Windows 7 – First Impressions

I know I said this was going to stop being sort of like a tech blog, but the release of the Windows 7 beta happened to coincide with my return to the blogosphere, so I’m writing about it.  If you do not care about computers, you may want to just stop reading and come back later this week when I complain some more; those are the posts you’re more used to.

Anyway, a few months ago I bought a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet for a pretty good deal on eBay.  My reasoning: netbooks (cheap, low-powered notebooks) are popular and I sort of want one, but it’s cheaper just to get an old laptop that ends up having about the same specs.  Plus, I wanted a tablet PC for editing purposes—the next best thing to writing on paper, without a tablet, is the “comment” feature in Word, and it’s clunky at best.  This way I can do actual pen editing without wasting all the paper.  And the price was fantastic, since even old tablets still fetch a decent price most of the time.

Originally, I had intended on giving Linux another try, since it has a pretty good reputation for doing well on older hardware.  I put Ubuntu (and OpenSUSE, and Fedora) on it, and always ran into a problem with the video drivers—the nVidia Linux drivers have terrible support, and screen rotation (a really, really useful feature in a tablet) ends up eating all the system memory and making it completely unusable.

So I figured I’d try the Windows 7 beta.  This particular tablet runs on a 1.5ghz Centrino processor with 1 GB of RAM and a 20GB 4200 RPM hard disk.  It’s designed for XP, and while it can run Vista, you’d pretty much want to shoot yourself if you had to use Vista on it for more than a few minutes.  In other words, it’s the perfect PC to see if Windows 7 really lives up to the hype.

Here’s the surprising thing—it does.

The installation didn’t take long at all (less than half the time of Vista) and startup was snappy—less so after installing the software I wanted, but still very reasonable considering the hardware.  Shutting down—which occasionally takes ages on my Vista laptop—is also very quick.

I had some trouble getting things up and running, since 7 is based off the Vista architecture and Toshiba never actually released Vista drivers for the M200 [in America].  With a little digging, I finally managed to find a video driver that didn’t crash when running any kind of acceleration (like Solitaire.  Yes, Solitaire.) and while it’s no powerhouse, it’s great for typical netbook tasks and it runs Crayon Physics decently enough.  And the tablet features are very well supported in 7.

I thought the new (more dock-like) taskbar would take some getting used to, but surprisingly, it didn’t take me long to adjust, though having a “show desktop” feature in the bottom right rather than left is still a little off for me.

So far, Windows 7 seems pretty compatible—it had some issues with XP drivers (it took a lot of digging to find a wireless driver) but other than that, it seems to have handled everything I’ve thrown at it, which so far has been Opera, Thunderbird, Office XP, OpenOffice, Trillian, Windows Live Writer, and the Crayon Physics demo.  It’s a beta build, but it’s already more stable than Vista, and I could easily use this as my primary computer.

There’s still just one problem.  Windows Journal, the built-in program that allows you to annotate files, crashes whenever I try to import a file.  In other words, the one thing I still can’t do with my tablet is edit things, which was sort of the point.  Lovely.

Where Tech Meets Take Your Own Advice

Author/podcaster extraordinaire Mur Lafferty just posted a video podcast about the tools every writer should have, and one of the things she mentioned was an external backup drive.  A flash drive, external hard drive, Google Docs--it's not important what you use, so long as you're backing up everything.  Most writers know this, and all techies know it.  But here's the dirty little secret:

Most of us don't do it.

It's simple.  It doesn't take long.  But we don't do it.

And now the obligatory horror story:  It's the Fall 2007 semester.  Midterm week.  I'm almost finished with my final projects.  My hard drive has been flaky for about a week, but I keep putting off backing it up until after midterms when I have more time.  I'm in the middle of copying the files onto a flash drive so I can print them off in a computer lab, and that's when the computer blue screens and dies.  Shit.

Figuring that not all is lost, I buy an adapter and hook it up to Melissa's computer.  The hard drive is detected!  Fantastic.  Maybe it'll be okay.

File type: RAW.  As far as Windows is concerned, this means: "oh man, there sure are a lot of ones and zeroes on this thing.  But what does it all mean?"  In other words, all is lost.

Luckily, I was saved by a small miracle--the drive was partitioned, and all my music was on the D: partition, which I was able to rescue through the magic of chkdsk.  I found a program called Zero Authority Recovery that claimed to be able to recover the gibberish in the other partition, and it was able to save only one folder--Documents and Settings.  It didn't get everything, but it got most of the important stuff.  I made it through the wreck with some minor cuts and bruises, but I was okay.

The experience was an awakening.  I have an external 80 gig drive that's just been sitting around, so I pledged to back up religiously when I got my new laptop.  Take a guess at how many times I've updated my backup since I got this one over a year ago.

That's right.  Not-a-once.  A mistake I plan to remedy.

And for the rest of you: if you haven't already started keeping a backup, start.  And if the words of Mur, myself, and the countless others who have suffered hard drive crashes (chances are, you know a few of them) fail to get through to you, you're a hopeless case.  Which is probably okay.  Hard drive crashes are pretty rare to begin with, and with storage tech getting more and more reliable (some flash drives are nigh indestructible) it's possible that you'll never deal with a crash that will destroy everything you've worked on.

If you're okay with the risk, fair enough.  But fellow writers--and especially fellow college students--I beg you.  Back up your files.

Because I won't feel sorry for you later if you lose everything.  And I won't fix your computer, either.