Dark Liquid

Been using Windows 7 a little bit and hit a few snags. It didn’t detect the Macbook hardware very well but sticking in the OSX Leopard Install Disc and installing the drivers sorted that out. The two-finger scrolling isn’t very smooth and to right click you need to hold two fingers on the touchpad then press the mouse button. Weird. I’ve installed a bunch of security updates and done everything it recommends (install anti-virus, run a Windows Defender scan, etc) and I’m just waiting for the anti-virus scan to finish. So far it’s not been too annoying though and most of the dialogues have actually been useful and helpful. The only thing that I’ve been annoyed by so far is the autorun functionality. The Windows Explorer program displays your devices (when clicking on the Computer link) as a bunch of icon button things and clicking them only does autorun it seems, to actually look inside the disk I had to open the tree view of the computer tab link thingy and browse into the disk. Didn’t seem very intuitive. Also, the autorun popped up asking whether I wanted to run the autorun programs but when the autorun programs actually run, it asked again about whether or not I would like to allow them to modify my computer which was kind of annoying since I’d already agreed to run them. I get that running the program and allowing it full system access are two different things but it would be nice if perhaps they could detect it was an installer or something and ask me this all at once rather than have two similar questions asked separately in quick succession.

Aero seems to run a little slowly which is quite disappointing considering compiz under Linux seems to run very well now I’ve applied the changes I mentioned in my last post. Perhaps the drivers or graphics card needs driving in some better way similar to the changes I made under Linux but no idea how I’d make them, sounds like I need to do some searching on that one if it’s even possible.

IE8 is still as horrible as IE7. I hate it’s interface, I hate the way it does things and it renders stuff weird in some cases, such as the TinyMCE controls on Wordpress’ Post Entry box. I just find it a chore to use and it UI just seems to get in the way of what I want to do. I haven’t used it for doing anything complicated like debugging a javascript app or anything like that but I don’t imagine I’d be in for a fun time if I did given my previous experience with older versions of IE.

I found the font rendering looked pretty shitty by default, but playing around with the ClearType tool made it all render much better and I can’t really complain now, though I think the rendering under Linux looks better.

Conclusions

So far though, no major complaints, most things seems fairly easy to find and fairly well explained by the help text. I think generally the actual system maintenance and customisation tools are much easier to use and far more friendly to new users than they used to be in older versions. Not a bad operating system as far as they go so far, but not tried to do much stuff yet, still only really had some basic usage out of it, not tried developing anything or messing with multimedia of any kind yet so the jury is still out on that one.