Windows 7: Byte Me

I've had to play with Windows 7 in the workplace lately.

It's been...interesting?

First of all, Microsoft did improve heavily from Vista. Vista was frustration wrapped in a pretty eye candy shell, and no matter what you did to try and enjoy the candy the frustration was just itching to burst through and make you gag.

At least now it doesn't nag you quite as much.

That said, I've still had issues with Windows 7.

I hate not being able to easily run something as administrator. I find that I have to type "cmd" into the search bar and then right click on the result to "run as administrator."

We use a VNC server to remotely work on many of the desktops in our organization. Windows XP? It wasn't a problem. Under 7 (and Vista when we tested that abomination) we needed to run something like UltraVNC, because the version we were running isn't compatible with the security model used in newer versions of Windows.

I also was more than a little irritated when I could no longer run XLiveCD, a CD disc that has a standalone set of Cygwin tools and X Windows client for Windows. Pop in the CD, run it, and it allows me to secure shell into a Linux system at the office and run my mail client or other tools on my office system. Exit out, and there's no trace of anything on the client computer. Really handy for getting some work done in the field. Windows 7 won't allow me to run it, no matter what I've tried (compatibility settings, permissions, running as administrator...) How annoying!

Another item; I had to change some permissions on icons placed on the desktop of a system. They were icons for everyone, but because of the way my boss made a batch file the icons were placed in a directory for everyone to use under Users but the permissions were set to just the administrative user running the batch file. I went into Users (since documents and settings is no more) and went into all users (after I finally found the setting for showing hidden files and folders, since the file menu is gone now from Explorer windows.) I went into All Users, but even as an administrative user I couldn't get into the "desktop" folder.

I swore a few times and my supervisor came over. "Oh no, it's not there. Go up one and go into Shared." (It may have been Public, I'm recalling this from memory and am too lazy to look it up.) Sure enough, that folder had the Desktop folder for all users who log into the machine.

"That's stupid! The folder sounds like one used as a common sharing area for any user to share documents with each other..."

"I know. But that's what it is now."

Bloody @#$.

Then I had to reset the permissions by selecting the folder containing the desktop files and resetting the files from there, since I couldn't just select the files and tell it to change permissions to those inherited by the parent folder as I could under XP.

Then today I had an application that is niche, used by only a few of our users but "vital" (due to more mandates from outside our control) for their job function. The program looks for "Windows NT 4.0 SP 6 or higher", and installed .NET runtime 1.1, if that tells you anything about the age of the program. It looks like something shoveled together at the last minute and shoved out the door, then as long as the #@#% thing ran the company never bothered to improve it (hey, they have a contract to supply it and we're mandated to use it! So why should they improve it?!)

Can you guess where this is going?

I contacted the company, saying that we have this program that apparently has problems with Windows 7. Is there an update or patch?

"Nope. The workaround is to use a Windows XP SP 3 system until we get a chance to test it with Windows 7, maybe sometime next month."

Um...you're aware the Windows 7 has been released, right? And if you actually developed the product, you should have had a copy of the betas of Win7 to...I don't know...test with several months ago, yeah?

Great. Another company producing shovelware.

And I can't get the "compatibility" mode of anything to work with this piece of crud. Then I saw something that gave me hope! Windows 7 XP mode!

Basically, it's a virtual machine running Windows XP for backwards compatibility!

I downloaded the 500 meg installer from microsoft, installed the virtual machine software, then installed the update patch (MS actually had a convenient web page with a "install this, then install this, then install this...set of instructions and download buttons.) I was getting irritated that I had to run some "Authentic windows" verification program, several times for reasons unknown to me other than probably clicking the link too many times while it was pausing to think about whether it actually wanted to do what I told it to do, and finally everything installed!

Then I created a new virtual machine. Oddly enough it said for memory I could allocate 4 to 511 meg. I skimmed the wizard's instructions (don't most people) and just clicked "next"; it beeped at me with an error. Apparently the default memory size in the box was 512, despite the warning that it could only go up to 511. My supervisor wondered what was going on when I blurted out, "How fucking retarded is this thing?!"

He just shrugged and went back to what he was doing once I explained what Windows was doing again. Because really, how hard is it to check that error condition?

Fixed it, created the VM, and double clicked it, giddy with excitement that I may have found the solution to our problem. The computer hesitated, gave a busy pointer for a moment, then *blip*...blue screen of death.

The machine rebooted, and I tried again. *blam.* Blue screen of death.

Yes, I found a great Windows simulator here.

I slammed the desk with a fist and moved on to Googling the error. So far I found griping about problems with XP Mode on Windows 7, but no solutions. The last thing I did before leaving was upgrade the BIOS since it was an older computer, but haven't tested it again.

So what do I think of Windows 7? It has potential. It looks nice, it has great features, it's leaps ahead of Windows Vista, but it's still frustrating as hell half the time and the rest of the time it's mildly irritating. It's broken a lot of software, and if you're using software by developers that played loose and wild with best practices you'll be lucky if your software works properly.

There are those that would say it's just because I'm used to "bad habits" from Windows XP. Perhaps they are right to some degree. On the other hand, every irritation is one more reminder why I have come to prefer the Mac as my computing platform. It's not fanboy fanaticism or a need to feel superior to Windows users. It's because I find it far less frustrating to use and it doesn't get in my way even half as much as Windows.