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Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar
Foofoobar writes "Due to a strike with the UK's postal system, people in Great Britain are getting copies of Windows 7 early and have already posted their experiences about the install process. Some have an easy time but others post installs taking 3 hours including Windows asking them to remove iTunes and Google toolbar prior to installation." The article indicates that many of these early users, though, are having better luck.
First, this obviously applies only to upgrades.
Second, iTunes does horrible things to your USB stack, and it needs to go.
After Win7 is installed you can add it back, and not lose any of your music.
Don't make a big deal out of Microsoft trying to remove the effects of misbehaved software corrupting the install.
There is no issue here.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Seriously. I actually like iTunes, but damn is it a resource hog. Sometimes it will chew up 90%+ of CPU for no apparent reason. It will often be unresponsive to clicks for a couple seconds. I am not sure what is so complicated about a music player that causes this.
And then every time it asks me for an upgrade, it insists on installing Quicktime and other things that I don't want on my PC.
I don't use Macs, but wonder if all of Steve's apps behave this way...
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Can I play a bit of devil's advocate? My guess is that the need to remove iTunes and Google toolbar might be related to compatibility issues (i.e., the version that the users have currently not being the "latest" one, or the one "100%" compatible with 7). Without any more concret info, like the version number for iTunes of all the machines involved, if 7 "demands" diferent things with the same version installed, etc, we can't really be sure what's the issue here, and assume it's for the best for the users (not having potentialy incompatible software installed on 7).
Now before someone says "but I've been using iTunes 2.0 with 7 since forever!!", well, I'm just speculating as much as the next guy :) Afterall, this is Slashdot, right? ;)
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
For some reason, Apple decided to use their own USB driver; one not exactly known for it's stability, evidently. Yes, Apple would rather risk your system instability than use a standard tried & tested driver to write files to any iPod. That'll be why Windows 7 doesn't like it I expect.
http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+BSOD
Sometimes I wonder if Apple make PCs crash deliberately to fuel their ad-war
throw new NoSignatureException();
My experience with Windows 9x matches GP's claim. If you had a broken installation and tried to fix it by re-installing without deleting the old installation, it would copy the broken settings and usually work even less than before.
Maybe GP still remembers that time and based his statement on that ;-)
I'm not so sure about newer versions, as I made a habit of doing always clean installs back then. Never tried to "repair-install" W2k or later.
C - the footgun of programming languages
And if these people **REALLY** believe that upgrading any OS in this fashion, let alone MS Windows, will end up giving them a nice clean install afterwards, then they probably shouldn't be anywhere near a computer in the first place.
You're generalising. I've had:
In fact, while I have on rare occasions found it easier to install afresh than to upgrade, that's been the exception, not the rule.
The problem is not n00bs who are naive enough not to plan their way through an upgrade. The problem is junior and intermediate geeks who think the sum of their knowledge and experience is all there is. Upgrades require care and attention and planning. Just because it's currently beyond your capacity to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?
Yes. e.g: .mov if you rename them to .mp4, as for the past few revisions that's all they've been anyway)
CCCP: 5.9mb (plays damn near everything you'll encounter, including
Quicktime Alternative: 17.8mb (just the quicktime codecs and the plugin, no player)
Quicktime: 30.94mb
As someone who installed Vista 2 years ago, updated to the Windows 7 RC when it came out and then to the final, allow me to say - what the heck are you talking about? The only thing that broke was Daemontools. This includes but is not limited to Firefox, Chrome, mIRC, Sony Acid, Sony Soundforge, Photoshop, GOM player, uTorrent, Emule, FTPrush, video codecs, and, as you already stated, numerous MS applications I run. They've all been there from Vista to the RC to the final.
Really, what do you guys run that causes all these problems?
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
Not a cop out... nobody said they couldn't.... just that they didn't.
makes me question how much of the bashing of MS is legitimate.
Sure it's "legitimate," but consider the possibility that Slashdot is narcissistic in this regard. They've identified so much with an anti-Microsoft perspective that they are stuck with being critical even if Microsoft improves. Their identity comes before anything else, and they are pathologically driven to post submissions such as this one in order to protect The Slashdot at all costs. In other words, par for the course.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
At other OS companies, squads of test engineers maintain "DO NOT BREAK" lists. All during development, and especially before the revision ships, these engineers test builds of the OS to make sure that the new version DOES NOT BREAK a good variety of commonly used apps. If they find breakage, they respond in various ways, including contacting the developers of the application to help with a workaround or to help build a patched revision.
Assuming Microsoft does this - and they'd be insane if they didn't - then Windows 7 should not complain about iTunes.
The point is, TO END END USER it doesn't matter who the hell used proper APIs and who didn't. If they upgrade-in-place and their apps break, they are going to blame the upgrade.
That takes pure skill!
Not any more.
Slashdot is pretty much a Microsoft shop these days. Just try saying anything Microsoft doesn't want discussed (like Win 7 is bland and uninteresting interesting, or that MS marketing is gaming mod points). You'll be guaranteed a "Troll" mod.
MS reputation managers started infiltrating /. a couple of years ago, and the job's just about complete.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Actually I think Microsoft has been much better at "DO NOT BREAK" than Apple or Linux. Many old viruses still worked on XP (and old applications too) :).
;) )...
BUT I think they decided that it was time to break more stuff starting with Vista ( maybe in more ways than they planned
Microsoft's big problem is a Windows XP compatible O/S is dangerously close to existing, and if Microsoft does not move the goal posts in time, people might switch to it instead instead of "Vista" or Windows7. Then Microsoft loses significant control of the market.
It's just like Intel trying to get everyone on board the the Itanic, but then AMD came up with AMD64 and everyone jumped on that instead.
If Microsoft doesn't keep breaking stuff "slightly" and keep "moving the goal posts", Windows XP+DirectX9 could become a defacto standard that even they can't escape from, and the Windows market would be like the BIOS market.
Microsoft does not want to be just another BIOS vendor. They'd make a lot less.
You know why people don't follow the published API's? Because they're woefully inadequate, and even if you do follow the API, half the time the fucking documentation is wrong. Seriously... talk to someone who's written anything to Win32, which you pretty much have to do if you want anything more advanced that "place form X here"
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Not really.
I've been quite happy to bash MS for almost everything they do for more than 15 years now. I'm quite relaxed. If Win7 is a really good product with no major flaws, it would be a first. If they don't show up now, they will show up later. Maybe they've become better at hiding them.
The people trying to turn the initial positive reviews on their heads are young and stupid. They don't have the experience with hating MS that most of us do. They don't know that MS is expert at disappointing, even if the initial hype is well engineered and the major flaws hidden too deep. Also, they forget that after Vista, it was pretty much impossible to come up with something that wouldn't look good in comparison.
And hey, after almost 20 years of trying, let's give MS the credit for coming up with a halfway acceptable system, shall we? Where's the joy in hating them if they'd produce only crap? No, the substandard-but-acceptable stuff belongs there, too. It makes the next failure more enjoyable.
So in summary: No. You are dead wrong. The real, experienced zealots are quite happy to delay satisfaction and wait until the polish has gone and the hype machine died down, and people start to use Win7 for some serious gaming/work. We know that you can make almost any car look good on the test drive. It's the daily use and the first maintainance where you find out if you've been had.
We'll wait until then. We won't even say "told you so", because that became old with Vista. We'll just smile and shrug.
And if it never happens, if Win7 turns out to be adequate after all, we'll just shrug and wait for Win8.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org