A Blog about new Windows Edition's like Windows 7 and other software programs http://www.windowsedition.com/blog/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Tue, 03 Mar 2009 5:10:50 -0700 Tue, 03 Mar 2009 5:10:50 -0700 One thing that is completely revamped from previous windows versions is Windows 7’s power consumption savings. The power settings will allow you tweak a laptops power profile to get more battery life. In fact, one of my colleagues was able to increase his laptops power life by 30 minutes vs with a regular Vista installation. You can access these new features from the control panel, power options, click “change plan settings”, and finally click “change advanced power settings.” In the menu you will have the ability to tweak everything from your USB ports to the power on your PCI Express Video Adapter. In the USB menu, you can easily tweak your USB ports to suspend when they are not in use. The next mode allows you to set the processor’s minimum/ maximum power state and a cooling policy. What this menu essentially does is allow you to forcefully under clock your processor to save power. While Vista has some of these advanced power tweaks, Vista wasn’t able to achieve the kind of power improvements that Windows 7 is able to achieve. In addition, Windows 7 also has a lot of automatic power saving functions. Windows 7 has the capability to instantly disable and re enable your wireless adapter while it is still turned or not in use. Windows 7 also has the ability to momentarily disable processors cores if they are also not use. I am sure more details will come about Windows 7’s advanced power management. Stay with WindowsEdition.com for more! http://www.windowsedition.com/blog/windows_7/advanced-power-profiles-windows-7-laptops/ Tue, 03 Mar 2009 5:10:50 -0700 Windows 7 attempts to improve upon the Windows Vista User Account Control. For those who don’t know what user account control is, it is that annoying dialog box that frequently pops up in Vista. The UAC popup asks you whether you actually wanted to do the intended action. This action might be accessing the control panel or modifying a system file etc. The purpose of UAC is to prevent trojan horses, viruses, or unauthorized programs from automatically changing your system settings. Hence, if a malicious program tried to modify your computer, a UAC dialog box would come up and alert you. Knowing that you didn’t cause the change, you would have the opportunity to deny the action. This all sounds great in principle, but has ended up causing alot more frustration than help. I have observed users just ignoring the Windows UAC messages or stating that the UAC dialog boxes are just plain annoying. Windows 7 attempts to improve upon these frustrations. In fact, I havent seen a UAC message while using Windows 7. This is a huge change considering that I might see 10 notifcations a day while using Vista. Whats also nice is that Windows 7 gives you the ability to tweak UAC. For example, if you are a very parinod user who wants to know every change on your computer, you can move the Windows 7 slider to the “always notify” setting. While, if you are a user that wants the machine to take care of everything simply leave the slider in middle. Finally, if you dont want to be annoyed by a popup, simply disable UAC by setting the slider to “never notfiy.” In summary, I really like the control that Windows 7 gives you in tweakin UAC. With Vista you were only able to turn on or off the UAC functionality and that was also a difficult process. http://www.windowsedition.com/blog/windows_7/windows-7-features/ Mon, 23 Feb 2009 5:49:50 -0700 Taskbar: I like the new taskbar that Windows 7 has. What it does is consolidate all of your icons based upon their logo. The new setup looks extremely clean and works a lot like the Mac dock. If you highlight your mouse over the taskbar, a preview of all of the program windows will pop up. This feature is similar to Vistas but it will show you a preview of all the windows rather than a single one. Unfortunately, this feature wasn’t enabled on my laptop because it wasn’t powerful enough. However, I was able to use it one of my friends computers with a midrange Core 2 Duo processor. Drivers: One of the features I really like about Windows 7 is its compatibility. As I stated in the last article, the Windows 7 driver update is awesome. But what is also cool is that Windows Vista drivers are compatible with the new version. This will save developers a lot of time because they don’t have to scrap all the work they’ve done on Windows Vista drivers to be compatible with the new version. This means that for the user they can expect to see Windows 7 deployed relatively quickly. Other features There are a lot of other great tweaks that Windows 7 offers. I found these sites that lay out some of the improvements. The Istartedsomething blog has a great explanation of the new Taskbar. They discuss the new shake feature. This feature is activated when you shake an open window all other windows behind it will minimize to the taskbar. http://www.windowsedition.com/blog/windows_7/windows-7-features/ Sat, 14 Feb 2009 5:52:50 -0700 The other day I installed Windows 7 Beta on my laptop. The installation went very smoothly and there were very few context menus to fill out. I guess you can say that Windows is approaching a fully unattended install which is nice. Upon bootup, the windows logo is also new as it is now a 3d windows logo. However, this seems to slow down the startup a bit. Once I your are into Windows for the first time Windows 7 will search for your drivers. This is the feature that really separates Windows 7 from its predecessors. The driver detection capability is simply outstanding. On the three computers (2 new desktops custom built with completely different components and a new Dell laptop.) that I installed Windows 7 one, all of the drivers were correctly detected and installed. One of my friends even installed Windows 7 on an older Dell centrino laptop. The install was flawless. Interestingly, one of my other friends had a printer which he simply could not install on Vista or Windows Xp. The printer was successfully detected and installed on Windows 7. There was one downside to Windows 7 Beta which is its memory usage. On my laptop with 2 gigs of ram, I was still getting about 900 megabytes of memory usage even during idle computing. This is compared to 150 megabytes during idle with Windows XP. However, there is still an interesting point to note. My friends centrino laptop with 512 mb was still able to run Windows 7. He claimed that it wasn’t that slow. Regardless, two of my friends have been running Windows 7 beta for 2 months, albeit on powerful machines. They will swear by its performance. http://www.windowsedition.com/blog/windows_7/windows-7-automatic-driver-updates/ Sat, 14 Feb 2009 5:52:50 -0700