Personal blog about photography, geek stuff and life.
Windows 7 in a Apple Mac environment day 1.
I have a strong love/hate relationship with Windows. In the past it has been good but then it became bloated and unreliable. I don’t know when this happened and I swore I would never be tempted by Windows 7; why should I? I’m using Apple Macs which are rock solid. However, lately OSX has been giving me hassle as well, then my XP PC decided it did not want to boot up anymore; more worryingly the XP PC also acts as my FreeNas 2.8TB file server.
So, I installed the BETA which I downloaded a month ago and installed it over the XP PC. So far so good, the installation has been smooth. I’m currently installing EA Game’s Black and White 2; games is the primary use for this PC as the more serious stuff is handled by my Apple computers.
about 11 months ago
g’day!
I installed Win7beta(5075) on an old Thinkpad recently and was very surprised/impressed, compared to the agony that is Vista. Memory footprint after bootup (no apps running) was less than 350Mbytes, about HALF of Vista’s! (& lower after disabling superfluous services & features). UI seems cleaner, and even runs acceptably on this old 1.3GHz PentiumM 768MBram Thinkpad. Looks to be what Vista should have been.
Your XP box suddenly not booting might be a job for Spinrite (see my review on my blog: http://no-comply.org/2009/02/20/spinrite-on-par-with-craig-venters-brilliance/).
Even tho you’ve rebuilt it now, the underlying problem might still be there to come back to haunt when the OS gets around to using that bit of the disk again. Unfortunately this is a sad reality of domestic-grade hard-drives, in fact it always has been, and countless machines (inc Macs, they’re the same hard-drives) are rebuilt &/or thrown out simply for lack of a bit of hard-drive TLC. I only wish there was a way to boot a Mac from a Spinrite CD…
only recourse is to temporarily remove the drive & plug it into a Windoze box, which obviously isn’t fun for most people.