Tag Archives: Windows 7

GeekStuff

Happy Windows 7 Day!

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Finally! You’ll get to start playing with what I’ve had installed for months and, well, to be honest it’s an exciting time. For me.

It’s 7:42 AM, I’m on campus in Studios West’s theater, watching a co-worker NOM on a blueberry muffin, and waiting for the launch event to start in New York… yes, I’m excited enough to have gotten up that early to be here. On top of that, it occurred to me in the shower that a number of users will be going from XP to Windows 7 – that is going to be very, very interesting to see, since they skip the intermediary view of Vista: going from XP blue to Seven glass? Nice!

For what it’s worth, for as good as 7 is – and it is good – its goodness started in Vista and, to be technologically blunt, Vista wasn’t as bad as most people would have had you believe. Vista was an improvement on XP, as 7 is an improvement on Vista… it’s the nature of software. I actually look forward to pointing out to people which of the features they love in 7 …that they missed out on for the last few years because they were in Vista. Reminds me of when Office exposed a ton of functionality with the Ribbon and were able to say “That’s not new to Office 2007… that was in Office XP.” But I digress…

Windows 7 – go get it.

Oh, and if you have a netbook or notebook without an optical drive, we’ve got that covered too: The Microsoft Store allows you to buy Windows 7 online, download it to a USB thumb drive, and install it from there.

digital pity

Are People In Hell Sipping Iced Cold Kool-Aid?

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WSJ: In recent years, I, like many other reviewers, have argued that Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is much better than Windows. That’s no longer true. I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.

While on one hand, I bristle at giving OSX an “edge” for these reasons. Just because Snow Leopard shipped at $29, if you add up the MSRP of 10.1 to 10.6 and compare it to the XP-Vista-7 upgrade path, Windows is cheaper… Apple has been gouging wallets for OSX dot upgrades for years, but no one ever calls them on it. As for more built-in software, does Walt not know about the EU and South Korea? While Apple never gets sued for their included software (Safari, iTunes, iChat, QuickTime, Mail, etc.) Microsoft does – ask the foreign governments why there’s less built in software included because it is their idea.

But on the other hand, for Walt to break out the first part of the comment… job well done, Seven.

(and the title is just about Hell freezing over rather than anything else)

GeekStuff, Windows

Props to the Windows Team

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I’ll go on record with this comment: Wow… that actually just worked.

Retiring my last Vista box didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it did. Windows 7 installed fine: every device I had in the thing was auto-supported… the machine was built in 2007 with all brand name parts, but even so… there’s usually a rogue driver that’s required on a repave. No, the reason I was up until 2:30 this morning was caused by something completely non-OS related…

One single password.
Continue reading Props to the Windows Team →

GeekStuff, Windows

Windows 7: Allowing Access to C$

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After recently installing Windows 7, I found that I was unable to access the “default admin shares” for my local drives, namely \\ME\C$. I was able to see the machine on my local network, so I know that the firewall wasn’t the problem. If I shared out something explicitly, I could see that from other machines as well: File Sharing was turned on. On other networks, I know that I’ve been able to access the C$ share from other machines, so the functionality was still there, but likely just turned off.

From HowToGeek.com, I found a registry setting that would allow this. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, add a new DWORD called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set its value to 1 and reboot. Want to revert? Delete the key or set it 0.

I must have done this for Vista as well, but I don’t remember doing it… either way, it works. And this was the “last” box. All of my machines are Windows 7 64-bit including VM’s and Bootcamp partitions. My Lenovo S10 had to settle for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 because Atom didn’t like the x64 version. The only other OS I see daily is from a couple of servers which are Windows 2008 (and awaiting an R2 installation).

And so Vista slips away …as XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95, and 3.11 did before it.