Posts Tagged Microsoft
Net Neutrality
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Business, Law on August 3rd, 2009
Net neutrality has been an issue which has been underplayed over the past few years. Net neutrality, a network design principle, aspires that all content and data is treated equally (Wu). Ever since its creation, the Internet has been neutral, but with the advent of new technologies this neutrality has been threatened (Anderson). Today, the Internet is one of the most important means of communication. It’s neutrality is crucial to all aspects of society. No corporation, government, or individual should be allowed to censor public networks. Read the rest of this entry »
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
As 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.
