Battleangel | Personal

After a RAM and SSD upgrade, as well as learning how to fool the activation system, and doing several test runs I was finally comfortable with moving to Windows 7. It’s inevitable after all because of DX11, and the availability of a useful x64 version of Windows. Vista x64 was never an option and XP x64 was at best a parenthesis that very few ever supported.

So how did it go? Well, installation from USB stick to SSD went smooth. 15 minutes all in all give or take user input and the speed of the USB stick. Boot times, with SSD, were amazing, around 46 seconds to hit the desktop. Though only about 20 of those are actually spent loading Windows. The rest is various POST related stuff. I am sure I can do more, in the bios and from within Windows to speed things up.

My first impression of Windows 7 still stands however. I find it remarkably awkward and very unfriendly to power users. If you’re like me, the amount of little fixes that you’ll have to do after a fresh install is simply staggering. And as of yet, I’ve been unable to find a good tweaking program (that didn’t crash) to do all of these things automatically.

Here are just a few gripes in no particular order:

• Shortcut arrow on icons. So far impossible for me to remove despite several proclaimed fixes.
• Safely remove hardware icon shows up, suggesting that you can hotplug your SATA AHCI system boot drive. Unlikely. Impossible so far to selectively make it not show SATA hard drives. Will try to kill it altogether and install Safely Remove instead.
• Text and icon size is waaay enlarged when first installing W7. By 125% or so. Finding the setting to revert to 100% isn’t impossible but I cannot fathom why Microsoft would do this. New fancy icons may work, I don’t know, but most icons look smudged and jagged. An icon is exactly 16 or 32 pixels or whatever. Pixels are pixels. They are not to be stretched, mangled or otherwise abused.
• The taskbar is completely useless. Though thankfully it can be tweaked to resemble the classic functionality. Taking back your old school quick launch however is nonintuitive to say the least.
• You will find that a ton of applications wont launch. Thankfully, most likely none of those applications are essential nor irreplaceable.
• Windows offering to format “raw” hard drives from time to time. No, they’re not raw, they’re encrypted you stupid piece of shit! Aggravated by the fact that W7 sees disks are removable. But installing Safely Remove will also have the side effect of killing the "remove hardware" icon.
• The new explorer interface … can’t get my head around it. It’s like a media browser, but it can’t handle or relate to the hard drive’s actual structure. Unless you revert you’re entire theme to classic from what I understand. Replacement: XYplorer for those times when you want to browse the hard drive like a non-retard.
• The new copy / move interface. File or folder already exists? Prepare to be hit over the head with the most useless, cluttered and confusing dialog box EVER. Replacement: Teracopy or FF Copy.
• Ever heard of winsxs? No? In my 12GB windows folder it takes up 6GB (40k files and 10k folders!). Supposedly it used to be much bigger in Vista. This is obviously poison on an SSD. And there is no way to get rid of it. Supposedly it adds compatibility by offering side-by-side libraries. And it does seem to be bigger and grow more on x64 systems. It’s a ticking bomb basically if you have a 30 GB partition.
• Windows Search is a real pain in the ass as well. Though a lot more powerful than its predecessors, you will never notice because you’ll most likely not get past all the fluff. And who wants the indexer running anyway? And why can’t we have search in the context menu any more? I tried to restore the latter but it didn’t work as intended. Apparently you can now replace the entire search application so I will look into that. Something like Super Finder XT or FileSeek perhaps? Locate, Everything? There are plenty.
• Bitmap font sizes (Sans Serif etc) don’t really change with overall DPI settings the way they should. If W7, during the installation, thinks you should be at 120 DPI and later change to 96 DPI, you will notice how bitmaps fonts are still at a size that relatively speaking corresponds to 120 DPI. Fixed it.

Possibly driver / 3rd party related.

• Coming out of sleep (S3) I lose sound from the right audio channel. Fiddling around in the Realtek HD Manager, saving settings, solves the problem temporarily. Fixed it somehow. At least it hasn’t happened in a long while.
• Coming out of sleep (S3) I sometimes find that the power profile has been reset. Evident by the fact that the system now requires you to log on. Suspected Rivatuner but not entirely sure. Removed Rivatuner, hasn’t happened again.

That is just what I could think of off the top of my head. Don’t get me wrong, W7 is great, but its UI greatness is directly proportional to how little you know about computers.

Addendum: A few weeks later and W7 is still going strong. No BSODs and the only time my graphics drivers crashes it was possible to re-acquire the GPU without a reboot. SSD drive still seems fast (using TRIM). I have installed Safely Remove, XYplorer, Teracopy, and Everything to combat some of the more annoying shortcomings. Haven’t spent much time tweaking services yet so that is definitely something to do. But with an SSD and 6 GB of RAM you just don’t feel the burden anymore. I have solved some of the SSD usage / encryption concerns by having some applications use an encrypted HDD disk for cache. That way I reduce the wear and tear on the SSD, save space and keep the data secure. As for the disk space on the SSD, I still haven’t partitioned the last 15 GB. But now that I have TRIM I probably will after some more research. The C: drive has 10 out of 30 GB free. And that is with most of the software installed. Open Office, Adobe etc etc. D: has 13 out of 33 GB free. My idea is to only keep the games I actually play on SSD. And games where a) load times are an issue and b) SSD might change the playing field so to speak. In general, SSDs don’t do much in this field as loading times are usually just sloppy programming decisions and CPU / RAM bottlenecking. But I was thinking of moving the massive WoW folder (now 16 GB after patch 3.3.0) to see what that does. When I do play WoW, I sometimes switch alts several times a minute so any reduction of loading times would be most helpful. At any rate it would be stupid to continue to run some games off of encrypted space. I used to because I did a really sloppy full disk encryption, but now I more options.