Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 is now being run on one of our computers as a production machine.
Our set up is that all workstations connect to our domain server and all data is stored on that server so there is no locally stored data. Thus we can test Windows 7 in a real working environment without the risk of losing any data if things go seriously wrong.
The first viewing of Windows 7 beta left us unimpressed, however this release does seem a litle better.
It installed fine. Just a little annoyance when first installing there is a long delay without any progress bar while the disk is being formatted. Beyond that the install was trouble free. Most drivers were installed without the need for manufacturers disks but when we did the Vista drivers seemed to work OK.
We connected it to the domain without problem and at first glance it appeared to access the local network with better response times than Vista.
Internet access also seems to be improved.
The comparison with Vista is acute because we have set both machines to use a single keyboard, mouse and monitor via a KVM switch. Transferring from Vista to Win7 goes a dream, however there is a delay before mouse and keyboard respond when going from Win7 to Vista.
We are not installing MS Office on this machine yet but we have installed Open Office, Firefox & Thunderbird, Opera, Safari and FileZilla all of which loaded fine and seem to work without issues.
We installed Free AVG antivirus (Vista version) pro temp and this seems to be fine.
We are only at the end of our first 24 hours of testing so it is early days.
We will keep you posted of significant issues as we find them.

Read More..

We were planning to ship a client a new domain server based on ClearOS.
Good spec machine with 2 x 1 TB hard disk in mirror. We got the operating system installed, the disks mirrored and the configuration started easily within 2 hours.
Our client then bought some software (without our recommendation or involvement) and it only runs on Windows server platforms using Microsoft SQL Server. So our Linux based, easy to configure domain server has now to be installed with the very expensive, very slow, very cumbersome Windows 2008 server software. (I had hoped never to have to install one of these again!).
We placed another disk in for the system to reside on and at our third attempt managed to get the OS loaded. Ok now time to set up the mirror on the 1 TG disk. Remember apart from the extra hard disk this is exactly the same hardware as we used before - not a new machine with different hardware - exactly the same kit.
We created the mirror (using the whole disk) and after 2 hours the format was only 24% complete! Six hours later we return to the machine to find the mirror resynching but only 51% complete!! I thought overnight disk formats went out with Novell Netware V2!!! And what is it resynching, there is no data on the disk!!!! (No, I do not want an answer but I want the boys and girls at Microsoft to ask themselves that question).
Has anyone in Microsoft ever tried to do this operation? I cannot believe that any developer would think this level of performance was acceptable.
So wake up world. There is no need to design and write programs that only run on Windows platforms. There is no need to rely on the inefficient Windows software. Or pay the over inflated prices Microsoft charge. (Hey, did you know that to buy a 3 pack set of Win7 OEM costs more that buying 3 individual packs).
Lets not settle for mediocrity, lets push for systems that allow us to benefit from the high performance hardware we can now get.

Read More..