Windows 7 Beta, a couple of weeks in.

I’ve now been using windows 7 beta on my spare machine for a couple of weeks, and it pains me to say, I’m impressed.  It’s rock solid, and not fallen over once.

The machine I’m running it on is a Dell Vostro 220 that I bought toward the end of last year.

The Spec is as follows

2Ghz Core 2 Duo

2Gb Ram

2 x 150Gb Sata Hard Drives

ATI 3450 256Mb Dedicated Graphics

Onboard sound

All driver I’m using are in inbuilt Windows drivers, apart from the ATI drivers which are beta.

I’m currently running, Tversity, Utorrent, MKV2VOB, Imgburn, Epson CDprint. Now granted I’m not really pushing it, well apart from the Vob encoding, and the Tversity encoding, but it’s worked flawlessly since I installed it on the 21st Jan 2009.

Taking the above into consideration, I decided to ghost my hard drive on my main gaming PC, and install it on the main drive, big mistake !

Now I will be honest, my machine isn’t the best example of a standard machine, as I’ve had a number of issues with it. There is nothing phyically wrong with it, hardware wise, it’s just have had some (Microsoft hates ATI, and ATI can’t write drivers for toffee issues)

The spec is as follows

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR2 5400 OCZ Memory
Asus M2R32-MVP SB600 chipset Motherboard
1 x Pioneer 212 DVD-Multi Drive
1 x WD 500Gb 7200 Hard Drive
2 x WB 250GB 7200 Hard Drive
ATI 2900HD 1Gb Video Card

Now the initial problems I had were with the installation, As I have a SATA DVD drive the AHCI doesn’t like working, however I was able to crowbar the operating system on, this worked ok, however the system paused every couple of seconds, and the hard drive light lit up like a Christmas tree.

So based on this, I put the hard drives into IDE Native mode, and reinstalled, and this fixed the pausing problem.

Driver support….well apart from ATI, NONE ! I know the software is in beta stages, but Geeez, didn’t manufacturers learn thier lesson from the Vista release, I remember waiting for months for Soundblaster to release stable drivers, I ended up taking my XFI card out and using the onboard card instead.

The ATI drivers were Video only, so I have no motherboard drivers, which mean much slowness. I attempted to use the Vista drivers, nope, forget it, just hung. I found that any vista drivers I tried, just made the system hang (fair enough, they ain’t for Windows 7)

I tried to run a few games with the current machine, and they run bad. If they would run at all, they were slow and choppy.

Now I do understand, that the majority of the issues are driver related, so I’ll keep an eye on these and retest at a later date.

As an operating system, I actually can’t wait for it to come out, it’s what Vista should have, and hopefully everybody will forget Vista even happened (kinda like Windows ME).

I like the way the Widgets are no longer on the windows sidebar, I love the preview Window when you scroll over the bottom bar, like the management of the taskbar menu.

Will update when more drivers are available, but at the moment a 2 thumbs up

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Gear4 AirZone FM ‘Follow Me’

As I mentioned in my previous post (Vectra SRI CDTi), I was bugged that it didn’t have an MP3 player. Well I thought, maybe I can change the head unit, or pull this one out, and see if it had any auxiliary sockets at the back, then I thought….Ooooo, why don’t I just get one of the FM transmitter thingys.

First off I bought myself a ITrip, which even though it stated on the box that it was compatible with the Ipod touch, this apparently didn’t mean the 2G. I bought it, plugged it into my ipod, sat in the car, turned on the stereo, pressed play….and nothing, no LCD display, nothing. So lucky for me, I hadn’t even left Curry’s carpark, so took it back for a refund Pretty glad I did, as it was almost double the price that is was online at other leading retailers.

That night I came home and did a little research, and found that Gear4 also did one, however this used the RDS technology to a, display the ID tags as the radio station, and b, send a signal to the headunit, if it moved stations.

This turned up on Thursday at work, ripped it out of the box, plugged it in…..nothing……

Luckily, my office seems to have been taken over by Apple in the last couple of months, it went from nothing apple to, 4 Iphone 3G’s, and 4 Ipod Touch 2G’s.

I kindly as a few people to try it in their, and it worked….DOH !

Got home that night pretty gutted, as my Ipod seemed to have a fault with it, so C decided she ought to by an Ipod Touch as it had been tested and working with several in the office.

Long story short, C bought an Ipod Touch from the shiny Mecca that is the Apple store (there are no Ipod touches anywhere…..believe me, we tried, but that’s another story), and we got to try it out.

It works, and works well.

The button on the left scans the radio waves where you are and finds the clearest frequencies, once found it sets itself to this (eg 99.9 FM seems good near me). Hit play and your away, it scrolls the ID tag along it’s own screen in a very cool blue LED font, as well as displays the frequency it’s using. Program your radio to pick this up, and all is cool.

The quality is good, I wouldn’t say is it CD quality, but around the same as a well tuned in radio station (I know, I know, obviously, however just thought I’d point that out if anybody though it was going to be as good as the MP3 dock you get is some cars, personally I don’t think it is).

We did get a little interference, however this was fixed by moving the Ipod from underneath the head unit, to a SunGlasses holder above the centre console, we realised we were actually getting interference from the windscreen wipers.

While driving from home to Leicester, it did adjust it’s frequency from 99.9 to 99.7 and with it being RDS, the Head Unit re-tuned itself (very cleaver I thought).

Conclusion, for £30, it beats buying and fitting a new head unit, the quality isn’t perfect, but very good.

Spec Below.

Tags: 2g, 4, AirZone, Apple, apple store, Box, carpark, cdti, Clearsearch, curry, Display, dock, FM, fm transmitter, Follow, frequency, G. I, Gear, Head, home, interference, iphone, ipod, ipod touch, itrip, lcd display, led font, Me, mecca, mp3 player, night, nothing, office, quality, radio, radio station, radio waves, RDS, rds technology, signal, sockets, SRI CDTi, station, story, technology, touch, unit