The Adventures of a Systems Engineer

It seems Windows has learned a lot since the horrifically terrible release of Vista. I have been running Windows 7 Professional for the last two weeks and will attempt to sum up the 5 reasons why Windows 7 Rocks! It no only installs quickly, it also runs like a dream … so far anyway.

1. The Task Bar- Windows 7 features a totally redsigned task bar. It like grouped icons on steroids. The task bar now only has a handfull of icons- one for each running application.


Multiple instances of a running program are grouped together and you can preview the window by hovering the mouse over the task bar icon. This features is great when web-browsing. IE and Firefox both support the preview of each open tab.



2. Media Center- Media Center seems to get better and better with each release. The UI is more smooth and usable then in XP and Vista. Amazingly Media Center is included in the Professional Edition of Windows 7!
3. Driver Support- I have installed Windows 7 on my MSI Wind u100 netbook and desktop, both of which are newer systems (less than a year old). An interesting thing happened after the install- All of the drivers were detected. I can truly say that this is a first. The driver support in Windows 7 is rock solid. I plugged my phone in and Windows automatically found and downloaded a driver from Windows Update (granted it was a Windows Mobile phone).
4. Speed- Windows 7 run much smoother then Vista. I saw a great improvement in usability on my netbook and my desktop was much more stable. Windows 7 requires less memory which frees up resources for your applications.
5. Battery Life – I have not done extensive tests, but am seeing a much better battery life on my netbook. So far I have seen around a 15%-20% longer battery life.

In short Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista. That said there are still some caveats. The most major one being the price. Yeah its nice, but $200 nice – in this economy probably not. I have also found a few applications that worked well under Vista that refuse to run in Windows 7.

Google has had sync available for quite some time, but up until recently it has only allowed for contacts and calendars to be synchronized between your phone and Google.The feature has been a great and allowed users to easily back their data up to the “cloud” where it will forever reside. Recently this feature got even better with the addition of the ability to sync mail and the addition of push. Now your phone can maintain a connection with Google allowing new emails, contact updates, and calendar updates to be automatically pushed to your phone. So far the service has been great (flaky at times though). The only down side- watching your cellphone battery die much faster.

I got back from my trip to Europe about a week ago. I have to say the MSI Wind U100 worked amazingly well. It was great for checking email and even doing some like php coding and photo editing with photoshop. The Wind’s card reader was also very good for unloading the 3,000+ photos  from camera memory sticks as they filled up. This of course all ended about a week and a half into the trip. I happened to get off a train at what I thought was Rome, but was not. After realizing that it was the wrong stop I ran back toward the train while my netbook flew out of my pack in the other direction. Once I got back on the train I opened up my netbook to reveal a broken screen .

I just ordered a new screen for around $100 from eBay and it should arrive soon. It was an expensive mistake, but on the bright side I now have an excuse to rip the netbook open and replace the screen. Look for the results in a post within the next week.

I recently order an MSi Wind 10″ Netbook. I will be traveling to Europe in a week and wanted something small and portable that will let me surf the web and do some on-the-road web development. After hours of searching the MSi U100-451US seemed like the best choice. I picked one up for $279.99 at eWiz.com.

Specs

Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz (with hyperthreading)

RAM: 1 GB DDR (PC5300 (upgraded to 2GB)

Included Peripherals: On board mic, 0.3 MP digital camera, wireless, 10/100 Ethernet,  bluetooth

Adding a 1GB RAM Stick

A great how to on installing RAM in the Wind is available here: http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/msi-wind-ram.aspx. One thing that is not mentioned on the webpage is that some models of the Wind have a “warranty void if removed” sticker covering one of the screws on the bottom of the netbook.  It took me far longer then it should have to realize that there was a screw under the sticker that was preventing me from removing the bottom.

A word to the wise, do not go with really cheap RAM. I bough a cheap RAM stick from ebay for $12 and it did not work. I ended up going to the local computer store and getting a Crucial 1GB PC 5300 RAM stick for around $40.

Installing Vista

One of my first orders of business was to install Vista Ultimate on my new netbook. At this point you are probably laughing “haha Vista on a netbook, what an idiot.” I was a little apprehensive about installing Vista on such an underpowered machine (my main pc running Vista has 8 GB of RAM with a Quad core processor). I was inspired by this article: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4505 which actually says they saw an important in running Vista over XP in terms of both performance and battery life. Low and behold Vista runs like a dream, even with the sidebar running and the Aero theme running. In fact the thing that really hurt my “User Experience Rating” the most was the GPU, which actually scored respectably for a netbook. Aside from the GPU, the CPU scored the next worse which again is not surprising from the atom chip, but this is still respectable for a netbook.

These results were after I downloaded all of the drivers and MSi utilities from the MSi website. Surprisingly all of the Vista drivers are available from the support site. The version says Windows XP 32bit oallthe downloads, but they contain Vista drivers as well.

Adobe CS4

After installing Vista and downloading serveral hundred megabytes of updates I loaded up Adobe CS4. Again you are probablly saying something to the effect “Photoshop won’t run on a netbook”. That was my exact initial response, but I figured I would give it a try anyway. I was pleasently suprised. Photoshop actually ran very smoothly and the layout changed to take advantage of the netbook’s quirky resolution. Now I’m not saying that I have an amazing editing machine, but I can open and edit psd files on the go as well  as fire up dreamweaver to do some web developement.

Conclusion

The MSi Wind is a solid mobile computing solution. I find myself using my netbook more and more. Its ultraportable and ultralight design make it perfect for a college student who wants to take notes in class or those that want to be able to use the internet on the go without havng the carry around a heavy full-sized laptop. It also can run some fairly intense applications like Photoshop with only a slight delay.