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Harry McCracken Rounds Up the Year In Tech
Velcroman1 writes "Windows got less annoying. Smartphones became smarter. The Internet continued to change entertainment for the better. All in all, it was a good year for technology and the folks who use it. Harry McCracken, the brains behind Technologizer and the former editor-in-chief of PC World, reveals his picks and pans for the most interesting tech stories of the year."
I was half expecting an Onion article with the name Harry McCracken in the summary. Although I don't know that Fox News is any better.
What does his brother Phil think about this?
I just tried to fix a neighbour's new Toshiba laptop which came with Windows 7 home premium installed. I have fixed similar Toshiba machines with Vista. The difference between the two is so small as to be negligible, both in speed as well as 'features'. The Windows 7 panel might be nicer than the Vista/XP/2000/w98/w95 panel and the somethat less torrential flood of UAC prompts is an improvement but I really do not get why Windows y is being portrayed as the second coming while Vista is painted blacker than black.
If you like Vista you will like Windows 7, if you dislike Vista you most likely will also dislike Windows 7. Some anecdotal evidence comes from the experience I had about two hours ago...
The new Toshiba my neighbour bought did not want to connect to his wireless network while it does connect to mine as well as the one in the shop where he bought it (which he found out when he brought the thing back to complain). Other machines with other operating systems have no problems connecting to the same router so the router is OK. Debugging this problem was made impossible by Internet Explorer and the panel crashing all the time. This might be due to his installing of some Norton crap product. The machine bluescreened three times in a span of 20 minutes while it was only in use for light web browsing (looking for a new 802.11 driver for the RealTek chipset in the machine). The only way to get the machine to be in a usable state was to start it with a Ubuntu 9.04 CD. Unfortunately Windows 7 did not want to recognize the Windows Mobile (!) phone which was used as a temporary storage device for the downloaded driver.
I ended up giving the neighbour the Ubuntu CD with some instructions on how to use it for browsing etc. As to whether I will retry getting that machine connected with Windows 7 or just try to downgrade it to XP or upgrade it to Ubuntu I don't know yet. For now he can at least use the machine he bought, no thanks to Windows 7.
--frank[at]unternet.org