it’s going to take about 11 DVD-sized files to back them all up. It’s a good thing I’ve got a 4TB external SATA backup drive.
• Data Files. In terms of raw gigabytes, I have more data files than steam games. In fact, my main user folder contains roughly 487 GB of data. Much of that is digital photographs in Nikon RAW format, but there’s a ton of other data, including all the files from past articles I’ve written, stuff in the AppData folder, game backups and so on.
• Other Data Files. These are files I need to explicitly create just to make sure I’ve got them. These would include bookmarks, cookies and other ephemera from the three (!) different browsers I use regularly, Microsoft Office template files, Outlook data files, game save files that weren’t in the user directory and so on.
• Deactivate DRM’s Applications. I’ve got a couple of games that perform online activation (the latest being Blood Bowl), and they need to be either uninstalled or de-activated. One set of applications is Adobe CS4 Master Suite. Here’s where I encountered my first glitch. When I tried to deactivate the Adobe apps, I got a “Deactivation Denied” error, with an error number 194:1. That’s apparently a connectivity problem. When I contacted Adobe’s help line, they tried to deactivate from their end – and also failed. Apparently, the deactivation server was down. So I’ll have to wait a day or so.

Curses, foiled by DRM!

While inconvenient, I’m pretty sure this will iron itself out. It’s not the first time I’ve encountered issues with Adobe activation / deactivation. I’m all for protecting intellectual property, but I do wish these companies would make their processes both more bulletproof and more transparent (I’m looking a you, Ubisoft!)

Once the prep work is complete, the system is ready for Windows 7. I’ll cover the actual setup process in the next update to this diary.

There's a New Kid in Town

This isn’t about Windows 7 itself. That’s for a later post. It’s about building a reference system to test Windows 7.

I’m working on various Windows 7-related projects. For that, I need a reference system.

What’s a reference system? Glad you asked.

A reference system is something that’s a baseline. Since I’m starting fresh, with a new OS, I wanted to build a system in which I could compare other systems and components. This would necessarily be a high end system, but it wouldn’t be an overclocker’s dream. It is, after all, a reference system. So everything needed to be bog-standard.

Some of the parts for the Windows 7 reference system.

I want to distinguish this from what I call a testbed. I have several here, all running in massive Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 cases. They’re constantly evolving, used to test new motherboard, CPUs, graphics and storage. My intent for the reference system that I just built will be constant going forward, for the next six months at a minimum.

That doesn’t mean it needed to be low performing. I’m working from the thesis that today’s high end is tomorrow’s midrange, which then becomes the low end in a few years. So we’ll start with a fairly high end system. Let’s run down the list of components.

• CPU:  Intel Core i7 975
• Motherboard:  Intel DX58SO
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Ultra 120
• Graphics:  ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB stock
• Memory:  OCZ DDR3-1333 (@1066MHz) 6GB kit (3 x 2GB modules)
• Power Supply:  Corsair TX850W 850W 80-plus certified
• Hard Drive:  (Primary) Seagate 1TB 7200.12
• Hard Drive:  (Secondary) Western Digital 1TB RE2-GP GreenPower
• Optical Drive:  LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray / HD-DVD / DVD burner combo drive
• Case:  CM Storm Scout (Coolermaster)

So it’s a high end system, but it’s not an extreme high end system. That was the intent. The Scout, by Coolermaster’s CM Storm brand, is a useful mid-tower design. It’s not massive, it’s easy to move around and more important, it’s typical. It’s not huge, like many enthusiasts cases, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

For example, you can’t install a really large motherboard, like the Asus Rampage II Extreme. Physically, it would fit, but the back-facing SATA ports would be completely inaccessible. Airflow could be better. But it’s relatively compact and easy to move around. Since this reference build won’t see a lot of frequent hardware changes, the relatively small interior space isn’t a drawback.

Similarly, Intel’s DX58SO is pretty standard fare from Intel. It suffers from having only four memory sockets and unfortunate placement of several of the SATA ports. But it’s reliable, fits easily into standard ATX cases and works.

AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 is not a factory overclocked card, but does support DX10.1. At some point, we’ll have DX11 cards, but since Nvidia doesn’t support DirectX 10.1 features, in went the ATI card. It’s certainly speedy enough in modern games. The hard drives are pretty standard fare. Why a pair of one terabyte drives? The secondary drive is for storing various OS configuration image files. I typically have different image files backed up for gaming benchmarks, content creation testing and so on. And, of course, the LG drive will allow me to check out Blu-ray playback, as well as burn DVDs as needed.

All of these components should give me a pretty good baseline to judge component behavior under Windows 7. Later, I’ll benchmark this baby, but I only just got the Windows 7 RTM installed. I’ll post some results when I get them.

Of course, now that the shipping version of Win7 is up on Microsoft’s Technet, I’m downloading Windows 7 Pro, which is going on my production system. But that’s also a tale for another time.