Archive for June, 2009

First Look: Windows 7 Ultimate RC

Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Microsoft, Windows on June 13th, 2009

On June 2, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 7 will lunch on October 22, 2009. Since the release candidate has been out for over a month I decided to give it a shot on my old Dell Inspiron 630m. This system has never run Vista and it’s not officially supported by Dell to run it. Here are the specs for my 630m:

  • Intel Pentium M 1.86GHZ
  • 1GB of RAM
  • 80GB HDD
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG
  • Broadcom 440x 10/100 NIC

win7As you can see, it’s not the most impressive system. I downloaded the DVD image from the Windows 7 website. The down load was a bit over 2GB which I found a little excessive but then again it’s Windows. After burning the image I inserted the DVD into my laptop and booted from the DVD the installation loaded fairly quickly compared to older versions. The disk petitioner has a straight forward UI and formating process was quick. The whole installation took just over 45 min which is decent. Once I booted into the OS, it ran perfectly and it installed all my drivers as soon as I ran the Windows Updates. That’s great since in XP you would spend a good portion of your time downloading and installing drivers.

Ok, so the installation went well. Now its time to get a feel for performance. Through out my uses the system didn’t freeze even though it maintained a high CPU and memory usage during my testing. The new taskbar feels a lot more intuitive than Vista’s. Things like the wireless network management in the task bar make it a much nicer experience. Microsoft also reduced a lot of the permission prompts for basic settings which makes the security much less annoying. System restarts are also less prominent.

The only major problem I had with Windows 7 is that when I unplugged the AC Power the screen goes from 32 bit color to what I believe is 8 bit color. This is a major problem if it happens on newer system but I believe that it is a driver problem since this system does not officially support Vista.

All in all Windows 7 is shaping up to be a good release. Much better than Vista was. I look forward to being able to recommend people to upgrade from XP.

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Google Wave: First Take

Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Google, Web Services on June 3rd, 2009

I have to admit that I am very impressed with Google’s latest endeavor. Google has set out to reinvent one of the internet’s most basic tools e-mail….

Google Wave UI Prototype

Google Wave UI Prototype

Google Wave was introduced at Google I/O on Monday to a large group of developers. During the conference the wave team introduced the concepts behind wave and previewed the early prototype of the project. Development of wave was start in 2007 and is still in its very early form. Wave integrates features from email, forum (discussion) boards, blogs, and social networks all together. The wave protocol will be open sourced, allowing for open collaboration with developers around the world.

You can watch the preview here:

This is a very exciting concept and one that I look forward to working on.

For more infromation go to http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

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