After just over two weeks with Windows 7, I can daw a few conclusions. While it steals some ideas from OS X (particulary in the dock task bar), it's definately Windows. This is the best Windows ever. No, really. It's better than XP. The stability, ease of use, and performance are all better. I've installed both upgrades (via the Family Pack) and fresh installs. The upgrades don't tell you this, but they will check for a legitimate existing XP or Vista installation ahead of time. When doing a "custom install" as an upgrade (necessary when you change bit sizes in a Vista upgrade, or in any XP upgrade), you have to boot from the DVD. If you insert the Windows 7 DVD and try to run the upgrade from Windows, it will appear to work, but you'll run into an error and have to start over. Microsoft and partners did a very good job on driver prep. I'm running both 64-bit and 32-bit and have not had a driver issue so far (see exception below).
My main experience has been in upgrading my media center PC. Charlie has always been an experiment for me, as I'd like to move my family to a media center, butfelt the technology was not there. And I prefer Apple, but Apple TV was too weak, and the open-source media center products were too complicated. So Windows has had an extended trial. At first I was running XP MCE on it, then Vista. I was never happy with the performance, despite the fact that Charlie has 3 GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. The cuplrit, of course, was the video card. While I had a decent 64Mb video card in the system, it was restricted to a VGA connection. As my eventual goal is to create an HDTV-capable media center, this just would not do. DVI or HDMI would be required. Over the years I had twice tried to add an NVidia video card to improve the picture and boost performance, and had twice failed. These were high-end, high-performance, well-rated video cards, but adding them always killed my system performance. Various troubleshooting and diagnostic efforts resulted in no answers, so I always just removed the cards and went back to the old VGA standby. After upgrading Charlie to 64-bit Windows 7, I tried again. And again I had issues. But this time I called in the cavalry. After support discussions with Microsoft and NVidia, I learned that the NVidia video drivers required for the card are fundamentally incompatible with the drivers for the ATI motherboard. This is documented pretty much nowhere, so let this blog be a warning to others. When running a Windows Media Center (XP, Vista, or Windows 7) on an ATI motherboard, you cannot use an NVidia video card. You'll get slow performance, system freezes, and other flaky behavior. The System Interrupts process wil spike your CPU to 100%. So I returned the NVidia card and picked up an ATI Radeon card. Success! I now had a full DVI connection and perfromance was much improved. For about two hours everything was fine. Then all of a sudden the system bogged down again. A web search revealed that a service called "High Definition Audio" was the culrpit. I deactivated the service and rebooted, and performance was restored. If you know Media Center, you know that it can support two tuners, one for watching and one for recording. My main tuner is a Hauppauge internal PC tuner card, and that one has worked well. But to get a second tuner in the box, I pulled out and installed an old MSI TV Anywhere card. Big mistake. Once the system tried to use this card to record video, everything screeched to a halt. It turns out that the MPEG-2 decoder used by this card is a piece of garbage that spiked my CPU. This seems to be an endemic problem with this ancient and not-so-noble card, so I yanked it. A new, modern tuner card should go in this week, and Charlie will be up and running like never before. Next up - media sharing between Windows 7 Media Centers. And oh, yeah, eventually I'll need to replace my Windows Server 2003 installation with a brand new Windows 7 installation. I ran a two-week trial on my Mac via a VM and it went well, so now I am using a Boot Camp install for further evaluation. I'll keep you posted!
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I spent this weekend with Windows 7. I've not completed all of my installations yet, but I can report on one upgrade and one clean install. First I upgraded my Vista media center server. This was my first priority as I have always wanted better performance out of this box. It's also not mission-critical so it was a great test platform for me. I was installing from the Windows 7 Family Pack, but this was not a straight upgrade: I went from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Win7, which essentially makes this a clean install. All of my media files are on an external hard drive, however, so I figured I would not lose anything. I wanted to try the 64-bit version. The install went pretty cleanly and took about 40 minutes, booting directly from the DVD. Win7 Home Premium have me the choice of a 32-bit or 64-bin install based on my hardware, and then installed without a hitch. It didn't ask me for an XP or Vista disk, so I assume it looked at my hard drive and realized the upgrade was legit based on my existing Vista install. Win7 detected and loaded drivers for my NIC, external DVD drive, and my two media tuners. I had some issues with the VGA connection to the monitor/flat panel I use with this system, but I determined this was a problem with the monitor, not Windows 7. Then I poked around Windows 7 some. Performance was peppy, better than Vista on the same hardware. I have to say I like the interface a lot. The changes to the task bat take a little getting used to, but I didnot have any real problems getting around. The re-design of UAC is much less intrusive. I'm not crazy about the changes to home networking, but then as a geek I am an atypical user. Then I started Media Center. It ran through a setup routine very similar to that of Vista and XP Media Center, but it's been dumbed down a bit. One thing I don't like is that if it detects a signal, it assumes that is a broadcast signal. I had to go through custom setup to tell it that I use a direct cable signal. Once I did that, though, it correctly deduced my cable provider from my ZIP code and downloaded the appropriate settings and guide info. My next step was to add my media libraries. This worked very well. After taking some time to index the content, Media Center correctly listed all of my recorded and downloaded media. This is what I would expect a good piece of software to do, and Media Center did the job well. I then tried watching some recorded and live TV. This is not an outstanding box for a media center, so any improvement is noticable. I had no problems with both types of TV. Performance was noticably better than with Vista Media Center. My next task on this PC was to upgrade the video card. I'd wanted to move from VGA to DVI for a while so I decided to give it a try. I added a brand-new PNY PCI Express 16x 1GB card and changed connections form VGA to DVI. Windows 7 detected it at boot and installed the drivers from the disk. The DVI link worked great and the picture was much improved. At next boot, however, Windows 7 seemed to forget that I had an advanced graphics card, and picture quality dropped despite the DVI link. When I tried to play media, I got a message that "required files are missing. This is Media Center code for "your video card does not have enough RAM." Since my new video card has plenty of RAM, something is funky here. I downloaded new drivers from NVidia and the picture quality improved, but it still won't play videos. This is something I'll have to research. My second install was a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate on a Parallels VM on my Macbook Pro. This installation went very smoothly, When I booted the VM into the Windows 7 Ultimate disk, the setup asked me what edition of Win7 I wanted to install, from Starter to Ultimate. I chose Ultimate and watched the computer work. Installation again went smoothly. Once installed I rebooted and downloaded and installed AVG Free anti-virus. No problems there. Then I installed all Notes 8.5.1 clients and Domino 8.5.1. The purpose of this machine is to evaluate Windows 7 as a Domino server platform. To date I see no issues, but I also haven't left it running for any time yet. In short, my first weekend with Windows 7 was both more productive and less trouble than I might have expected. I have one more XP machine to upgrade, and after I finishe evaluating Win7 as a Domino server I have a migration from Windows Server 2003 to Windows 7 Ultimate, so watch this space for more information.
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OK, geek like me. You must be aware that today is Windows 7 launch day. If you don't keep an eye on the Windows space (and I think we all have to, it's the 800-lb gorilla even if you don't like it), you may not be aware that Microsoft has finally gotten smart with pricing. If you have multiple Windows machines at home, you should look at the Windows 7 Family Pack. It lets you upgrade three PCs in the same household from Vista or XP to Windows 7 Home Premium for $150. Finding the Family Pack can be a challenge. Use the Microsoft part number, GFC-00236. You'll see some weird prices, but expect to pay $150 or a bit less from a legitimate reseller. The trick with this is that Microsoft has allotted only a limited number of family packs for North America, and once they're gone, they're gone. Don't worry about me, I got mine this morning. I am no Windows fanboy, but as a Notes developer I need it. Plus we have an XP machine and a Vista machine at home, and they are going to Windows 7 as soon as I get the chance.
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Over a year ago I asked about what server you use to run Domino. I was still running Windows 2000 and was quite happy with it. If you want to know my reasons, read that entry, I detailed them there. I have since replaced both the hardware and the OS. I'm now running Windows Server 2003. The change went pretty well, with a couple of hitches. The main cause is that I use my server as a personal workstation as well as a server. I have to do things like manage PDFs and so forth. Remember that I'm a one-man shop when it comes to IT, so less complexity is a key driver. WIndows 2000 was ideal for this, as it ran consumer-grade software and still was a decent server. But the lack of support and updated software was starting to be a pain, so I rolled over to Windows Server 2003 when I upgraded my hardware. The upgrade was smooth and Domino runs like a charm. My main frustration with 2k3 is that so much consumer-level software won't run on it. I can no longer use my Brother MFC-665CW as a scanner and PC fax - the Windows 2003 driver won't allow it. Bluetooth doesn't work at all. I also can't use the Nokia PC Suite software to manage my phone. I used to sync my Nokia E62 with Notes on my Windows 2000 server/workstation via Bluetooth, and I've had to find a completely different solution. I understand why this is - 2k3 is designed for serious servers in corporate environments. But in this way it's not a good fit for me. The benefits are that Windows Server 2003 is a lot more up-to-date than Windows 2000. For example, I can now do remote management via Remote Desktop Connection. The performance is a lot better, and 2k3 takes better advantage of the hardware I have. I refuse to rely on Vista for my server, so I am considering doing a fresh install of Windows 7 when it comes out and giving that a shot as my new server. Any thoughts are appreciated. Oh, and if you're going to recommend Linux, don't bother. I have no interest in learning it.
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I have been running my own Domino server out of my home since about 2001. We run our family e-mail and web sites from it.
I started with an old HP Pavilion back in 2001. In 2003 I upgraded to Windows 2000 and moved to a new box with a gig of RAM and a huge, for the time, 20Gb hard drive. This server is still up and running today. It's gone from Domino R6 through 6 and 7, and currently runs 8.0.1. In, I think,. 2005, I added a second hard drive (30Gb). The transaction logs go on C: and the Domino data goes on D. I also upped the memory to 2 GB. But other than that, service packs, and a new LAN card, it hasn't changed much in years.
The neat thing about this server, aside from its longevity, is that through all the version permutations and my experiments with Tomcat, DB2, and other products, it has always met my needs. Windows 2000 has, overall, been a great OS for me. I'm planning to finally retire this server this summer, and will (reluctanlty) probably move to Windows Server 2003. I'm sticking with Windows primarily because I know it, it works on my hardware, and I own the licenses so it's free. If I knew Linux I would consider it, but since I don't know it I can't be bothered to learn it unless there's a good financial reason to do so.
So this Windows 2000, 2 Gb RAM, 2-disk server has pretty much been an ideal solution for me, perfectly balancing out cost and performance while being extremely low-maintenance. If you could picture the perfect server for an SMB organization, what would it be? And remember I don't mean "the most powerful server"-- imagine you are paying for all the costs out of your own pocket, so you'll need to balance cost, performance, maintenance, utility, and longevity.
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