Windows 7 Rant

Okay, so I’ve used Windows 7 a bit on and off and I’m fed up with it. Like all other versions of Windows it’s basically shite.

Why?

Because Microsoft seems to want, for the most part, to not actually be in the computing industry, but more in the ‘computing appliance’ one. Windows 7 I’m sure works great if you have a box built out of 100% certified and Microsoft-approved hardware and you just want to load stuff onto it and use it without a moments thought.

I don’t. I’m running it on a Black Macbook, I want and need to be able to fiddle with various settings and dig under the surface for when things go wrong. I want to understand how my machine is actually doing what it is doing so I can optimise things. I’m a developer, I want and need to access to the tools to tune my system and monitor it, not just from a coding perspective but from a user’s one as well.

Windows 7 just gets in the way, like all the Windows OSes before it, trying to dress things up, hide them away or just refuse to acknowledge they exist so they don’t have to put them in the hands of users. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Yes, Windows 7 is in beta so it can’t be expected to have full driver support for everything but if my linux install can do it, so can Microsoft. I mean seriously, people have to pay for this shit.

Nothing I’ve done has managed to get everything to work on Win7. The performance is abysmal, the sound doesn’t work and the brightness and volume controls don’t work, which is very annoying when suspend turns off your backlight and there is no obvious way to re-enable it. It’s shit like that which I find mindnumbingly irritating. Surely if you could turn it off, you have enough access to the device to turn it on again, why wont you let me?

I’ve tried multiple versions of the boot camp drivers, hacked up drivers, custom drivers. Nothing bloody works and the so called ‘troubleshooting wizard’ just flails around impotently like a blind idiot, flailing at the walls in the hope it might hit something to make things better.

I take back all the nice things I said about Windows 7. It’s nice if you want to buy a computing applicance, not if you want a computer. Then it sucks and it sucks hard.