Archive for the ‘Windows 7’ Category

Why I use Windows 7

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

Windows 7 has been out for a few months now so I thought it time to comment on why I choose to use it and why we use it in our media centres.

Essentially, I use it because it is more stable that Vista – crashes far less often – and has some nice eye candy to boot. I am not going to discuss the pros and cons of using Windows 7 in an every day sense – there are plenty of sites for that on the web. Rather I wiull talk about why Windows 7 is better than Vista from a Media Cenrte perspective.

As I have described to several customers, it is the small things that make 7MC better. Things like:

- being able to fast forward / skip forward avi files
- TV guide data pulled from the antenna (not internet) – known as ETIT data
- The ability to have nice station logos in the guide
- Native DVD playback
- a really cool slide show screen saver, where you can choose what folder to display images from (excellent for family photos, holiday snaps, etc…)
- Better slide show functionality
- Improved ability to control when secheduled recordings start and finish
- ability to colour code TV shows in the guide based on content (uses ETIT data)
- nice user interface
- Better 64 bit usability

As with most things there are some draw backs:

- no native bluray playback capability (ASENT uses a very good third party application)
- inability to customise the location of third party apps in start menu and sub menus

Not a long list of drawbacks, to be fair, and this highlights that Windows 7 Media Centre is a strong improvement over its predecessor.

Overall Windows 7 Media Centre is very good and ASENT is proud to use it in our media centres. Having tested Windows 7 for about a year now we are confident that it is a worthwhile contribution to any lounge room.

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Windows 7 Beta 1 – First Impressions

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

With the release of Microsoft’s new operating system in beta, I thought I would give it a go and see how it performs in it’s current form.

I created a new partition on one of my drives and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Beta 1. The install process was virtually identical to Vista – no surprise there. However as the system rebooted in to the Windows 7 GUI (graphic user interface) for the first time disaster!! A black screen. The system was still running, but there was no image.

I grabbed another monitor and rebooted. No change. In the end I found that the boot loader has a setting that runs the GUI at a low resolution 800 x 600. Viola! I had a screen and could get to the desktop. From there I ran Windows update which downloaded two driver updates – ethernet card and Nvidia driver for the graphics card.

After the updates the system worked fine – I could change the resolution to my preferred setting and everything worked OK.

Onto the media centre. The first thing I notices was the changed layout. Like all things different from what we are used to I was not too sure about the new layout, but the more I use it the more I like it. Having switched between Vista and Windows 7 and can say that the Windows 7 Media Centre interface is very intuitive.

Why? The Menu titles are clearer and in a stylish, thin font. The layout of the menus is slightly different with the more common menu items easier to get at. Also the menus are left justified, rather than centred as in Vista. The only thing that I found I did not like was that you can not continuously scroll through the menus. In Windows 7 once you get to the last menu it will not continue. To get to the other end of the menus you need to scroll all the way to the other end. A small thing, but annoying. Hopefully it will be fixed before the final release.

The big thing for Windows 7 is the fact that most codecs are pre-installed. That means that DVD’s, DivX and avi’s will play straight away with out the need for a codec pack. The exceptions to this are MKV files and Blu Ray. There has been much discussion about blu ray and Windows 7 so I will not go into it here, except to say that native blu ray playback is unlikely for some time to come.

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