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First Look On Windows 7
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Loading ...I recently had the option to test Windows 7 the Release Candidate. So I thought it would be good to write a short post on my first thoughts on this latest version of Windows. Don’t expect a lengthy review in this article, I may write on later on though.
After downloading and burning the image I got from Microsoft I quickly tried to install it on my HP TouchSmart PC. Why did I choose this computer rather then my laptop or mediacenter. Well I was honestly expecting a lot of trouble and my TouchSmart has a recovery disk to quickly revert to Windows Vista 
.
First look at the Windows 7
The installation of windows was damn easy, I guess when you compare the installation it is very similar to Windows Vista. A graphical interface is loaded that will help you trough the various steps needed to install Windows 7. So far so good, though it does take quite long to install. But then again who is expecting anything else from a bloated OS, which I still believe Windows is. After the installation most things on my computer are recognized and work fine. Why I say most things, well unfortunately none of the special buttons of my computer are working. So I can’t control the sound, media or the brightness of the screen. Which sucks, but then again I don’t think I can blame Microsoft for that. As HP does not have any support what so ever for Windows 7.
One cool thing I really liked is that after installing a multi touch driver my HP was able to recognize 2 pressure points on the screen at the same time. Which makes for some cool features that work. I really liked it, but keep in mind it is just some eye candy and won’t help you in the every day things you do on the computer 
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Some new neat features
Some might have already heard about some of the new features included in Windows 7. Well I will try and summarize a few that I find useful and some of which I have serious doubts that they are any added value what so ever.
More decent window grouping
Anyone who has used Windows XP or Vista knows about the feature that windows starts grouping similar windows when there are a lot of them open. Well in windows 7 this feature got extended. Now it groups the windows no matter how many are open. This on its own is not that bad. Because like in Windows Vista you get a small preview of the window when you hover over it. A new feature in this is that when you stay over a window for a longer period of time the window will be displayed on the screen and all other windows ‘disappear’ to the background.
Though this is a pretty stable and nice feature I strongly dislike Windows for doing this same thing for every single tab in Internet Explorer. Which is pretty annoying to people like me who have several tabs open, as well as several instances of Internet Explorer. This causes it to become a bit crowded down in that small preview window.
Better quicklaunch features
One of the older features in windows is the quicklaunch bar in the taskbar. This allows you to quickly start up any program you pinned to it. Well Windows 7 is no stranger to this. It features this prominently and slightly changed. The icons are a lot bigger then before, and like before you can pin any application to the taskbar. One new thing is that if you click on an icon and drag up a quicklaunch window appears with the most used actions, or in case of the explorer the most opened folders.
Speed compared to Vista
A lot of people are comparing Windows 7 with Vista, which I guess is not that strange since they look very similar. One huge improvement is that Windows 7 appears to be a bit quicker and slimmer then Vista. I have not done extensive tests speed wise, but it looks like it boots up a bit quicker and closes quicker. As well as loading of applications this also appears to be slightly faster.
The eye-candy included in Windows 7 is a bit sluggish tough. It’s just that bit lagging behind on commands giving. Like dragging of applications seems to bit just a bit slow. It might have todo with my HP TouchSmart, but Vista runs on it beautifully so I would expect Windows 7 to do the same.
Some related video’s
Like all of you I like vid’s, so I added some nice reviews and feature video’s below. Enjoy them and until next time…
No HDCP using the Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H onboard card??
Ok I recently got a very weird problem with my HTPC. Since a couple of days I’ve been unable to play any Blu-Ray disc. Even after updating my PowerDVD to the latest patched version.
Before this update of PowerDVD the weird behaviour was the disapearing of PowerDVD when playing discs. No message no error nothing, just gone! After the update the DVD player informed me that HDCP was not available and it could not play protected Blu-Ray discs.
This sounded weirdt to me since I have played them in the past, and I know the onboard graphics chip (the Ati Radeon X1250) supports it.
As it turns out, after a lot of digging, I had recently installed an updated version of the Catalyst Control Center. Which should not be anything strange, its recommended practice by a lot of software developers. However the graphics chipset on the motherboard appears to have some custom stuff, since after installing the latest version from the Ati site HDCP was no longer supported.
When I reinstalled the version of the Catalyst Control Center that came with the PC all my troubles went away. No more warnings / crashes or unable to play disc reports.
Playing around with my new HP TouchSmart IQ532
I recently got very sick of having one of those bulky computers sitting next to my table, sucking in air all day and making a lot of noice with it. Yes as you may have guesst I don’t have the latest version of a PC. Well any way since a few weeks I was looking for a all in one PC. Which to me means no seperate monitor, no computer and if possible no mouse or keyboard. Wtf, you may think does such a thing exists!
You are not alone. I wasn’t even sure if such a thing exists either. Well the first part of the quest was very easy, find a computer that does not have a seperate casing for the actual computer. So an all in one system. Well these things actually exists, I mean look at the iMac. So I know they are out there, I just don’t want an iMac because non of the software I use is available for it. And I’m not a big fan of the Apple company, but that’s a completely different story all together.
It was only a couple of days later that by accident I came accross a small poor quality video of the HP TouchSmart series. Which appearantly has been out ever since early 2007. These computers have everything build into the monitor, not just that but they are touch enabled. And I say touch enabled because they don’t have a touch screen in the traditional sense. The HP TouchSmart series has a shit load of LED’s build into the screen that detect where you press on the screen (and no you don’t even have to touch the screen for the LED’s to detect the touch).
Initially I was considering either a late model of the IQ500 series, which was brought out in 2008 or the IQ800 series which was brought out in 2009. The trouble with my little quest was that the 800 series is currently very hard to get. When I called several shops they could not get any computers in that series at all! So I ended up going for the IQ532, which was the best out of the IQ500 series currently available. And I can honestly say I like it, no more wires. And best of all you can choose to not use the mouse or keyboard. The touch part works pretty damn good, even with the onscreen keyboard that HP made for us as you can see in the screenshot below.
So I really like it, I mean the HP Touch application that is provided is pretty useless to me. But the idea of not needing anything and only having a single cable for your entire computer. Having bluetooth, WiFi and even a TV Tuner integrated is perfect for me. So just for you I have included some YouTube movies on the HP TouchSmart Series.
A fresh start
As you may have noticed by the lack of me posting new articles in the past couple of months I have been really busy on a lot of projects. This has caused me to focus on other things then blogging on Narnio (unfortunattely 
).
I will attempt to start posting somewhat more regularly from now on again, as I’ve sorta managed to get some stuff out of the way. One of them is my work on a complete overhaul of a part of the platform that the Zylom site is running on. Well enough of that!
Ok so what have I been up to that caused little posts. One of my new projects was a complete change of the corporate website I have been maintaining. It’s not live yet, but great things are comming for this website. Which also gets me into the next phase of my career, as I am now looking into starting my own company, and it is really a scary thought 8-O.
I will soon start writing some more posts on developing website platforms in both PHP and Java, as I’ve been learning a lot recently for each one of these two languages.
Setting up a mailserver, continued
In my last article on how to setup a basic mail server in debian using postfix and dovecot, I am now continueing on how to setup some basic spam filters. The reason to split this up, well I was stupid and assumed I wouldn’t need a spam filter yet. But I forgot that I also moved one domain to my new mail server that got 200 spam messages a day.
So now to repair my mistake I am adding the following features to my already existing mail server. To find out how to setup the mail server itself read my earlier article.
- Use spamassassin to mark spam in the header
- Change the mail delivery to dovecot LDA, this is needed for step 3
- Automatically move marked e-mails to the spam folder of the user
Sounds easy right. Well it should be .
