Comments on: Windows 7 – It Just Works… As Long as You Don’t Use It

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:46:13 +0000

Damn Si, that sounds maddening. Like “throw the laptop out the window” stuff.

I continue to see “rotting” behavior in my Windows install, I noticed I’m rebooting every 4 days or so, where as for the first month or two I don’t think I rebooted once things got stable. Around month 5 I started to notice crap behavior and now more and more.

It’s really subtle stuff, stuff you know that only a reinstall or new profile would fix — but both are so damn inconvenient I don’t know how those are actually valid solutions.

Anyway, if it helps, I’m enjoying my MacBook Pro. It’s not amazing or anything, just a solid/consistent experience.

By: Si

Si — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:38:11 +0000

Completely true.

When I first installed Win 7 RC on my laptop back in August, I was impressed with the fast, polished and very responsive desktop. Had MS finally got it right?

No chance! After nearly 2 months of light usage (Firefox), things started to go wrong. Suddenly, and for no explained reason, Windows would take nearly 5 minutes to enable the network interfaces after booting or resuming from sleep – including Wi-fi, so rendered my laptop useless for it’s primary purpose – browsing the web.

This still continues and I cannot find any solution – despite following the mostly useless tips from those MSFT/MVP/MCSE (whatever they call themselves now!) forums.

It gets better. Now, my laptop will not resume from sleep *at all*. I need to hard reboot it. And that’s another thing, it now takes many moons to even boot the thing. Over all, the system is now slow, unresponsive and worse than it ever was under Vista (which takes some doing!)

I have installed no software on this laptop, other than Firefox and Open Office. It’s also virus/malware/spamware/etcware free ..

My main desktops at home and work both run Linux. Neither ever slow down, even after filling with truckloads of crap. My home Linux desktop is now at about 5 years without a reinstall (just updates) – still as snappy as ever with all it’s Compiz goodness!

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:46:31 +0000

My primary reason for trying a mac out again is that I wanted to work with video and audio a bit more and knew there would be more software and support focused for Mac users in this realm. Also, after having used Windows 7 for as long as I have, and seeing it starting to do the same “rot” behavior that 2K, XP, 2k3 and Vista had done before it, I lost all hope that at any point in the future Microsoft would manufacturer an OS that wasn’t going to start fighting me in the long-run.

While my motivations were less than pure, I’m glad I did. I’m enjoying the Mac so far. It’s not eye-boggling wonderful, just stable, fast and easy to use.

By: JaseF

JaseF — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:31:39 +0000

I’ve dabbled with Linux, I’ve never been entirely satisfied by Windows. But I’ve never really used Macs. Why did you leave them 2 years ago? I imagine you wrote an article on that?

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:35:14 +0000

As a new user of a MacBook Pro, I have to say after 2 weeks of use, I am really seeing what this “it just works” business is all about.

At the same time my Windows 7 RC desktop is starting to develop retarded behavior — like when I doc my iPhone now, the “Installing USB Device drivers…” and “New USB device attached” notifications cycle endlessly… not to mention that I’ve had this iPhone connected to this PC for months… what a piece of crap.

By: ouija

ouija — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:28:21 +0000

I completely agree. I find it utterly hilarious that my HP Pavilion Elite, which is retailed as a “Vista Compatible System” runs a thousand times better as a HACKINTOSH system (Using iDeneb v5 with the latest 10.5.8 updates) and even scores almost TWICE as fast when benchmarking against my Vista partition (using Geekbench).

Microsoft really needs to get their shit together.

I thought I’d try out this “OEM” version I found of Windows 7 this past week (7600.16385) and, although I can say that I was impressed with it’s performance vs Vista when it first booted up (mind you it wouldn’t install properly using my RAID drivers; I had to first install Vista and then do a “custom” install/overwrite from within Vista using the Windows7 disk), it’s really quite a buggy OS still with half of my programs not working (even WinRAR has issues with shell integration).

It’s really sad, especially since I just updated my Mac OSX partition to 10.5.8 yesterday and it ran almost flawlessly after (although I did have to reinstall a few kexts and remove one to get the firewire working) but it now runs EVEN FASTER with this latest update.

I’m just so frustrated how a new MS product or OS means the reliance on having a NEW COMPUTER just to be able to handling running the fucking thing, when OSX can make something OLD run EVEN BETTER.

Stupid. Just my 2 cents.

By: Mac OS X Offers 2x Battery Life than Vista or Windows 7 | The "Break it Down" Blog

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:12:01 +0000

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