For the past eight years, ever since I got tired of building them myself, our primary workstations have been Dells. They’ve served us well; only a couple of times have we had hardware problems and when we did, they were promptly fixed. My current system is an XPS and it’s a behemoth of a machine that weighs a ton and sounds like a 747 taking off when you power it up. I’ve had it for about two and a half years now and although I’m running Windows 7 on it and it works well, but it maxes out at 4 GB of RAM. Once upon a time, that was plenty for anything you’d ever want to do, but today, with VMs and video editing and a 64 bit OS, one longs for more.

The Dell XPS is a loud monster, but it gets the job done

Tom’s been chugging along with a Dell P4 for even longer, about 3 or 3 and a half years now. I’ve been trying to talk him into getting a new system for over a year, but he has an aversion to “new” (unlike me – I love nothing more than setting up a brand new computer). Finally, last night, he decided to take the plunge, and we ordered a pair of HP m9600ts with Nehalem (Core i7) processors and loaded down with RAM. Price with a $300 discount coupon for the configuration with 12 GB of DDR3 RAM was only $1149 – who could say no to that?

The HP may not look as impressive as the XPS, but the price and specs were right

The most significant thing about this purchase is that it represents a radical departure from previous brand loyalty. We might have been more hesitant, if not for the Media Center PC that we got from HP a year or so ago. It’s been a great, fast system and the only problem we’ve had with it was a hard drive that died – something that can happen with any computer vendor.

We probably would have bought Dells again, if not for the fact that a similarly configured Dell came in at hundreds of dollars more. We were also encouraged by the reviews of the HP that said it’s not only an excellent value for the money, but is also very quiet. That will be nice.

I look forward to posting a full review here once they arrive and we get a chance to play with them for a while.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

You would have to be living in a cave to not know that the country – indeed, most of the world – is in the middle of a “down” economy. We’re bombarded every day with horror stories from the media, and even if we’ve been lucky enough to escape the direct impact, most of us know at least one or two people who have lost their jobs or taken pay cuts recently. Companies are slashing their budgets; this includes giant IT companies formerly thought to be invulnerable to financial woes – and it shows in big ways (such as the layoffs of “rock star” employees) and small ones (such as going on the cheap for food and entertainment at big conferences, compared to past years).

What effect is this having on data security? If capex budgets are cut, that could result in foregoing new firewalls, servers capable of running new, more secure software, etc. If opex budgets are cut, security services may suffer. If IT staff is cut, that means fewer personnel to ensure that the network is secure. Another, perhaps overlooked effect of the economic downturn is that more companies are turning to telecommuting to save money for both the company and the employees. With more remote users accessing the network, the security threat rises.

Will all of these factors lead to a perfect storm, making network security breaches even more common than they’ve been in the past? Or will companies recognize that security is one area where short term cost cuts may result in long term liabilities that will cost far more?

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

Okay, I admit I am not a fan of the new logon screen background in the Windows 7 RC. I thought the one in the beta was much classier.

 
Original Windows 7 logon screen in the beta

This new one is friendly, what with the little bird and the spring of greenery, but not very, well, professional looking.

The new Windows 7 RC logon screen

It’s just not … me. It was crying out to be changed. So that’s what I did. Now I have my own custom picture on the logon screen.

Windows 7 logon screen with custom background

That’s much better. If you don’t care for the flowery look, you can find the instructions for changing it here:
http://www.blogsdna.com/2698/you-can-customize-windows-7-logon-background-officially.htm 

Or if you aren’t comfortable with making the registry edits, you can download a Logon Changer program to let you do it through the UI:
http://tweaks.com/software/tweakslogon/ 

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Okay, I’m happier with the RC now. I discovered that one of the few things I didn’t like about the beta has been fixed, and it’s an important one. The drivers for my HP Officejet 6310 in the beta would not allow me to set the print quality. The option to choose Fast Draft was just gone, regardless of which drivers I used.  I was beginning to suspect it was an Evil HP Conspiracy designed to make me use up my ink cartridge faster. But in the RC, I have the ability to print fast drafts back again. Hurray! I don’t really print all that often anymore, but when I do, I usually don’t need super duper high quality. This makes up for most of the other stuff.

That’s especially true since I bit the bullet and bought CorelDraw x4, which has the newest version of PhotoPaint, which does work just fine on Windows 7. I know PhotoShop is everybody’s darling, but I just have always liked the PhotoPaint interface much better. Now I have it and the full functionality of my printer back. Things are looking up.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

Okay, I’m being overly dramatic in that headline. The RC isn’t a giant step backward or anything – but it always wasn’t (at least on my Dell XPS) quite as trouble-free an install as the Win 7 public beta was. Both installations were clean installs to new partitions. Both were done on the same computer, with no hardware changes having been made. I installed the same applications on both; even made a list based on my beta installation to ensure that.

I had read that the RC would have support for more devices than the beta had, so I was surprised when two cards that had been recognized automatically when I installed the beta required me to go hunt down drivers in the RC. Neither my sound card (a very common Creative Soundblaster X-Fi) nor my external TV tuner (a not so common AutumnWave OnAir Creator) worked off the bat as they had in the beta. Finding and installing the drivers wasn’t a big deal, but I’m just saying … .

Then there’s this quirky little problem I’m having with settings not “sticking.” When I installed, my middle monitor wasn’t set as the primary monitor. No big deal, easy to change. But then this morning, for no apparent reason (without rebooting or doing anything related to the display settings), it suddenly reverted back, making my right monitor the primary monitor again. Changing it back caused the gadgets that were on the middle screen (where I wanted them) to move to my left monitor and I had to manually move them all back to their proper places. Again, this isn’t a huge big deal, but it’s annoying and I hope it doesn’t become a habit. That never happened in the betas.

Much more serious is the bug that Ed Bott calls a “doozy” in his blog post at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1003 . This one can cause programs you install to be unable to run if you install them before installing the fix that was released a few days ago. If you have updates configured to install automatically,  sure to install the update before you install any programs to save yourself some grief.

Speaking of programs, I was absolutely thrilled when I found that my ancient Corel PhotoPaint v10 installed and ran on the Windows 7 beta (it wouldn’t work at all in Vista). Well, that happiness was short-lived; I was able to install it on the RC but it won’t open. No matter what compatibility mode I use, I get this disheartening message:

Then there’s the fact that IE 8 in the RC keeps giving me the “Welcome to Internet Explorer 8” spiel every time I open it after rebooting, and wanting me to go through the little setup wizard to select my search provider, accelerators, etc. Why?  Also of note: in the beta, Windows 7 made whatever partition it was installed on appear as C: (only when you were booted into Win 7; if you had a dual boot configuration and booted back into your previous OS, drive letters reverted back to whatever they had been before). In the RC, that doesn’t seem to happen. I installed it onto the drive I had named E: in the beta and it was still called E: in the RC OS. However, this might be because I started the RC installation from within Windows, rather than booting from the installation disc.  Or it may be because I already had an instance of 7 installed (the beta). I’ll have to do further experimenting to determine whether there has really been a change in behavior here.

On the positive side, performance seems a bit snappier than the beta. It’s also easier to distinguish the active/open programs on the taskbar from programs that are just pinned there (I had no problem distinguishing between them before, but Tom did so I guess this is a good thing). I haven’t had the problems with Adobe Reader and Flash that I had in the beta; they installed and worked without a bunch of hassle this time.

So … I don’t hate the RC. I still like it much better than Vista. But I also don’t love it to death, which was the way I felt about the beta. From my point of view, on my particular computer, with my particular configuration and applications, it seems as if they broke more than they fixed. Too bad the beta expires soon. Anybody else had a similar experience or am I the only one?

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com