Broken Windows Part 4

Windows 7 has displayed its roots, it did a Vista trick.

Something that seemingly happens at least every other day in Visaster, a window stall where usually an Explorer window comes to a dead stop and sits there comatose. I decided to try and figure out what is keeping the window hung through process elimination. I usually go through Task Manager and stop processes until the window clears. I even tried stopping services. No luck this time. To clear it, I had to shutdown and reboot. I've learned to keep the Explorer window at less than full screen because once it goes dead, it takes the mouse and keyboard with it within the confines of the window. Sometimes to start Task Manager with the three finger salute the cursor has to be outside the hung window.

What is especially annoying are the times when Explorer has to be stopped in Task Manager. In XP Pro it usually will restart automatically. In Visaster though it almost always has to be restarted manually. That hasn't changed in Windows 7.

It is also not a good idea to use Fast User Switching in Vista or Windows 7 when Explorer has a window hung-up. That one required a power off. You could switch back but the hung window was like a part of the background but you couldn't get the background to change!

Please note that the comparisons between Visaster and Windows 7 are for installations on two different computers and two different sets of hardware. The Visaster install was an OEM installation with SP1 installed on top of it. The WIndows 7 install was from the February Beta release ISO. So I count the window stall behavior as something built into or a result of the OS.

The only redemption for Windows 7 in this particular case is that it doesn't seem to stall very often. It has happened only three times so far.

*************

The hung window effect is reproducible. Open an Explorer window, once it starts indexing something click on it like a mad-man until the window goes white. If the OS reports it isn't responding then open another Explorer window. The original window will hang about 20% of the time.

***********

I've also had an issue with VMWare Workstation 6.5.1 on Windows 7. The networking doesn't.

Using the exact same hardware and booting up into Windows XP Pro SP3 on another partition (on the same drive with Windows 7 in a separate partition) with VMWare 6.5, the networking does work. This is with the exact same set of settings in the VM and with the exact same DHCP assigned IP to the real NIC. The MAC address for both installs comes up the same, hence the same IP from the local DHCP server.

What is really maddening is that I can use ping from inside the virtual machine on the Windows 7 partition (its running XP Pro SP3) to ping the server system I am attempting to connect to. With XP Pro SP3 running as host for a VM running XP Pro SP3, the client application software makes a successful connection to the remote server. With the exact same hardware running Windows 7 as host with the exact same VM running, the client application cannot successfully connect to the remote server. I don't count this as a Windows 7 error per se but there is something obviously different about Windows 7 networking preventing the connection. (And yes I checked the firewall and VMWare 6.5 is allowed to originate connections in the Win7 UAC.)

**************

I find the visual appearance of the UI in Vista and Windows 7 to be annoyingly busy. There is so much “trash & flash” on the screen that it's difficult sometimes to determine what's there and what's not. It takes a lot of poking around to find all the buttons, hyperlinks and what-have-you to get things done.

I find that the top edge of windows of applications have a tendency to end up under the task bar. I park the task bar on the top of the screen. Open application windows with the annoying semi-see-through top edge slide under the task bar. With the background color seeping through all the window edges, its difficult to “grab” a particular window edge to drag it where you want it. I'm going to see how much of the trash & flash I can turn off in Windows 7.

****************

Renaming all of the Control Panel icons was quite possibly the stupidest thing Microsoft has done. I find that it takes twice as much time to get things setup or changed then it did with Windows XP Pro. In XP Pro I turned on “Classic” mode to get the largest number of icons possible to avoid the extra clicking it seemed necessary to get anything adjusted when not in Classic mode. Now Windows 7 and Visaster introduce yet another level of absurdity.

There is a minimum of three clicks and sometimes as many as 5 or 6 to get to anything useful. Its basically the exact same complaint I have with MS Office 2007. The effing ribbon crap makes things harder, not easier to do.

****************

Why does the idiot OS have to do a search EVERYTIME you open a new window in Explorer? Why can't that be done in the background ONCE? This behavior is especially annoying with anything connected with networking. Yes, the Windows 7 partition, the Windows XP Pro partition and the Visaster computer all have domain membership and all of the testing so far has been under a domain log-on. Active Directory domains in Windows shouldn't require every freaking desktop to keep a browser listing.