It’s the “Windows 7 Rant!”

I’ve been listening to the non-stop computer press love affair with Windows 7. Upgrade your PC’s! Don’t be afraid! This time Microsoft has done it right!

Well, not exactly…

We have a lot of laptops in our office and home. We try to stick with major brands and configurations. A few built desktops are in our home, but mainly we have Tablet PC’s, which tend to stick to basic Intel Motherboard and Graphics configurations. Thus, you would think these would be easy to upgrade.

Guess again!

Again, these are major brands: Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Fujitsu. These have all been best selling tablet pc’s. Microsoft should know these machines!

Here are the issues:

1. Portrait mode on a tablet PC creates a double cursor. These machines were designed to be held and used like notebooks, using the tablet feature and Windows Journal or Office One Note. It’s usable, but you often get confused by the weird double cursor. This bug appears in every tablet we have and was present from even the Beta One days of Windows 7. Unfortunately, the bug was never fixed. I’ve spent A LOT of time on this. There is no fix.



2. Higher resolution laptop monitors have a strange habit of reverting to low resolution every 15 minutes or so and every time the system powers down or hibernates. Again, you have no idea how many hours I have spent trouble shooting this and looking for some sort of menu item, registry entry, driver change, etc. to try and keep the machine in it’s native screen resolution. The machine is a Fujitus 4220 tablet with SXGA screen. Incredibly frustrating!

3. Windows 7 acts oddly with networks. Hooking to a network can be a lengthy affair. Hooking to a network printer can be terribly slow. If you are having trouble with this, I’ve found a reboot often solves the problem.

4. My tablet art programs choke with Aero, the fancy glass appearance in menus that appears in Windows 7. This is disappointing, but not a deal killer. The solution: Turn off Aero. Good luck finding the menu choice. I tried to find it in the “help” menu. Instead, I had to use Google and the Internet. Hey, Microsoft! Help us out a little bit.

I’ve just started and am barely using the new OS. Why? I’ve been too busy trying to make is function!

Are there things to like? Of course! There are features I love, but they are currently overshadowed with these very irritating problems!

I bought several copies of the upgrade version to install. It looks like I may have some copies left over because some of these machines are going back to XP Tablet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Animating on Paper: The Sneeze 1992

Image
I made my last animation with tracing paper and a pen back in 1992.  At the time, I was mainly drawing with a Summagraphics Sketch Pad attached to a desktop Amiga Computer with a ton of peripherals. Even though they all filled a room, it still only output low resolution video. After a day of traveling 23 years ago, I sat down with a black marker and my tracing pad and drew this animation.  When I got home, I scanned the drawings, colored them and compiled them with triggered sound events in Disney Animation Studio.  Paper drawn animation of this type has an interesting jitter referred to as “Line-Boil.”  Like the early animators, I believed line-boil was a terrible imperfection.  Sometimes, however, it makes the animation interesting.  Around the mid 1990’s and later, television grew to like line-boil and added the deliberate exaggerated effect to many titles and animations. Anyway, I found the original 1992 drawing files for "The Sneeze" and, with some e
Read more

Hospital-Admin-Speak: A new language

Image
Anyone who has ever served time on a hospital administration committee knows what I'm talking about.  This is where the vast difference between the world of hospital administration versus the world of doctors and nurses becomes clear. As a side note for those interested in the process of creating these animations: I experimented with a different method of creating the talking head portion.  The result was not what I wanted, but it was interesting... Here is the comparison video:
Read more

Coronavirus Cartoons

Image
It's easy to forget how early most of us knew Covid-19 could become a real problem.  Experts were downplaying it as a minor hazard compared to influenza.. Not until January 20 was there official acknowledgement the virus could spread from person to person. On that same day, I tried to buy face masks for our office and discovered a disturbing problem:  They were all sold out.   Something was brewing.  Though the American Public was preoccupied with Democratic Primaries and impeachment hearings, many were also aware of the new virus in Wuhan.  By January 23, I felt enough people knew of the threat to create two cartoons: The second cartoon was done at a time when people were entering crowded DMV's to get their new driver's license which would enable them to fly in airplanes.  The lines were insane and the wait was many, many hours. This one did not age well.  I thought it was pretty hilarious at the time and I got a lot of positive feedback.  Now, it looks.... kind of cliche
Read more