FREE Windows 7 upgrade

So, here I am picking up some new gear for my company. The bigwigs decided to go all-out with IBM (currently Lenovo), because it 'is a big company', it is 'more stable, reliable and secure' and the 'black boxes look kinda neat'. [List more stupid reasons here].

So the overpriced computers we get come with Windows Vista licenses (business or ultimate), which we never use. I wonder how those negotiations went:

Bigwig: "Um, we'd like to buy 250 PCs please."

Lenovo: "You must take *these*. Windows Licenses included."

Bigwig: "But we don't really need Windows, you see... We have this Volume Licensing-"

Lenovo: "Silence! I have SPOKEN!"

Bigwig: "Okay" :O

And there you have it. After a few years there are about a thousand license for Vista just lying around (you're not allowed to use them on anything but the original hardware they came with).

So, today I figure I might try and get a Windows 7 upgrade for a few of them, so that I can start testing some of our applications. There might be some legal/licensing issues here, but I figured that I may be able to get a CD-KEY that would work for a bit until we have to go out and buy more volume licensing to include Wind0ws 7.

Luckily Lenovo is offering *!_FREE_!* Windows 7 upgrade for certain customers.

If only it were so easy.

It seems they are handling their upgrades through another company - Mentor Media Corporation, who take your information, serial numbers, proof of purchase, etc, and then send you a DVD over snail mail. Guess what? Costs 18€ apiece for my country. I hear that it's even worse for some (up to 35$). Each has to be ordered separately, and each needs its information filled out.

Last time I checked 17.47€ != 0€. In fact, 17.47€ > 0€.

So, the !!#*_OMIGOSH FREE_*#!! upgrade of a crappier OS to a merely crappy OS is not really free. Sure, you don't pay Microsoft, but you pay someone else. That's not my definition of free.

*GASP* so Mentor Media has some postage expenses. SO?! Give me my ISO over HTTP (use bittorrent if you're poor on servers) and then send me the CD-KEY in my email, sheesh. What is this, the middle ages?

As it happens, I have recently tried upgrading a friend's laptop (no legal issues here, since it is personally bought from a store). Acer also uses Mentor Media. So does HP and most others I could find.

Did the guys at Mentor Media land a sweet deal with these upgrades or what? Quite likely the PC distributors pay them some "fee" for their "service", then the users pay them some "postage and expenses". Maybe even Microsoft pays them something as well. Quite lucrative.

So, in conclusion... Your *!FREE!* Windows 7 Upgrade is not really free. (It is however, somewhat cheaper than a store bought version. Remains to be seen if there are any "special cases" in those EULAs, though.)

Remember - the software companies and their "subsidiaries" are not really there to help you use your computer more productively. There are there to take as much of your money as they can. And some hard data about you as well, cause that sells nicely too.

Some things I don't like about Windows 7, Part 1

Hey all, I'm back after a prolonged absence. I have acquired some fresh material for my rants and I will start with the hot topic: Windows 7.

If you haven't heard of it yet, you must be living under a rock, because Microsoft is desperate to sell sell sell. The sales pitch certainly paints a rosy picture, but what is it like live?

Well, I have been using it seriously on my home (gaming) computer and at work. In fact, I have completely replaced Windows XP. Below are listed some of the nice improvements, which should have been made years ago:

• Driver installation - Aside from the network card, Windows Update now provides most drivers you are likely to need. There are still some strange pieces of technology around, so don't throw all your driver discs away yet. But the most common configurations are supported.
• Networking stack - Windows has finally become less open on the network side. No longer will you be exposed to all dangers of the internet world when you  connect to that free, open wireless at the airport.
• User interface - Although still plagued by stupid decisions, the GUI is at least a bit more usable, especially if you use the hardware accelerated features - previews and smooth animations. Let's face it, now Windows at least looks modern.
• Installation - The installation wizard doesn't require constant supervision anymore. Now you can set the settings and leave it to work. It is much faster as well.

But, unfortunately, the Windows version number isn't 7.0 (at least at the time of this writing), but rather 6.1. This means that the actual programming code you receive is slightly improved Vista (which is in itself heavily modified XP). Some oddities have persisted and there is a number of new problems. Let me try and capture some of them.

Slow, large and unstable

For the past couple of years I have felt as if speed and efficiency don't matter anymore. Windows 7 continues this trend of "If it isn't massive, it isn't complete" mentality. The installation is supposed to take 16 GB for 32 bit and 20GB for 64 bit version. That is huge. The amount of information in 20 gigabytes is phenomenal. You can save 5 full DVD quality movies in that without compression. In estimation, that is 20.000 thick books, without compression again. So, what is in Windows that takes up so much space?

Here are the biggest folders in Windows directory:

• Assembly - approx 1 GB. These are the libraries of objects and functions for the .NET platform. Amazingly, if you install .NET 3.5 on Windows XP, the download takes about 120 Mb.
• System32 - approx 1.7 GB. These are supposed to be core operating system files. At 1.7 GB that is some fancy operating system indeed.
• SysWOW64 - 1 GB. The name is completely misleading, as there are no 64bit DLLs and executables in here. All code, 32 and 64 bit is in the System32 folder. WoW64 stands for "Windows on Windows 64", meaning that this folder holds the necessary files to run 32 bit applications.
• WinSXS - 5.8 GB. This is a copy of the entire installation DVD. The idea behind this is to make it easier to install additional windows features and components without needing the original media.

So, if we exclude the installation files and hope for the best case scenario, Windows 7 installation boils down to about 9 GB. That is larger than many triple-A games on the market. I have for you one simple acronym to describe this state of affairs: WTF?!

Lots and lots of shiny graphics plus bad programming equals lots and lots of stuff in your computer's memory. That is why Windows 7 likes to have about 1 GB or RAM for itself.

I've seen it go as low as 700Mb (at startup), but that was on a laptop with only 1.5 GB of RAM in total. On an average computer with 4 GB of memory, Windows 7 will never start with less than 1.4 GB. I have tried disabling everything I dared, completely crippling networking and GUI, but the memory usage at startup never went below 1.2 GB. How is it that the same 64 bit version of Windows 7 takes up almost twice the space on different computers? Do I need 700Mb worth of drivers? Someone seriously failed here.

Interesting fact: Ubuntu linux on default installation with desktop effects enabled takes up 200Mb of RAM when it is done loading - and the number doesn't vary by machine. It clearly is possible to look shiny and be memory efficient.

As for speed, Windows does look acceptable at first, but with a few months of installing tools and programs and with some disk fragmentation it takes forever to do simple tasks. During a certain period of my experimentation with Windows 7, the laptop took noticeably longer to start up every day. But I will not go into detailed performance benchmarks - for me what matters is that I get stuff done. So the speed I am measuring is not related to hardware, but rather the speed with which I can work. This kind of speed has everything to do with GUI design. Let me give you an example:

Upon connecting the Windows 7 laptop to my home network, it asked me what sort of firewall profile should apply. Not paying it much attention, I pressed enter to accept the default. This is the most restrictive setting and as a result, no way of sharing worked. This is good - it saves the inexperienced or stupid users from themselves. But then I wanted to change this setting, upon which Windows refused to "recognize" my network and insisted it should be public, since it is clearly unknown. No GUI option that I have become used to seemed to work. The problem was apparently caused by my router, which isn't IPv6 compatible, so after disabling IPv6 for that network connection, it suddenly was recognized. I ended up spending 30 minutes searching for a problem and then correcting it, because Windows 7 is so safe that it protects me from myself, even if I know what I am doing and how to do it.

Going on with another example: Living in a country with a non-standard character set you can expect that all the keyboards I am able to buy are modified. They use the SI layout, which I don't like very much. But occasionally I need those special characters for typing formal letters in my language. In Windows XP, we could press Left Alt + Left Shift to change the layout. In 7, I somehow ended up with 2 "locales" - EN and SI, which both have the US keyboard layout. The only way to change the layout now is to click the keyboard icon in the tray and select the layout I want. I have been unable to correct those settings, so changing the layout takes me a bit longer. 

You'll say: "A few clicks? That's nothing." But as my other computers work properly, those few clicks turn out to be a few minutes as I forget this anomaly and try to use the old shortcut method, only to be baffled by it not working. A few minutes spent in such a ridiculous fashion every day doesn't improve my mood.

Stack together just 10 or 15 of such time-wasters and you end up doing nothing except battling with your operating system so you can do your job.

I am running out of time here, so the next part with contain a short paragraph on the amazing stability of Windows 7 and the continuation of this rant.

Oh yea, by the way, this is a rant, or didn't you notice? :)