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http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5737

The dirty truth!

Microsoft is now getting really down and dirty! “Microsoft extends 90-day free Windows 7 enterprise trial until end of 2010…a “while supplies last” free 90-day trial of Windows 7 that was targeted specifically at enterprise customers.”  In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. Now, you are probably wondering how does this happen…. and what does this have to do with this article! Its simple on both counts; The real transformation or psychological switch for the captives toward their captors is the Stockholm Syndrome’s psychiatric definition describes it as “a primitive gratitude for the gift of life,” not unlike that felt by an infant!

Microsoft extending the  90-day free Windows 7 enterprise trial until end of 2010 is a truly diabolical ploy but paints makes Microsoft in a good light making them sound like they are really good guys, caring and helping you out in a bad economy but this is not the case by far and are really offering you a disservice.  It is a GIVE AWAY! That means, giving away something,  NOT making a REAL offer or offering special discounting on their product which would be the RIGHT, helpful choice. Microsoft extends 90-day free Windows 7 enterprise trial until end of 2010 is the same ploy taken by Credit card company’s getting you complacent and wallowing in your denial until you have no other resource or time to make an alternate choice by postponing the inevitable and giving you enough rope to hang your self out to dry and no way down and Microsoft is hoping to make some un-discounted money somewhere along the road.

Mind you, within the sales process, there’s still resistance to overcome the difficult and very painful decision to spend their money, but in their mind that hurdle has been taken. They liked your initial offer and did exactly what you wanted them to do. As in the Stockholm Syndrome’s primus, as previously describes as “a primitive gratitude for the gift of life”?!

Ok for starts,

I did do a big full test of windows seven at work on a machine and threw everything at it that makes vista and xp crash. the version we used for that test is windows 7 32 bit, here is  Windows & in Workplace Environment.

I have to say that anyone who preaches on about 7 being better than windows Vista, You really did not even try both with an open mind. I like vista, Seven is not impressing me at all. All the stuff about vista I heard everyone complain about but never noticed myself, I am seeing it in Windows 7. I think by now it’s just common enough to blame everything on George Bush and Windows vista, it’s the first two things out someone’s mouth. But ok here is what I get in the trial at home on  windows 7 64bit.

Well I am on day two of windows 7. The default drivers it installed, amazed me, almost as much as windows vista did. Video card drivers, not so much. I am forced to use almost one year old nvidia drivers. Fine.
For the record, my machine is a mid way between work horse and light gaming machine, nothing to brag about in either direction.
Specs are
AMD 5600+ 2.9g dc
3 gigs pc6400 800mhz
Nvidia / evga 9500 gt 512 mb
some ecs motherboard
air cooled.

Well the video drivers have been iffy on me and would not let me use the manufacturers drivers. This has always been my special sweet spot, using EVGA drivers instead of nvidia drivers has always givin me a cooled advantage. but no, win 7 rc is forcing me to use the ones they have from the update service at Microsoft, if I install anything else I look at 8 bit graphics at best.

Well I tend to do my benchmarking at pc pitstop.com (full test) . to say the least, my scores drop dramatically over my vista scores. I usually use the old test , it’s hard to find but it’s there it’s a link in the description kinda hidden there. my scores have been i the 3000′s for about a year now. With windows seven they dropped to 1500. strangely it shows my 2d fps increased by nearly 100 fps. Well that’s cool…..
So I turn to my faithful typical benchmarking methods of real testing. :-)
I crack open every version of Grand Theft Auto and install them all.
On gtaiii I get the same hesitation I used to get about 6 years ago. While passing under bridges and through tree covered areas there is a lag that comes in spurts. with vice city, the yellow almost takes over the screen and the cut scenes are jittery just like it was the day the game came out and I was on out dated hardware. San Andreas, well not much better.
GTAIV For me to achieve the 23 FPS at best in game I had to turn everything off or all the way down. When I was on Vista I was seeing 35+ FPS with some things turned to medium. Yes I know my video card is not the best in the world, but it was the same one I was using on windows Vista and it makes a great “before and after” comparison.

Now for the lock out issues everyone complains about with windows Vista.
I head to MVPS Hosts site to update my hosts file to block bad sites and advertisements. Nothing fricken happened. Wouldn’t block anything, So I head to the ETC folder to modify the file by hand. HA! No administrator rights to modify that file. Meanwhile in the background I am playing myspace mobsters. I refresh a page and bam new advertisement, all my browsers drop and fricken notice comes up telling me my computer might be compromised, and it offers this virus scan. then it scans my computer anyway and says I have a virus then tells me to update. I freak out and try and close the page and notice, it’s not windows explorer, it’s Mozilla. it’s a fricken spam scam. See if I could have changed my hosts file, that never would have happened. so I head to bit defender to scan my disk onlline. would not allow me!!!!!! WTF!!!!!
So I head to emsi and get a-squared and do a scan, sure enough… I am infected with 4 types of Trojans. I am upset now.

The hardest thing for me to find, I still have not found it yet, is how in the blue hell do you turn it so that you can see your file extensions? Have they disabled so much user ability that they have turned that off? I feel as if I am being dumbed down and pacified with big shiny buttons.
You can like windows seven all you want, but I really have this whole thing figured out.
Either it’s going to turn out to be Mojave, or windows ME 2.0

still the same issue with Windows Seven that bothered me most with Windows Vista , No Ftp. You have to download Fire FTP for firefox and use that . You no longer have direct access with windows Explorer.  I find this unacceptable. It really feels like we are being dumbed down.

After some help, someone linked me to how to use notepad as administrator to modify files such as the hosts file
Here

Strange event of coming out of hibernate. Happens approximately every thirty minutes

The issue with peach tree and esc Was not caused with Microsoft, It was clarified as an issue between the two versions.

Well after plenty of hassle, all printers and scanners are functioning. All networking is functioning.

About the same amount of issues if we had gone with opensource. Ubuntu,open office and Peachtree Linux

Day one windows seven at the office.      Day two windows seven at the workplace.

More will come

Day 2
Auto desk did not install directly, had to do sp2 update for autodesk/ autocad 2007
video card is an 5200 pci-e Nvidia bfg.
Scrolling within Autocad is smooth, no hesitation as my dell computer with 8500 pci video card seems to lag and work in spurts.

Printing with Autocad to the Ricoh Aficio m wp2400, came out very well.
line weights  fine, antialliasing is fine and smooth

directory mapping via cross network is the same.

switching through desktops and backgrounds, umm.. these people.. um to be nice and prevent my sponsors from dropping me
let’s say the people who made the themes, lived in the sixties, and chewed on small peices of paper, and or plants that
grew on cow dung.. these desk tops are weird!!

ESC 9  installed fine, no patches needed, no updates needed.
Peach Tree 2010 install.
Error notice was “there was an error”  gives a phone number.
We continued install anyway.
Got notice “change firewall” and “change virus scan”
We just selected “um Ok”
Setup status is fine. looks like 30-45 minutes.

install of peachtree 2010 on windows 7 is faster than peachtree 2009 on xp.

Had error with “Crystal reports” failed to execute the install/setup  file.

Peach Tree installed, but when we started to run it, and sign in to the peachtree server, it said “not compatible with current version of esc” well that blew all the earlier great goings. Now we are updating Esc. For now there is no update for ESC9  to comply with Peach Tree 10

Windows 7, Day one of the workplace testing.

Day 4 Testing Windows 7 at work

Off the bat, I have to tell you, I do not have the fastest or the best machine in the world.
I have a machine that is at the max processor and ram for the motherboard’s capability.
Here are the specs for the machine I am using.
Sis 755 A-2 Motherboard
Sempron 3400+ 64 bit Processor
Nvidia 7600GS 512 mb
2 Gigs kingston 3200 ddr Memory
Sony cd/dvd burner
500 watt power supply

Ok for the past 7 or 8 years, The way I have benchmarked computers and operating systems Would be by playing Grand Theft auto III.
Of course I have since then added vice city and San Andreas to the mix. But GTAIII Is the benchmark for me. If you do not like the game sorry
But please hang with me on this.
For a long time I fought trying to make my computers strong and sturdy enough to handle the demands this game calls out. Computers these days are actually strong enough to handle these demands.
After the install of just straight vista drivers I went to pcpitsop and did my first benchmark of my machine. The score was pathetic. I kind of knew what would happen after I installed gtaIII, But I go ahead and start the game. Before the load screen I get a notice saying that there is some sort of dll missing (sorry all, I did not write it down) . I then hear the game start up but minimized in the task bar. I click the notification and the game takes over the screen. I see this look that took me back to the days of 256 megs ram and nvidia 440 on a 800 meg processor. This game looked wretched. But what do you expect with o/s drivers and not vendor drivers? Well since it’s a newer o/s than XP, I would expect better results than xp, not similar to win 98 on a crap machine. Very pixilated simi laggy but not as laggy as you would think with the way it looked.
After the drivers had been installed I start GTAIII again. Again it gave me the notice of missing dll. When the unnamed player in gtaIII walked out of his hide out I noticed artifacts. The garage was covered with imaging from the walls adjacent to the Entry to the garage. The player had openings so you could see through him in many places. I moved on and walked into the garage and drove the banshee down the ocean blvd to check how the game (typically) lags (with bad bad drivers or bad hardware) as you drive under objects, like the over head train, and trees and bridge. The game was very jaggedly laggy and objects where not being displayed properly.
After the gtaIII test I tried the other two Grand Theft Auto games and got the same mess. I swear the game looks better and plays better on linux with just the linux basic drivers, but the lag is way worse on Linux.
So I did searches for help forums and the like. I found that allot of people with the 7000 series nvidia video cards had similar issues. I never found a solution that worked. No, using older drivers did not help. Until sis/ecs releases more than one gart driver I am pretty much stuck in the same spot.

I did notice that the fonts on websites looked a bit bigger than when on xp.
As much as I enjoyed the looks of Aero (makes me think of Ubuntu) I decided to try turning it off. I used Black Viper’s tips from his tweak site .
The game did not change. and my bench score on pcpitstop only went up 10 points from the first test with base drivers.

Vista test was done 3/29/08. So please wait a few months before you tell me they fixed the operating system. I did try all online update and nothing got better that I could witness myself.
I am now back on xp and my machine runs three times a fast. using the same direct version as I used on vista.. 9.0c

Well it seems the lady has come into a few cooties.

She has an xps m1210 laptop.

Since neither of us know just how long the stuff has been on her machine or where or how they all got there, I believe it would be in her best interest if we just back up everything that is important and whip out the reinstall discs. Easy? lol. Newp. No chance. Seems back when she got the computer she lived elsewhere with someone else and obtaining the drivers discs and o/s and all teh bundled software discs had to include a spy. Her little sister had to sneak the border and play friendlies… Now she snuck out with the baggy thing that all the discs are in which of course no one there claims to have seen. We have done some searches and find that one disc on the bag, is not for this laptop that we are about to work on. Ok. Now we have all the discs.

The hard part is deciding what to do after we install everything and well, does the sister go back and act like nothing happened? ( I mean this is a close as family issue, I am not in the family so I have to step back) I am thinking of burning the discs as a back up and bundling some jacked up progs with it.. but will they hate me for it?

well whatever

Ok So now the back up is not going so well. I have been to virustotal ,virscan.org and jotti’s a million times and man, I keep finding malware in everything she wants to backup. I am half tempted to just format and cross my fingers and lie like a dog. I am getting sick of each time they find stuff in the files I end up having to delete them anyway because they are beyond repair. Meanwhile I have a million more files to scan…one by one….. It’s hardly worth it. Then again she is fricken hot and I know what I am doing.
Well I also looked around and saw that ubuntu installs pretty good on this particular model. If I can assure her that open office is just as good as microsoft office/works then I got it made! I wouldn’t have to delete anything!
Tell you what, I will do something with this pretty machine and post it here later ;)

to be continued…….

http://www.helium.com/tm/554548/making-choice-distribution-linux

Making your choice of distribution of Linux is not near as big of a deal as it was 3 – 4 years ago, even though for some reason all of the tech guys lead you to think it is.Really i think it is because of pc repair minded political correctness. The ease and interface is not varied by such a greatness that only techy nerdy guys can use one version and regular people can use another. Anything on one distribution can be used on another.
Let’s break this into 3 popular core distros.
1.fedora
2.debian
3.novell

On fedora you get the two main players. Mandrake and redhat. You get excellent support on either one, there is a slight difference in the look but not the feel. The installs have gone smooth for me every time and easily on many different machines, from mother board and wifi and video card variations. even the freshest of Linux users can install and use fedora smoothly and easily.

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on debian you get a few main players. Knoppix, Linspire, Xandros, and the Ubuntu family.
ubuntu I have to say has the best of all splash screen when it boots up, after that it is really not worth the install.ubuntu is heavy bloated and really limited to what types of installs you can use. pretty much limited to .deb files and source. That operating system is slow, but has some high dollar hype or public viral advertisement. Linspire is a transition os made to make the swap from windows to linux easy. it’s alright and makes alot of usage really easy. Knoppix isnt much different but is a bit more pro feeling. Xandros is the ultimate operating system for those who like a fast operating system without bloat-ware,basic file install works easily with .deb and .rpm with no code to type in or lines to edit.

On novell you get suse . and a bunch of add on software. suse is foreground user of .rpm but recently also took in the use of .deb installs. Suse is the mid mark between ubuntu in it’s nice looks and excessive bloated addons, and Xandros with it’s ease of use and fast performance.

The question you need to ask is “Do I need Performance and speed? or do I need appearance?” if you can not make your mind up on which is more what you want, then go the midway and get suse. after you use suse for a while and get a feel , you might want to think about what you do need and don’t need. You could even consider getting the faster operating system and then adding on only the stuff you would like to see on it. to pretty it up.everything on linux is tweakable. 90% of the addons are free. Sourceforge will be your best friend eventually.

The choice is yours and there is nothing to fear about linux and every big distributed version is safe and easy to install and use. They all can be strong tools and beautied up if needed.It really is not a huge ordeal and adaptation comes quick.

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