Windows 7 first impressions
Published
I finally got around to installing Windows 7 on my PC, having skipped over Vista altogether. It was quite interesting, so I thought I would share my experiences here.
First, a bit of background. I have been installing operating systems on various computers for a long time - from Amiga OS to MS-DOS, Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS X, various Linux distributions and many different versions of FreeBSD. Installing a new OS for the first time still makes me quite nervous though, as I do not know if anything is likely to go wrong.
My hardware is an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR2 memory and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT graphics card driving two monitors, one a DVI-connected ViewSonic and the other an analogue Daewoo using a VGA connector. I added a spare 160GB hard drive that I had lying around to install the new OS on, splitting it into two partitions.
I backed up my XP installation and rebooted with the Windows 7 install DVD. I selected the 64-bit version to install as I have had reports of JPEG Saver having some problems with it. The installation started and almost immediately asked me for some drivers for the ITE IT8211F ATA/ATAPI controller on my motherboard. Oops. I remember now that XP had the same problem. I rebooted to XP, found the drivers (here) and put them on a USB flash drive. Being able to load drivers from USB and other disks is a nice touch.
The installation went ahead after that, rebooting once or twice, and then things got a bit tricky. My analogue monitor went black, and the DVI monitor developed a mid-blue effect with a bit of diagonal pattern in it. The kind of pattern that makes you think of memory problems. I waited for a while to see if it would sort itself out, but nothing changed. There was no disk activity, so I hit the reset switch and rebooted. The installation continued and looked like it was working, but the end result was the same pair of black/blue screens, so I went searching the web for answers.
I found plenty of people having similar problems with a dual-monitor setup, and so I finally got the machine up by hitting F8 in the boot menu and choosing the 640x480 video option. And unplugging the DVI monitor, but I am not sure if that was strictly necessary. In any case, the new Windows 7 installation booted up fully after that, so I ran all the software updates (there were a lot of them) and tried to sort out my monitor issue. The best I achieved was the same desktop mirrored on both screens, so I gave up. I guess my old GeForce card just is not up to driving both monitors under Windows 7.
With the new OS up and running the first thing I tried was the JPEG Saver 4.1
installer. It ran through normally, said it was installing into
C:\Windows\System32, the DirectX 9 install went without a hitch,
and "JPEG Saver 4.1" appeared in the screen savers listing in the Control Panel
(though it took me a while to find that). The screen saver configured, found
and displayed the images properly, and so I looked in
C:\Windows\System32 to check that all the files JPEG Saver uses
were present and correct. To my surprise, none of them were there. I found them
in C:\Windows\SysWOW64, where they were redirected by the
operating system. I have since found out that SysWOW64 is where the
32-bit binaries go, and System32 is where the 64-bit binaries
reside. That seems a bit weird to me.
I found the config and database files in C:\Users\Graham\AppData\Local,
which seems like an improvement over the old location in "Documents and Settings".
The next thing I did was to install the 32-bit version on the other partition I had created. I was hoping that my graphics card and monitor problems would be solved in the 32-bit version, but it did not make any difference.
To sum up: JPEG Saver works on both 64 and 32-bit versions of Windows 7, though not as well as on XP. The thicker window border makes the configuration dialog look a bit messy, so I will have to take a look at cleaning that up. Transitions appear to be less smooth on Windows 7 than on XP, which I can probably put down to my old graphics card for now.
Next: Getting TagCanvas working properly on IE9.