My Micro-Review of Windows 7

After much trepidation, I finally installed the Windows 7 beta on my laptop. With the possible exception of losing my VPN connection (Cisco hasn’t made a driver available yet), it’s been a really smooth experience. The beta is very stable and a big improvement over Vista.

I’m one of the few people who seem to actually like Vista, but 7 takes it up a notch. In a nutshell:

• It seems snappier than Vista and uses less memory on my machine.
• It ditches some of Vista’s big annoyances (I’m looking at you, UAC)
• It adds some nice features such as an improved and more useful taskbar.
• It resumes from hibernation and standby much faster.
• It updates the Media Center interface.

Windows 7 also extends the life of the laptop battery, but I have not had time to test that.

In other words, my observations seem to jibe with what everyone else has said so far. If the final addresses the VPN issue, there’s no question that I’ll upgrade when it comes out (the final is scheduled to launch in about a year).

Update: I installed it on my home computer, but it didn’t recognize my ancient GeForce3 chipset, which controls audio and networking. So I had to go back to Vista on that machine.

Comcast to institute 250-gig cap

I don’t know yet whether I should be outraged about this new policy, mainly because I don’t know how much bandwidth I actually use -- Comcast won’t tell me. By policy, the company won’t tell you how much you’ve used until you've already exceeded the cap. If you exceed the cap again within a year, Comcast cuts off service.

I got the warning last year after I went on vacation and a buggy program (TVTonic, the company that helped NBC bring Olympic downloads to Windows Vista Media Center) kept downloading video over and over again. Before I figured out what was going on, I pleaded with Comcast to tell me how much I had used and when the peak download times occurred, thinking someone was leeching my network. The Comcast rep couldn’t have been less cooperative.

I figured out the problem on my own and have been in Comcast’s good graces ever since. But to this day, I don’t know how close I’m coming to that usage cap. While 250-gigabytes sounds like a lot, I use my Internet for downloading movies and TV shows on Xbox Live, playing video games online, my Vonage phone line, Skype video calls, streaming Brazilian radio stations, uploading and of course, regular Web browsing and e-mail.

Maybe that adds up to a lot of data; maybe it’s well short of 250 gigabytes. The bottom line is, I’ll never know, thanks to Comcast’s poor customer service.

I understand that Comcast needs to make a return on its investment. But by keeping users in the dark until they’ve exceeded the cap, the company is going to chill a lot of legitimate uses of the Internet. And that is going to make its service a lot less valuable.

Journeyman is actually a pretty good show

I didn't really like the first couple of episodes of this series about a San Francisco journalist/time traveler, but kept recording it for some reason. With a dearth of new programming on due to the writers strike, I finally got around to watching the shows piling up on my Windows Media Center. And you know what? Journeyman really grows on you.

Now I'm all caught up on the first half of the season and can't wait for the second half to begin. I hope it doesn't get canceled. It's one of the more sophisticated sci-fi shows I've seen on TV (one of the strengths of Battlestar Galactica) in a while -- and has been far better than season 2 of Heroes so far.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for sci-fi stories centered around journalists.

Update: Oops. Too late.

Vista SP1 release candidate

I went to the "install fair" at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus this weekend to get an early peek at the long-awaited service pack 1 for Vista. The event gave Microsoft engineers a chance to see how the install process goes on a variety of machines so they can tweak things before this week's public release. The entire install process took about three hours on my machine, but the folks at the event said many people there (including me) ran into a problem that caused a hiccup -- it should be fixed before the service pack goes public.

Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it, because it messed up the sleep function of my laptop. I don't know if this is because my 2710p's sleep feature is nonstandard or whether it's a bug in the Vista service pack, but I can't afford to have anything wrong with my laptop, so I'll just have to wait for the final release. I do plan to install the service pack beta on my home machine to see if it improves reliability. We'll see.

Fun while it lasted

My Xbox 360 gave me the dreaded "Red Ring of Death" last night, the flashing red signal indicating a general hardware failure. I've heard estimates of fatal defects in up to a third of all Xbox's. From the anecdotal evidence I've run across, though, I wouldn't be surprised to learn the total was closer to two-thirds.

Anyway, my machine just fell out of its original warranty, but thanks to the warranty extension Microsoft announced last spring, I'll still get a free repair.

Unfortunately, this process will take about a month. This wouldn't be so bad if my Xbox didn't also serve as a media extender; in addition to no Halo 3, it also means no recorded Heroes, Smallville, ER, 30 Rock, Bionic Woman, etc. So what am I supposed to do in the meantime -- read or something?

Update: In related news, GameStop is reportedly scrapping its Xbox replacement plan.

Windows Media Center: not ready for prime time

When my ReplayTV 4040 finally gave up the ghost last fall, I thought very carefully about its replacement. I had three main options: 1) Buy a TiVo. 2) Pay someone on eBay for a new hard drive formatted and loaded with ReplayTV's proprietary software. 3) Get a Media Center PC (or upgrade my existing PC to handle TV recording).

I didn't like the TiVo option, because that would have meant shelling out for a monthly subscription fee, and feeling left at the mercy of TiVo, which can change its terms and features at will.

Getting a new hard drive for the old ReplayTV would have been a cheap option, especially since I had gotten the lifetime subscription option when I bought it in 2001. But I wasn't sure how much longer ReplayTV would stay in business. For all I knew, the only reason the device was still getting programming guide info was because someone forget to turn off a server somewhere.

So the Media Center PC option was looking more attractive. I liked the idea of being able to easily add on more capacity by adding standard hard drives and new features with software upgrades. And the programming guide info was free.

Still I had no intention in paying $2,000 or more for a decent-looking PC for the living room (my new wife was clear that she wouldn't tolerate an ugly PC tower next to the TV). Fortunately, I knew I could use the Xbox 360 I had received as a wedding present -- which was already connected to the TV and stereo system -- as an extender. In other words, the ugly tower PC would remain in the computer area, where it belonged, but record all my shows and play them through the TV.

Since I already had the Xbox 360 and could find cheap tuner cards for my Vista-ready PC (the Media Center software is now standard with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate), the economics looked good too.

I encountered a few hiccups along the way. Vista ran poorly on my old machine, so I had to upgrade the memory. But this is something I would have had to do anyway. And my first choice of tuner -- an external USB tuner with no hardware video encoder -- was, ahem, a learning experience.

But after some trial and error, I got everything working.

Six months later, I find the setup more and more frustrating. I don't know whether its a hardware issue, still-poor driver support from ATI (tuner) and Nvidia (graphics card) or Vista, but the setup is getting less reliable by the day.

Sometimes the PC crashes when the Xbox tries to connect. At other times, tuner failures mean a show never gets recorded at all. And then there's the all-in-one ehrecvr.exe hangs, which mean shows don't get recorded and already-recorded shows can't be played.

I understand that new operating systems need time to work the kinks out. But Vista has been publicly available for 18 months or so already, and my patience is wearing thin.

When it works, the Media Center setup is excellent. But it's just not reliable enough to recommend. And if a geek like me can't get it working reliably, I'd hate to see the average consumer try to use it.