Quasi-Review of Windows 7 (Beta)

Friday, January 23, 2009

**The one-sentence verdict (for those of you with short attention spans): it will probably finally give people a reason to upgrade from XP, but below the flashy exterior and mostly helpful UI tweaks, it’s still Windows.**

As I’ve mentioned before in previous geeky posts on here, I was a diehard Windows fan until we bought our first Mac back in late 2005. Since I’ve been firmly entrenched in the Mac world for the last 4 years, I thought it would be fun to install the beta of Windows 7 and see what Microsoft has been working on recently.

My Windows 7 Desktop

I grabbed the 64-bit Windows 7 beta from Microsoft and installed it pretty painlessly through Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM; just acted like I was installing Vista and it worked without a hitch). It should be mentioned that the installation was pretty painless, and much quicker to install than probably any OS that I’ve done a clean install of in the past; well done Microsoft!

So, let’s get down to the details, shall we? While Vista felt like a slower version of XP with a fresh coat of paint, Windows 7 feels a little more like a new approach to Windows, and mostly for the better. Although it’s basically just Vista with a tweaked UI, the interface is surprisingly minimalistic at the outset; the new taskbar is pretty much the meat and potatoes of Windows 7, so lets start with that.

The New Taskbar

Well, it’s pretty much a rip off of OS X’s dock, but after using it for a few days, I’d say that’s a good thing. I’m not a huge fan of the blockiness or the icon spacing, but it is certainly much nicer to use than the unmanageable row of minimized windows I’m used to seeing in XP and Vista.

Unseen in my screen grabs are the nice “Aero Peek” hover effects you get when you move your mouse over the icon of an open program; little thumbnails pop up of all the open windows in that program and expand to full size when clicked. Combined with Vista’s Flip 3D, this is pretty much Microsoft’s answer to Exposé on OS X. I found Exposé to be more helpful in practice, but Aero Peek was certainly a nice UI tweak.

Moving on, I really liked the redesigned start menu and the use of “jump lists” when you right-click on a program’s icon. Right-clicking now gives you the usual info, along with program specific information that’s pretty useful (recently opened files, playback controls for media, etc). Once again, it’s similar to OS X’s dock (and maybe slightly superior in this respect).

Notice anything similar?

Speaking of similarities, it’s almost comical how much Windows Explorer resembles Leopard’s Finder windows now… take a look at the screen shot above. I found getting around the system was slightly easier than in XP/Vista, but I prefer OS X’s lack of clutter in the Finder.

Performance-wise, everything was very snappy on my relatively-new MacBook Pro. Although the Aero interface may be a little heavy-handed with animated transitions and general flashiness, overall it was attractive and responsive (not sluggish like my experiences with Vista). It should be noted that it appears to be a much more energy hungry operating system than Leopard; my four hour battery life in OS X was only 1.5 hours in Windows 7, though the lack of good power management in the beta may be to blame.

So, is Windows 7 worthwhile? From my brief experience, I’d say that it’s very promising, but still trailing OS X by a long shot. Beneath the nice new paint job lies the same basic Windows that you’ve used for the last 15 years, which may not be a bad thing depending on the user. For me, it’s all the extra features and polish built into OS X out of the box that make it far superior still. As I’ve waxed on about recently, the features in OS X that I use so frequently (Spaces, Time Machine, Quick Look, etc) are desperately missed, even when I’m using the latest version of Windows.

If you have a decently powerful machine running XP, I think Windows 7 will be a worthy upgrade to consider when it releases sometime this year. Microsoft is genuinely taking it’s operating system in the right direction.

However, if you’re on the fence about purchasing a new machine, I still think a Mac is the best option.

Have you played with Windows 7? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a Comment

By Eric in Geek Stuff, Reviews

Dedicated to all you Mario Kart lovers…

Friday, December 5, 2008

 

1 comment 

By Lauren in Funny, Geek Stuff

10 Things I Love About OS X

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

So, chances are that you may be receiving or considering purchasing a new computer for a loved one this holiday season. My obvious recommendation to you before you consider picking up a Dell or something from a Black Friday ad at Best Buy is to go for a Mac. It should come as no surprise to you that I’m making this recommendation due to my persistent gushing about everything Apple on this blog and my twitter.

First, a little background that you probably don’t care about (you’re probably just reading this to kill some time anyway, so who are you to complain ;-) ). I was an avid Windows user until the Fall of ‘05; truth be told I really hated Macs before then. I always thought OS X was slow, unstable and just not as powerful as my rock solid copy of Windows XP. However, Apple fixed all of my concerns with OS X Tiger; the operating system had matured with enough powerful features to lure me away from the Windows world I had been attached to for so long.

Let me be clear… I don’t necessarily dislike Windows; I still work in XP almost every day doing debugging, and it’s a fine, generally stable operating system once you’re used to it. I just feel that OS X has grown over the last few years to be the OS that everyone should be using. The user interface is just so much more powerful and well thought out that I lose productivity when I have to work on a PC for an extended period of time.

With all of that said, here’s a list of my favorite OS X features as they relate to my field and experience. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments below!

10 - Stacks

To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of stacks until just a few days ago. They’re basically just little expandable icons than sit in your dock acting as bookmarks for commonly used programs and folders.

My feelings changes once I began organizing my new MacBook Pro. I now have a stack for frequently accessed FTPs and a stack for my freelance client directory, both of which save me an average of 10-15 seconds each time I use them. More so, I don’t have to lose my train of though to open programs and dig through frequently accessed files. I’m a big fan now.

Click to continue reading…

6 comments

By Eric in Geek Stuff, Lists

Creating and Enforcing a Perimeter

Monday, November 3, 2008

Whether you’re watching a military movie or playing something like Halo or paintball, one of the first things smart leaders do when establishing a base is to create and maintain a perimeter of safety. You fortify the interior with needed items, get rid of any trash inside, and station guards along the edge to enforce the integrity of the perimeter. As guys, this is a macho, universally understood strategy.

So why don’t more of us do that with our spiritual lives and our homes? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately thanks to our small group discussions and some good time spent in God’s Word.

First off, my interior. For the last few months, I haven’t spent a lot of quality time in God’s word. I’ll normally try to read a chapter of scripture along with breakfast in the morning, but most days I just rushed through this and said a quick prayer so I could get along with my day. I was being spiritually lazy, and was just passively engaging God’s word.

In our Small Group time over the past few weeks, the following verse keeps coming up and hitting me hard:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” - Deuteronomy 6:5-9

I definitely wasn’t binding God’s word on my forehead… heck, I was paying more attention to my Fruit Loops than what I was reading. I decided that the first part of setting up a perimeter for myself was to really try to fortify the interior or my heart with more scripture. As part of this, I’ve been following this Bible-in-a-year plan I found through You Version. It’s pretty cool, taking you through a chapter or two out of three books a day (the goal is to have you read through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice a year). I can honestly tell you that taking the time to turn off the TV and spend some more time with God has been huge for me over the past few weeks. It feels good to cut off the steady flow of junk and feast on some truth for a change.

Speaking of cutting out the junk, the second part of my plan has been to enforce the perimeter we’ve set up for ourselves at home. We’re trying to cut down on the types of movies we watch, and are striving to be better about turning the channel instead of just subjecting ourselves to a lot of the junk on TV.

Probably the biggest change we’ve made is putting a strict filter on our internet connection to keep out the junk. I was always bad about making excuses about this since we do so much online (both of our fields are internet related) and filters can be an over-protective pain; I can say with certainty now that I was wrong. As a guy, it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders knowing that I’ve simply cut off the availability of that junk in my house. Why give the enemy a chance at a foothold when it’s possible to eliminate the temptation all together?

I highly recommend the Safe Eyes software from Internet Safety; it’s cheap, works on Macs and PCs and it’s extremely flexible. After only a few minutes of configuration, we had it set up and configured to block only certain things and allow others. If it’s blocking something it shouldn’t, you can easily white list certain pages or entire sites (it was blocking our blog as porn(!), for instance). Have accountability partners? It can also be configured to send logs to them if you slip up.

Coming from a geek who’s tried this stuff out, there’s really no good reason why you shouldn’t man up and get a filter now. The speed impact is imperceptible, and you’ll barely notice it’s there unless you try to access a blocked site. Fellas, I don’t care where you are or how much you struggle, you need this software. Don’t give me the “we should just trust each other” speech; it’s time to quit making excuses like me and eliminate the threat.

What if you have other ways of getting to the internet throughout the house besides your computers? We have a few video game consoles with full web browsers, so I’m going to play around with OpenDNS tonight to filter the connection even further from our router to everything on our network. For now, I’ve just had Lauren lock us out of those browsers through the parental controls built into those systems.

Am I being too over protective or paranoid? Maybe. But God’s word says we have an enemy that “prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for some victim to devour.” I’m going to take every precaution to build a perimeter and keep that garbage out of home.

Want a good deal on the Safe Eyes software mentioned above? They’ve given Long Hollow a promo code to use online that’ll drop the cost to about $37 out the gate (use the coupon code “LHB” when checking out). By the way, one license will cover three computers, so no excuses there. Guys, have you wife be in charge of the administrator password so you can’t be sneaky.

Also, if you’ve got an iPhone, you really should check out the YouVersion Bible on there. It’s got that daily reading plan built in, so you always have a Bible in a lot of different translations on you.

1 comment 

By Eric in Faith, Geek Stuff

Pumpkin Carve-a-thon!

Saturday, October 4, 2008

In celebration of the Fall, we got together with Dustin and Morgan Finn to try our hands at a little pumpkin carving. I have to admit, we’re all pretty proud of the results!

Lauren did the logo from our freelance business, Volacious. I did the Dharma logo from LOST (of course!). Dustin did a diamond logo from his fraternity, and Morgan did some good ole polka-dots! Check out the photos of our hard work in this gallery, or take a pick at the pumpkins all lit up in the youtube clip below.

For those of you reading this on facebook, you can view the youtube clip here.

1 comment 

By Eric in Geek Stuff, LOST, Life

Friends don’t let friends surf unprotected.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Upon the realization that we’re about to install our ninth WiFi-enabled device in our home, I decided now would be as good of a time as ever to patch up the holes in our wireless network and get a little more secure.

I’ve lived in several places over the last few years, and it seems like every neighborhood/apartment complex in which I open my laptop, there are literally dozens of wireless networks available for my choosing, most of which are left open and unsecured. Since wireless routers can be kind of daunting if you don’t have certified geek blood in your veins, I think most families do well enough to just hook up their modem to the router and don’t think twice about securing their high-priced internet connection from neighbors and folks up to no good.

Since I do have the aforementioned geek blood pulsing through my veins, all of our wireless connections have been pretty secure since I set my first one up in college; at least I thought that was the case. Do to it’s wealth of documentation at the time, I’ve (apparently unwisely) stuck with 128 bit WEP encryption over the past few years. This level of encryption was popular years ago, mostly because it was the highest protection that most devices supported at the time.

After a little research this afternoon, I decided it was time to make a switch. Apparently, even this level of protection can be completely bypassed by a middle school hacker with too much free time these days, in some cases in less than a minute! Yikes! What does this mean to you? If you’re using an unprotected or weakly protected WiFi connection, all of your online shopping, online bank accounts, etc are wide open for prying eyes to peak at. Given that some of my close relatives have had their identities stolen twice over the last two years, that has me a little paranoid.

So what to use? It looks like WPA 2 (with AES) is the bees knees right now. It’s compatible with most modern internet devices and actually seems to run a little faster than my old WEP encryption. If your router doesn’t seem to present that as an option, be sure to check for a firmware update that may enable it for free.

Lolcat voiding your warranty.

Does everything I discussed above seem like complete gibberish to you? It really is worth your time to grab your friendly neighborhood computer geek and have them secure your router (hint: we like comic books and gift certificates to Best Buy). Make sure to set it up with a solid alphanumeric password while you’re at it (and for Pete’s sake, don’t use your kids names, anniversaries or birthdays!). It also wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and turn your SSID broadcast off too so no one even knows you have a wireless network unless they know to look for it.

Identity theft sucks, and you can never be too careful these days. Need help/further explanation on this? Post it in the comments below.

2 comments

By Eric in Geek Stuff, Interesting

« Previous Entries