Windows 7 Beta

I’m generally slow to change operating systems..  When it comes to making one of those sweeping changes, traditionally I was the equivalent of an old man on his porch yelling for “you kids to get off my lawn!”   I was a curmudgeon and quite often would refuse to budge.

I didn’t switch to Windows 95 until sometime in 97.. I didn’t switch to 98 until 99.. I didn’t go to NT at all, and stayed on W2k Pro until well after XP was out.  The only reason I went XP was because it was on the new computer I had purchased already..

My reason for not wanting to upgrade to the newest version of windows was usually because it’s painful, the upgrade sucks and quite often I have to go back.  (I wont even go into my Windows ME story.. I had one of the Microsoft Windows ME tell me to go back to 98 because ME sucked…  Yeah.. It happened..)

More over upgrading isn’t the way to go.. you should wipe fresh and start over..  I usually dreaded this..   What cured that?  Funnily enough, Ubuntu..

I have installed and reinstalled ubuntu so many times I’m an old hat at it..  It’s really easy.    So I went into Windows 7 thinking it was going to be back to the pain..  And was pleasantly surprised..

Firstly what Windows 7 isn’t;  It isn’t a new OS.  Lets be clear here.. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.  It’s more than a reskin to be sure, but mostly it’s a refactor of Vista and a general rebranding to get away from the down right awful publicity that Vista rightly deserved..

Having said that, I like W7 quite a bit actually.  I have had some issues getting my sound card drivers working, but now that I do everything’s peachy.   Because it’s entirely based on the Vista core just download and install Vista drivers for it and asa rule you’re good to go.

The install process was simple and clean, and since I installed it on a new drive it correctly put the windows bootloader on the main drive (though it did overwrite my grub loader so now I can’t get into linux.. will have to add the linux install to windows bootloader..)    The install was fairly quick all things considered, and it configured all my hardware correctly.

I had World of Warcraft up and running within about 3 minutes of installing the OS because I had precopied it to the drive heh.   Yay I have DX10 now!

My biggest complaint at this point is two fold;  1. the alt+tab functionality seems really slow and clunky in W7.. In XP its instant.. but for whatever reason in W7 it takes a couple seconds.. Minor complaint though really.. it is a beta after all..

Secondly, I want to know what will happen in August when the license expires..  Will I just be screwed and have to reinstall all over again?  They have already stated that you wont be able to install the automatic updates beyond that point and that the OS will die then.. I find that… Odd..

OH well.. I can say that I would likely purchase this OS if it continues to perform as nicely as it does now.  Since it’s the premier gaming platform for PC’s at this point I don’t have much choice.. heh

I still very much like my Mac.. I still very much like Ubuntu.. but the games demand Dx10, so Vista.. er,  Windows 7 it is..

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head — you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game — you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard — I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do — don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. *shrug* Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..

I have been using linux quite a lot at work, and really like where Ubuntu is going. Pretty much everything about it leads me to think that Microsoft should be worried. (Apple has nothing to fear, simply because they are a hardware company..)

Anyway, after having XP tell me for the umpteenth time that I had “unused icons on my desktop”.. (Yes I know.. I PUT THEM THERE..) I decided to install Ubuntu on my game machine and try to get WoW working. I figured I’d be in a long and protracted fight, an impossible up hill battle with a colossal fight at the end! I couldn’t have been more wrong — but I get ahead of myself.

Getting Ubuntu installed on my game machine was cake. I installed a new hard drive, partitioned it to have a /, a /home and a swap.. Installed Envy to get the nvidia drivers running.. and fiddled with the xorg.conf file for hours on end trying to get my dual monitors to work correctly. That was the only part that was hard to be honest, I screwed it up a couple times.. heh. That and I had to correct some oddity with the alsamixer being muted.. not sure what that was about.

So with that, my game machine is now dual bootable into XP and Ubuntu. Synergy works nicely on both installs which gets me to my email goofing off box (also ubuntu) and all the peripherals work nicely.. (er.. I haven’t gotten the G15 keyboard stuff working in Ubuntu yet.. but haven’t tried either)

So next, I installed WINE. I really didn’t know what to expect here, but was pleasantly surprised.. It’s very simple, clean and works nicely.

Next I dragged the World of Warcraft install off my XP C: partition into the .wine directory.. and typed “wine Wow.exe” via command line..

And holy shit if World of Warcraft didn’t launch first try!! I was shocked and stunned beyond describing.. I mean I didn’t expect it to work at all.. little alone the first damn try.

Now the truth is, it didn’t work fully the first try. It got to the loading in screen, got to 100% and locked up. But a couple of config file changes later (I had to enter 3 lines into the WTF config file) it worked and I played on it for several hours.

What amuses me the most about this is that the game actually played in Linux at roughly the same frame rates as my windows XP box or HIGHER frame rates depending on what I was doing.

I have no idea how they do it, but the WINE folks are awesome..Awesome I tell ya. Wine you’re the bomb!

I don’t know how it would handle a much more intense game.. Lets face it, World of Warcraft doesn’t exactly push the envelope here.. So if I tried the same trick with say, Crysis… I doubt it would work. But still I’m damn impressed.