NaughtySpawn

Posts Tagged ‘Windows 7’

Looks like Microsoft is starting to prep Windows 7 Sp1, however reports are showing it won’t show up until the first couple of months of 2011. As it stands now, it’s been nearly one year since Windows 7 went to manufacturing. October was the actual date consumers could buy it off the shelves. So pretty much no matter how you look at it, the Service Pack will follow the OS release by at least a full year which is following in the footsteps of Vista which had the first Service Pack release a year after the OS initially hit the streets. Even still, that’s actually a pretty long time.

It’s not like Microsoft hasn’t been patching Win7 though, I get told there’s a new update that I need to install 3 or more times a week. On the one hand that’s a good thing that MS is fixing problems and taking care of issues. On the other, damn that’s a lot of problems and issues to fix.

But the big deal about a Service Pack is that Microsoft has been known to completely change or include functionality with a true SP. However, Ballmer has already stated that this SP won’t be that big a deal. Considering Windows 7 itself is just a massive Service Pack to Vista, yeah, he’s probably right.

I’ve gotten used to Windows 7 now. I’m not saying I like it, because really I still don’t, but I’ve gotten used to the things you can and can’t do with it.

It doesn’t really get an clearer than this, but Ballmer is admitting that Vista was crap. I don’t really agree that Vista was "too big a task", but I do agree that Vista was crap. However, I will also admit that after SP1 it really didn’t deserve all the bad press it got. It’s not a Netbook OS to be sure, but once the driver issues were worked out it wasn’t that bad, but the performance issues, driver bugs and lack of support for so much hardware put a stigma on Vista it would never recover from.

It is funny though that even though Vista was bad, Windows 7 is almost exactly the same OS and people love it. People can say what they want, but Windows 7 is Vista SP3. The dialog boxes, UAC, Control Panel and so many other components in Win 7 are simply reused from Vista. It has some cosmetic changes to the UI and Taskbar and the widgets have been taken out of your way, but at the hear of things, Windows 7 IS Vista, just without the stinky name.

http://www.neowin.net/news/steve-ballmer-quotwe-tried-too-big-a-taskquot-with-vista

So here’s the scenario: I needed to play a DVD on a Netbook that runs Windows 7. Now before you get all uppity and justify why this can’t be done or shouldn’t be done, let me explain that I understand the limitations as far as processing power and graphics. No, a Netbook doesn’t have a DVD player so you shouldn’t be able to play DVDs. But I can still load ISO images into it.

But anyway, using CloneDVD and AnyDVD I made a copy of the disc and using VirtualCloneDrive mounted the ISO image into Windows. However, I was stymied by the Windows 7 error that no DVD playback codec was installed. Really? You couldn’t include the damn playback codecs in the Starter Edition?

And it seems I’m not the only one who wants to play a DVD on a Netbook. As soon as you do a Google search multiple articles come up, but they all have the same answer. You either need to upgrade Windows (which is a crap answer) or install the free VLC DVD player.

Within minutes of finding the answer I had VLC loaded and the movie was playing. And it played just fine. It got choppy every now and again, but it obviously works. But it’s not so much that the DVD codec was missing, it’s more the total contradiction of how Windows works. If you right click on the ISO image you get the option to "Burn the image". My question is, how? To what? There’s no DVD burner! If the argument is movies don’t play since there’s no DVD drive, why the hell does Windows 7 Starter offer a choice to burn a DVD to a non-existent burner? And then if it did burn the DVD it couldn’t use it, it doesn’t have the codecs!

Make up your mind Bi-Polar Windows, are you going to work with DVDs or not?