Windows 7 – Raising the Minimum Hardware Standard
This morning I spent the entire morning messing with getting a new machine at The Shop working for me. I'd spent a little bit of last Friday making sure all the software I needed on it was installed, but that didn't prepare me for what I was to experience first hand with Windows 7.
Normally, I'm a live and let live kind of guy for work machines. It's what the company wanted to get, it's what tools the company has supplied, and so I make due with it because that's really the only possible outcome. If I dislike it that much, then it's my choice to leave and look for a place that provides the tools I like. I've turned down a lot of positions in the last decade for Windows development jobs - I just don't want to do it.
So today when I got the new machine - and by 'new' I mean 'different' with Windows 7 installed, I set about making it workable with the software and set-up I needed. A few things I couldn't have done remotely - like the virtual windows and such, but no matter, I had penciled in the morning for just such activities.
So I got the box, and while I'm not a great fan of the look and feel, I can see it's positives, and understand why they did it. But on the hardware that was provided, it was quite literally, a joke.
I am required to use NX Machine to get to my linux servers, and when I did that, I was stunned to see an 80-line Vim session take 2 seconds to redraw. The full screen was on the order of 10 sec. It was amazing... and totally unusable.
I tried all the things I could find on their web site - nothing to address the horrible slowness of the redrawing. Then someone pointed out a setting to skip DirectDraw on the refreshing. It seems it's the "budget" video card and Windows 7 that are at odds here. Had my machine had an accelerated video card, I'd have been fine. But with the hardware I had, I was forced to change the refresh method.
Thankfully, that worked. A little later the head of desktop support stopped by to ask how it was going. I had shared my problems with him earlier, and I was glad to see he was following up. We talked, and he pointed out that he turns off all the "new" Windows 7 features to get his box working quickly again.
Amazing... I go back to a Windows NT look-n-feel to get Windows 7 working OK. I'd have been better off sticking with XP! Really. The cost, and the time, and the now degraded UI... it's a joke. An honest to goodness joke. I don't expect the company to spring for all new hardware because of Windows 7, but they should have had a far more graceful degradation of performance so I could look like XP, and have the Windows 7 engine, as opposed to dropping all the way to NT.
But hey... I'm sure there's tons of people saying "Buy a $100 video card!", and they'd be right. For me. But for the hundreds of other machines? Now we're talking real money. Not so easy to say "Buy $30,000 in video cards so Windows 7 is nice!" But that's really what Microsoft is expecting you to do - invest in more hardware to get the user experience they ship out of the box.