Windows 7 at office

I recently got a new machine at office. I have Windows 7 loaded on it now. It is an Acer Emachine 1210 with 19" monitor.

That model originally had Vista but now they provide it loaded with windows 7 also. I was waiting for this to happen since I did not want to work on Vista. I mean, Vista is ok, I have used it at home for more than a year but at office I do not want to use my time on solving Software issues and learning the difficult method to do something which was easy in Windows XP. Furthermore the Vista installation did not have any drivers installed. The display was weird with the wide-screen monitor trying to display standard 4:3 resolution screen. I had to install the drivers for graphics, monitor, and even the mouse driver to be able to use it for a week.

The story goes like this. The support guys tried to upgrade the OS for that machine to Win7 from Vista(Upgrade is a misnomer here since there were going to replace it with blank copy of a new installation requiring all software to be reinstalled) but for some reason the machine refused to listen to him and kept rebooting in Vista.Then complete machine was replaced and he brought another machine which had Win7 already on it. That was disappointing since I wanted to see how they upgrade to Win7.

So my emachine now has Win7. It was disappointing to see that Aero was not working and hence I was not able to change the color of the task-bar. It looks so irritating that I had to change the theme to Windows classic to be able to tolerate it. It seem there is some problem with the rating system and it crashes, so the machine is not able to rate itself and turn ON the more advanced feature like Aero.

Apart from that it is better than Vista in speed and smoothness. I was not able to install Cisco VPN client on it. I have to figure out how to do it since it is very important for my work. Right now I also have another machine so it is not much of a problem.

All in all it is OK. Provides good functionality. Uses less memory and the hibernate function actually works this time around for me to resume all my open windows the next day directly. And this means that I can switch off the machine and save some power to do something good for the mother earth.

Solved: Problems installing VirtualBox 2.2.2 over 2.2.0

I use VirtualBox on Windows host with Linux running as guest. Usually it is Ubuntu, Fedora or both. I was running VirtualBox version 2.2.0 and tried to install the latest version 2.2.2 (as of 05/03/2009 ). It has a fix for the clipboard problem in which copy paste operation stopped working.
When I tried to install the new version of VirtualBox it would ask me all the questions and permissions and just about when it should be finishing the install, it rolled back the install process. Also uninstalling of the VirtualBox 2.2.0 failed with the same style. Rollback at the last step.

I searched around and they said some workarounds to install the new version.

• Search in the c:\windows\inf folder and delete .inf files which refer to the VirtualBox. (Didn't like the idea of deleting files manually)
•  There was a registry copy paste from LOCAL_USER to LOCAL_MACHINE. (The paste part did not work for me. regedit refused to paste the .reg file)

Step followed by me as follows:

1. I tried to repair the setup by running the old setup file and selecting the repair option.
2. Then I disabled all the network interfaces of the VMs and tried to remove the VirtualBox from the old setup. Surprisingly it worked. Maybe the new Host Only networking added recently has been the problem.
3. Then I rebooted the machine just to be safe.
4. Started the install of the 2.2.2 version and it successfully finished.

I don't think the first step did any good. Had tried it earlier on another machine and nothing happened. Step 2-4 are what it seem is the solution.

Currently I'm running the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope as VM.
The Visual Effect for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is enabled in VirtualBox and the 3d accelaration seems to be working better now. It did not work on 2.2.0 and earlier.

Windows 7 : Windows Experience Index score -> 5.5

I had posted my WEI score for Vista previously here and now that the new version of windows is available(Windows 7 beta) I thought I should do that for this one also.

So. I got the score of 5.5 in Windows 7. The sub scores are as follows

Processor 6.3
Memory(RAM) 5.5
Graphics 7.9
Gaming graphics 6.0
Primary Hard Disk5.9

This is with the AMD 6000+ Processor running at an overclocked speed 3300Mhz.

The score for my previous HDD (WD 250 GB PATA  ) was 5.3. This is my relatively new HDD Seagate 500 GB(32 MB cache) so the score for Hard disk has jumped a little.

Now an Interesting thing with the score is that some scores have moved up even though the hardware is the same. I mean I have not changed my graphics card, processor RAM etc. But the scores are different this time. Maybe the 64 bit OS makes some difference

My previous scores were 5.6, 5.9, 5.9, 5.9, and 5.3 respectively for Vista. The scores for Vista were capped at 5.9 so its understandable why the score graphics increased. But my Memory score has actually gone down and processor score has moved up. Very Interesting.

Since the WEI Base score is the least score out of the component scores, I got the Windows 7 base score of 5.5.
My plan to have a Hard disk setup in RAID 0 has still not materialized. Now I think Its better to have a single fast disk rather than couple of  disk in RAID. Maybe my troubles with partition disappearing due to infighting between Vista and Windows 7 has something to do about my new belief. The WD veloci-raptor might be something I'd like to try out.


Also I have managed to attach three 1200 mm fans for cooling and circulating air in my cabinet now and the temperature is in control. I've got 2 intake and 1 exhaust fans.
The motherboard temperature keeps exceeding the values set by ProbeII monitoring software. Maybe my change of CPU heat sink-Fan has left little airflow over the Crosshair motherboard chip set.

 The video driver is an beta provided by nvidia and available by Windows update and the other drivers are as provided by Windows 7 default. Hopefully these scores will go up when Windows 7 hits the stands and vendors provide optimized drivers for the new OS.

My upgrade wish list would be additional RAM, a new fast veloci-raptor HDD, and wireless kbd-mouse.

Cheers
Kunal

Wordpad in Widows 7 does not support .doc files

Wordpad in Windows 7 does not support .doc files. That means pretty much all the word documents you are likely to come across are not supported by this bundled word processor in Windows 7.

It does support Word 2007 format (.docx)though and also the other open standard formats such as .odt files which are used by OpenOffice. The look and feel of the interface has also been changed to make it look like a Office 2007 application.

 

Frankly I never liked the new interface of Office 2007. Confusing and frustrating for people used to the earlier interface of the previous versions of Office. 

Hoping that they add the support for .doc files in the release version of windows. Another thing they should add is the support for pdf files. That would be perfect for the little applicaton called Wordpad.