Windows 7 tried to turn my hair grey

At the end of October I received a pre-ordered copy of Windows 7 as I'd decided to take the plunge and upgrade from Windows XP.

Over the last month or so I have been uninstalling all the stuff I didn't need, then I manually backed up all our documents and photos to DVD and made a second copy on my NAS drive. Then I used VMware vCenter Converter to make a full virtual copy of my current Windows XP machine (as a single 16Gb image) which I could then run as a virtual PC within VMware Player. That way I still had access to the original machine build and all the original files and settings in case I'd missed anything in the backup process.

Then safely assured that everything was prepared a couple of weeks ago I put the Windows 7 DVD in and ran the installation process, reformatting the hard disk so that I had a clean installation.

And there the troubles started. To say that Windows 7 has been causing me problems over the last two weeks has been an understatement.

The install sort of went OK, it took ages, but it didn't seem to complete properly so after fiddling with it for a while I ended up reinstalling W7 again.

Second installation worked much better, got W7 up and running OK but it was "poorly" and remained so for the next couple of weeks whilst I tried to find the root cause of the problem.

The symptom was that it would take ages to boot and then would work properly for a couple of minutes but then unexplainably freeze. And when W7 froze it would stop completely for anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. When a freeze occurred the mouse would still work but nothing else worked at all.

And there I was stuck. I've been through numerous Google found searches of Windows 7 problems, but none of them really worked. The core suggestions were to disable everything "special" in the BIOS, unplug any USB devices, remove any cards from inside the machine, then try step by step to put your machine back together until you found the problem area. This didn't work as even with a stripped down machine it still kept on freezing randomly.

I did find and fix a problem with the onboard sound chipset not being recognised by installing the latest Vista drivers, but other than getting rid of the warning symbol it didn't cure the freezing problem.

The only clue I had was that the freezing seemed to coincide with when I accessed the hard disk (but not all the time, sometimes it worked fine), and in the Windows event log there appeared an error code 11 from the atapi disk service pretty much every time the freeze occurred. Windows help didn't give any clues as to what this error meant (and the same hard disk had worked perfectly with Windows XP), but it did seem to be related.

Cutting the story short I'd resigned myself to having to buy a new hard disk drive (so had been searching on ebay for one at the right price), when I decided in a last ditch attempt to try swapping over the disk drive cable inside the computer in case for any reason that was at fault.

When I unplugged the drive cable I noticed that one of the pins on the hard disk drive wasn't in line with the other pins and was in fact pushed down and out of shape. Perhaps that was the problem, with a dodgy pin the drive was only working intermittently??

Carefully with a pair of long nose pliers I pulled the pin back into place and fortunately it didn't snap off, then I carefully and reverently plugged the hard disk back into the computer cable, switched it all on and held my breath.

Result! Windows 7 works perfectly, not a single jitter, freeze or error message at all, even after running a hard disk benchmark that stressed the hard disk to its maximum 10Mb/sec throughput rate, everything was rock solid.

So that's it all fixed. All I've got to do is to plug the PC back together and sort out any remaining driver problems. From what I've seen of Windows 7 over the last few hours of finally getting to us it, it looks quite good and looks to be a massive improvement on XP.

Moral of the story is to look for the obvious physical problem first.

Postie brought me Windows 7 today

In July I wrote about Windows 7 being available to pre-order and this morning I received a couple of copies through my door.

They would have been with me yesterday which was the official global release date but we were out so they were re-delivered this morning. Actually getting the software on the day it was launched is impressive so hats off to all those involved.

I'm intending to move up from Windows XP to Windows 7 (having missed Vista) and am hoping that it proves to be as good a release as all the reviews say. By all accounts this is the operating system version Microsoft should have shipped 3 years ago when Vista was launched and hardware requirements are reduced and stability (including backwards compatibility) much improved.

The upgrade version of Windows 7 is currently selling at £75.73 from Amazon or £114.98 if you want the full version.

Windows 7 now available to pre-order from Amazon

Just received an email from Amazon announcing that they're taking pre-orders for Microsoft Windows 7 which is due to be released on 22nd October 2009.

Microsoft have come under fire for not providing a cheap upgrade path from Windows XP which loads of people (myself included) are still running. They've been pushing the pre-order route with special offer prices to try to improve take-up and the Amazon launch is no exception.

Windows 7 Home Premium E is available for a pre-launch price of £74.97 (compared to the normal Amazon 'full' price of £149.99).

Similarly Windows 7 Professional E has a pre-launch price of £179.97 (instead of a full price of £219.99).

Windows 7 has generally been getting good product reviews (e.g. see PC Pro's complete feature guide to Windows 7) and unlike Vista Microsoft have learnt their lesson about hardware requirements and so Windows 7 will run quite happily on older machines (although 1GHz and 1Gb memory is still recommended).

Personally I'm not a great fan of Microsoft but at these prices I do have to admit to being slightly interested. Like it or not Windows 7 is going to be around for quite a few years to come and so if you're thinking of keeping your current PC then it could be worth upgrading.

It's worth noting that these are the "E" (European) versions of Windows 7 so don't come with Internet Explorer built in because of European competition rules. You can of course download a copy of IE8 (see my earlier impressions of testing IE8) or my personal favourite Mozilla's Firefox (which was recently upgraded to Firefox 3.5).

PS: Just noticed that these Amazon prices are about £10 cheaper than pre-ordering Windows 7 from the Microsoft online store!

PPS: Amazon say that this is a limited pre-launch offer and is only available whilst stocks last and ends at midnight on 9th August.

Testing Internet Explorer 8 using Virtual PC

Internet Explorer 8

It doesn't seem all that long ago that I was writing about first impressions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, but it's actually nearly 2½ years ago (in October 2006), and here we are again with the launch of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer homepage is all full of news and video's about how it's quicker, more secure, more compatible and overall a 'better browsing experience' than the competitor browsers (most notably of course Firefox and Chrome), but I'm sure the reality is that it's a case of Microsoft catching up and perhaps slightly leap-frogging them, only in turn to be leap-frogged with the next Firefox version.

I have to admit to being a bit worried about this new version as Microsoft have made strides to make IE8 more standards compatible (something they were ludicrously poor at in the past), but of course in doing so many legacy websites will "break" and not render properly.

Some months ago I asked a friend of mine who'd installed the IE8 beta on his machine to see if our holiday rental website rendered properly, and the news and screenshots weren't good, seemingly the website design that I'd spent months on didn't work properly.

Microsoft have tried to ease the transition pain by adding a 'Compatibility View' button (right next to the Refresh button on the address bar), and my friend told me that the site worked OK in compatibility mode with the IE8 beta version, but nevertheless anything that detracts potential customers from the website is something I want to avoid (hence all the pain I've suffered in trying to get the website W3C standards compliant).

On microsoft.com away from the main IE8 public launch section, on the Microsoft Developer Network site, I found an article about the different IE8 website compatibility modes and how you can use a new 'X-UA-Compatible' meta tag in your HTML <head> section to force the visitor's browser into 'legacy compatibility mode', emulating either IE5, IE7 or IE8.

Currently I have IE7 on my home computer and IE6 on my work computer so I can easily test browser compatibility on the two main IE versions. Similarly I have Firefox 2 on the home machine and Firefox 3 and Chrome on my work computer.

I was thinking therefore that I would have to upgrade one of the machines to IE8 to try out the new browser, when I found through MSDN details of a set of Microsoft Virtual PC images for different versions of Internet Explorer.

Provided are images of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6, IE7 and IE8 and also Vista with IE7. All you have to do to try them out is download and install Microsoft Virtual PC (a mere 30-odd Mb) and then download the selected images. Each image basically comprises a virtual hard disk with the operating system and browser pre-installed; you start up MS Virtual PC, point it at the downloaded hard disk image and then it starts up as a 'PC within a PC' so you can easily test that your website operates properly with the new browser version.

It does take quite a while to download each VPC image as they're 600+Mb in size (and the Vista image is a wopping 2Gb), but they really are a doddle to use.

After trying out XP with IE8 on both the Gite website and this Blog I was really pleased to find out that everything displayed properly without having to revert to compatibility mode.

The only problem I discovered was that the 'Photo Gallery' feature (using Pictobrowser) didn't work with IE8. After a bit of head scratching I realised that the XP IE8 VPC image only had Flash v6 installed. Downloading and upgrading to Flash v10 cured the problem.

The Windows XP images all automatically expire (and stop working) at the end of April 2009 and the Vista image expires 120 days after first use, so these are not permanent test facilities, but they're certainly very useful.

IE7 now available - first impressions

As announced on the Microsoft IE Blog earlier this week, IE7 was formally launched for public download.

IE7 Download

As it's going to start being pushed out as a mandatory update next month I thought I'd better download it quick and check that our holiday home website looks OK, not just in its current incarnation, but also with the new design that I've spent seemingly months working on and I'm just about to roll out. It would be a bit of a problem if the new site is visually screwed up ...

Looking at my website logs I can see that 6% of this Blog's readers are already on IE7, and 3.5% of the main website users are on IE7; so IE7 is clearly out there in the field and starting to be used in anger.

Interesting to read that the CNET review of IE7 gives it a 7 out of 10 overall and ends with

There are a lot of changes within IE 7, though not as many as we'd hoped and some that are merely cosmetic. Missing are innovative, cutting-edge features such as search engine suggestions, live feeds within bookmarks, inline spell-checking, and session restore--features offered within Firefox 2-- or thumbnail tab previews, desktop widgets, or voice (which can read Web pages aloud)--features offered by Opera 9. Given a proposed 18-month development cycle for the next release of Internet Explorer, IE 7 was Microsoft's one chance to leapfrog ahead of the competition, but the company has only barely caught sight of the current front-runners.

That said, everyone should upgrade to IE 7 when offered the chance, even if you never intend to use it. Because Internet Explorer is so tightly bound within Windows XP SP2 (for example, if you view an HTML document in Microsoft Word, you're using IE technology), it's better to have the improved code within IE 7 running on your system than not. But for a truly secure Internet browser with more features, we still recommend Mozilla Firefox.

So that's what Cnet thought about it, what did I think? I have to admit I'm not overly impressed. I've been using IE7 for an hour or so now and whilst there are things I like, there's an equal number of things I find annoying - maybe it's just because it's different from previous versions of IE, but to me it doesn't seem as intuitive as Firefox.

Some comments therefore:

• It seems to be definitely slower opening and rendering pages than IE6 and Firefox
• Tabbed browsing is a welcome addition and I like the Quick Tabs button that gives you a preview view of what's on each tab - a quick and easy way to find a previously opened tab. Also good is that the Open & Close keyboard shortcuts (control-T and control-W) are the same as in Firefox. Also like that there's an option to autosave what tabs were open when you close IE7, though frustrating there's no way to turn this on all the time. Update 22/10, found a great Firefox extension, Tab Catalog, that adds a new button for a thumbnail view of the open tabs (as per IE7) and additionally shows the thumbnails when ctrl-tabbing (one feature not present in IE7)
• I found the 'favourites centre' a bit non-intuitive at first. I thought it only showed my favourites, but in fact it also enables toggling into history and RSS feeds.
• RSS feeds are of course a big new feature of IE7 and they seem to work quite well, enabling you to add and subscribe to feeds at will and also choose how often they're automatically updated.
• Another bugbear, the history view. For reasons unknown all the history file entries for my Gite website appear with the title duplicated twice (e.g. 'Rent our holiday Gite... Rent our holiday Gite .... www.giteinbrittany.com/whatever'). I can't see anything wrong with the HTML that's causing this; for some sites (e.g. Vauxhall Trafficmaster it doesn't duplicate the title in the History, but for lots of others, including Microsoft's IE7 pages have the same problem, but others such as the XP homepage do not - go figure!
• Of course I miss Mouse Gestures from Firefox; particularly 'right mouse click and moving the mouse left' to go back a page which I find I now do all the time
• Printing is much improved with a new 'shrink to fit' feature as per Firefox, quick buttons to toggle the page orientation and to turn the page headers on and off - all good features. However annoyingly they've removed the 'Close' button so you have to use the X button on the top right and also pressing the page up and down buttons on the keyboard which for me should show the next/previous page doesn't work (it's Alt right & left arrow instead) and Print Preview is modal so you can't look at any other webpage when Print Preview is open
• Final useful addition is a Zoom window button (similar to Opera) which increases the text size and automatically scales up images - it's good but you do end up with scroll left/right bars appearing
• There are a few minor niggles with using Blogger under IE7 - some of the administration features don't work properly - but doubtless Google will fix them soon

So for me I'm personally with CNET, Firefox is still better and remains my browser of choice.

I was delighted to see that the new Gite website design works perfectly with IE7 (phew!); however the current site design doesn't, the leftmost 6 characters or so of the navigation menu get truncated off - this is because the current site design uses the star-html hack which is no longer supported (good Position is Everything article about IE7 changes if you're interested in the detail).

All the more reason to finish off the new site design and get it uploaded quickly ...