Dave PC Guy » software

Windows 7: The best thing to happen to computers?

Admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:08:57 +0000

I’m dead serious with the title. I’ve installed W7 a couple days ago, and I have been testing it in ever way a person like me would use Windows 7 for. Look, I am a very non-lenient consumer when it comes to OS, Imaging Programs, and anything to do with web-development. I have my reasons for rejecting Vista, I have my reasons for rejecting a new computer, I have good reasons why I use Linux only for school work. Everything I use on my computer, I criticize and I KNOW exactly what the product needs to perfect. Well, I’m on Windows 7 right now, and before I give you my review of the system, let me tell you about my computer: I have a Dell Inspiron 1501, here are the specs:

Processor: AMD Turion 64 MK-36 2 GHz (single core AMD)
Ram: 1920 mb (DDR2 SDRAM)
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Xpress Series 1150M (128mb)
HDD: 160 gb SATA

Everest Computer Specs

I bought my computer about three years ago. It’s a nice neat laptop with lots of wear and tear. The only two components I upgraded hardware-wise was my RAM (from 1gb) and my HDD (from 80gb). So far, I’ve run XP Media Center on it, XP Professional SP2, Sp3, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 7.10 – 9.04, Fedora 8 and up, Mandriva 2008, Slackware, and yeah, the list goes on. And except for minor driver problems under the Linux distros, the computer runs perfectly. I’m a very heavy user as well, my computer runs about 15 or 16 hours every day, and I run multiple programs at once. Here’s what I have opened usually: Dreamweaver CS3, Photoshop CS3, Firefox, Word, Win Explorer, and Winamp. This might come as a surprise but my system does not freeze up while running all those programs. Not even under Vista. My Windows 7 rating is 2.9 Here’s why Windows 7 is so amazing:

Windows 7, so amazing

I’m currently running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 ultimate. YES, 64-BIT ON A SINGLE CORE PROCESSOR. My computer is comparatively weak to anything else on the market, but I can still run W7 64-bit. Before I get into my own personal tests, let me tell you about some lesser known features W7 has: The Little Things in W7

snipping tool, sticky notes and other accessories. The snipping tool lets you take a screenshot of your computer screen with your own parameters ie, you can choose what part of the screen will be “screenshotted”. This is eternally amazing. The Sticky Notes are the same as the sticky notes in Ubuntu, for all you Linux fans. Among the other accessories is the new Wordpad that makes you want to reconsider buying MS Office
Snipping Tool

Sticky Notes
Order Changing. In the new taskbar, you can finally change the order of the opened apps. That means, you can open all your applications separately and then move them around so that the order is pleasing to you. And it is! I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time
Order Change
Show Desktop. The new show desktop button all the way on the right does something that I’ve awaited for a long time as well. When you press the button again, all your windows will un-minimize in the order they were before. So now, you have a “show/hide” desktop button. VERY USEFUL!
New Status Bar. Okay, the new status bar on the bottom right, next to the time, finally does not infinitely expand. Rather when there is too many status icons, you get a little arrow that if you click, you get a small menu of your status icons. No longer will our Taskbars be plagued by endless status icons!
Windows TaskBar
Gadgets. I was a fan of the sidebar in the Vista, but one thing bothered me. It was a “bar”! another one that restricted the screen. I could not move around the widgets (or whatever they were called) as it suited me and I was always brought down by the sheer impact it had on my screen. Now, I have two or three gadgets up there that do not restrict me in any way
Gadgets
TaskBar Icons. The taskbar icons are great. They don’t take up a lot of space, and you still know what’s going on. When I was running Windows XP, I had a single great problem, too many tasks in my taskbar. The text combined with the icon in previous Windows OSes took up too much space. Now I have a single icon that tells me about the program.
Taskbar
New Windows Media Player. I’ve never truly used the Windows Media Player until now on W7. I always used Winamp but the WMP made me change my mind. I’ve already gotten rid of my old Winamp. Not only is the interface super-friendly with its playlist on the right, the library in the middle. Well, let me show you:
Windows Media Player

As you can see, I’ve got a playlist on the right where I can drag any songs from the left. Trust me, there is nothing easier than this new WMP. Oh and also, you know how sometimes you rip a CD on your computer and all you get is “track 1, track 2″ with no metadata? WMP solves that, you can right click the album and “find album info” through which you can add ALL of that metadata. You’ll manually find the right album and the computer will add the metadata to those songs (such as title, album name, artist etc).
Codecs, I was impatient so I installed the codecs right away, but apparently, I did not need to. W7 contains codecs to almost anything imaginable. It plays mp3, avi, wma (haha joke!), rmvb, basically anything out there.
Windows Media Center, I’m not a media center person, and if I was, I’d probably get XBMC that probably tops everything out there but I have to give credit to Microsoft for WMC, it’s good. I mean, it’s really good. You can set up your library, it launches fast, and it’s not as annoying as the media center for XP
Windows Media Center

Performance The performance is my main issue with Windowses, especially with Vista. When I had the original Vista install, my computer would freeze up, put my processor into overdrive, near-damn burn my ram. I solved that with a few quickfixes, such as getting rid of the sidebar, uninstalling a lot of crap, and optimizing it. I ended up with a beautiful, fast system. With Windows 7, I did not have to do anything like that. Somehow, whenever I launch a program, my processor goes to 100% for about ten seconds and then goes back to about 40%. Mind you, I use a single core 2ghz AMD processor. So to me, that’s amazing. After this initial spike, nothing ever changes no matter what I do in the application. Sometimes, the processor is used even less, at about 20% its capacity. My RAM is dead-set to 50% (ie 1gb) and usually starts out on 30% use when I boot up my computer. To me, just that is amazing. But let’s see what happens when I actually start using the system. I installed Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and Flash CS3 on my computer. I had no problem installing them, and they haven’t crashed…yet. The programs launch beautifully and faster than they have on my XP system setup, or my Vista set up. Once I launch Dreamweaver, I get about a 3% addition to my RAM use, and my processor keeps its current usage. And basically, no matter what I do on Dreamweaver, neither the processor usage nor the RAM usage changes significantly. The RAM usage stays the same, topping out on 54% (I have WMP turned on, and Firefox with five different tabs). When I launched Photoshop, it took less than 10 seconds to boot up. A record for me, because sometimes I had to wait almost a whole minute. My RAM usage jumped five percent to 56% and whatever I did, the RAM meter would move one or two percent, that’s it. The processor keeps jumping between 20% to 50%. The response of the program is immediate, which is something I’ve never achieved under XP or Vista.

So what now?

W7 basically knocked the wind out of me. The features, the easy of use, the interface, well everything about it basically won me over. I’m not even sure I’ll install Ubuntu 9.10 now, it seems a bit stupid because Windows 7 provides me with everything and at a significantly less power drain and better responsiveness.

All in all, I’m in love
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Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is here!

Admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:56:24 +0000

Karmic Koala

source

Phew, I was waiting for this. Ubuntu 9.10 has officially launched today. Go take the feature tour and see what it’s basically about if you know nothing about Ubuntu or Linux. So, here we are, 9.10 is here. It came out with three different versions:

The Desktop Version: The version of Ubuntu meant to run on basically any computer built in the past almost ten years (I’m not joking).
The Server Edition: This one is meant to run on servers. It has all the required features (MySQL, PHP, Apache) as well as other derivatives
The Netbook Version: I can’t believe it came out this early, but the fully supported Netbook edition is already out!

Also, don’t forget to visit Kubuntu, the 9.10 version is already out too! The new KDE release is packed with it. The Edubuntu is as well (this is the distro meant for education).

Highlights:

the system is faster and more reliable.
the booting system looks neater (oh yeah, it looks way nicer)
the audio system has been completely reconstructed for wider support and better performance
One Hundred Paper Cuts is up and running, dealing with all your every day annoyances with the system, and helping to solve those annoyances
Ubuntu One project is also up and running, and with it, you get 2gb of online storage space that you can use with your Ubuntu installation
Programming is much easier with the use of “Quickly” (should I try this one out? )
For the netbook users, there’s a new, better interface system
Empathy is the new messenger. Yes, I have to stress this one. I’m a long time proponent of pidgin and so I’ll have to truly see what Empathy has to offer
For the SERVER EDITION, Cloud computing has simplified lots with the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)
All of the applications, of course, have been updated including OpeOffice, Mozilla Firefox, and others

Other News:

The Kubuntu Netbook release will come out pretty soon, very exciting!
The Technical Overview of Ubuntu 9.10 is complete

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This year and the next

Admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:46:20 +0000

I just wanted to point something out to everyone. Technology and our world is advancing super-fast, I mean, I can barely keep up. So what does this year and the next year still hold for us?

Let’s look at Operating Systems:

Ubuntu 9.10

Ubuntu official logo

Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 3 screenshot

A new Ubuntu distro is coming out, the Karmi Koala. I know that they come out with two distros EVERY year but this is different. 9.10 is going to be a new stable and long-term supported update. It will also feature GRUB 2.0, the new multiple OS launcher. Also, a new X.org is available. I’m running a dual-boot with 9.04 and that Linux works perfectly for me so I’m looking forward to 9.10 because it’s supposed to be better than perfect and it’s supposed to have a friendlier GUI. I don’t even know how they do it, I think the user interface since 7.10 was extremely user friendly. We’re in a new era of super-fast laptops and netbooks. Ubuntu has already come out with several Netbook remixes but I think this year, they’ll have more fun with it. I’ll give you a full review once it’s out (it’s usually mid-October) and I’ll install it on my computer! You can follow updates and such at Planet Ubuntu.

Windows 7

Windows 7 desktop

Whoa yeah, new windows. I was starting to get scared that Vista was going to be around for a long time. So, I’m sure that millions of Vista users will be happy with the release of Windows 7 on the 22nd of next month. We already know what Windows 7 will look like, somewhat. There are hundreds of reviews on the Release Candidate. The RC is no longer available for free download so don’t even try finding it on the Microsoft website. So what’s supposed to be so great about Windows 7? It’s supposed to be more beautiful than Vista by using resources that would put XP to shame. There are hundreds more articles comparing the speed of Vista, XP, and Windows 7 (RC). It’s quite amazing, W7 can utilize your computer’s resources much more efficiently and you’ll see that your system will boot faster than even XP. I use XP, so this is great. And I haven’t even mentioned the revamped interface. It looks truly amazing, I don’t know what else to say except that I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

Snow Leopard?

I know nothing about the Snow Leopard to be honest, I just know that the OSX got updated a month or two ago. I really can’t write a review on it but I still want to point this out, a new OSX came out this year.

Let’s move on, Operating Systems are not the only pieces of software that get an upgrade. You might not have noticed but HTML 5 is getting a lot of attention.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is in works and us web-developers have a lot to look forward to. Some of the features include different mark-ups and tags and they are mostly directed to make 3rd party plugins obsolete. By that I mean, HTML 5 is trying to make it so that the user won’t have to install flash player, shockwave player, JAVA and all that stuff. It incorporates web form 2.0. Some of the new mark-ups try to limit the use of CSS such as the use of

and . Those will be replaced by markups such as

. There are plenty of other tags, such as which will conceivably replace everyone uploading videos to youtube and embedding those in their site. It should be much easier to embed a video straight from the source. I can’t wait for it!

Here are some example websites that already use HTML 5 but beware, your browser might not support it yet:

I’m not sure when HTML 5.0 will be fully implemented but I am looking forward to that day.

CSS3

A new CSS specifications under way! CSS level 3. Its development is under way and there is not much information present on the project. Most of the additions deal with shadows, transparencies, multiple backgrounds, overlays, and other fancy nice formatting through which you can bypass the use of photoshop.

You can find more information on it here:

I’m looking forward to the new formatting options as I’m sure everyone is.

From there, Adobe CS5 is going to come out, conceivably because of the OS upgrades and the web-development updates and that’s what I look forward to the most.

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Defragment! Yes, you should (have to)…

Dave — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:54:42 +0000

Defraggler

Download it for FREE at defraggler.com. When my friends ask me how to speed up their computers, or just plaincomplain about their computers being slow, I have few steps. One of my steps is to tell them to “defragg” their hard drive. With the new era coming in with humongous hard drives the defragmenting is more and more nescessary. First of all and advice, Your main hard drive or the one that has your operating system on it should be less than 320GB. You ask why? You need only about 100GB, if that, for your operating system and other programs. For your data: MP3, pictures, and movies use the big hard drives like 1TB or bigger. The reason being, is when you defragment your main hard drive, the one with operating system, you will not really add that much stuff, well not as much as a library of songs or pictures. If you follow this then defragmenting will not be needed that often and will take significantly less time.

Well now to the software…

Defraggler made by the same company as CCleaner is

Lot better utility than the wannabe defragmenter that comes with your windows. Very easy to use and will significantly speed up your system, whether it is while booting or while accesing data, like let’s say opening a picture faster. The difference depends on how fragmented your system is, it also tells you that.

Number 1

Number one shows all the hard drives, and your partitions. Your hard drives can be split into partitions which are something like chapters in a book. Select your hard drive or partition.

Number 2

After making your selection, go to analyze, or you can skip that and go straight to defrag; however, if you click analyze you can see the difference, basically before and after.

Number 1

As you can see my analysis is complete and my hard drive is 77% fragmented which is bad. The fragmentation should be less than %10. Also, you should have more than 10% of your hard drive space free for the hard drive to work efficiently.

After defragmenting try to reboot your computer, and if you are still not happy, give my other post about CCleaner a try and that should just do it.

+ It is FREE and in this economy that is a major plus, BEST DEFRAGMENTER FOR FREE

+ has plenty features even some of the paid programs don`t have

+pretty fast and very easy to use

-it might be just me but in my Vista it kept freezing and then working; however, might be just my system. Otherwise it did work and performed same or better than some of the paid defragmenters

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