Monday, January 12, 2009

Bluescreened!

Well, the awesome was not to last. I was attempting to install UT3 (keep in mind this worked fine on the other machine, but was really slow), and it was almost done installing when I bluescreened. I read something about a memory fault, then it rebooted, and I chose to go back to OS X. I then went back into Windows 7 later and got some pictures of the safe mode screen which I'll post later. It's working fine again but I can only wonder when the next bluescreen will be/

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Win 7 on Mac-it works!

Windows 7 is up and running on a partition of my Macbook, and it runs like a dream. No lag, much faster, it's awesome. I think it's the hardware in my PC-it slows it down. No more of that!

Win 7...on Mac?

I've just finshed putting the Windows 7 beta on my MacBook. It's a unibody 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM. I'm finishing up the setup now, I'll be in soon. It's working fine, except for a small, user-induced error that doesn't deserve mentioning. I'll update on it's speed vs. on the PC I'm posting this from now.

performance assessment-still

It got past the Direct3D tests without a hitch, except it took an EXTREMELY FREAKING LONG TIME. Now, well, the progress bar as been at exactly the same place, the past 20 minutes, on the Windows Media Decoding. I'm not going to click cancel, though, so I'll just leave it for another hour or so before giving up on it.

Performance test (again)

Retrying the performance test. It's frozen, guess where. the Direct3D 9 batch Assessment. Yay. How fun.

First post-Windows 7 Beta

Hello, and welcome to my tech blog. For this first post, I will just give an overview of my experience with the Windows 7 beta so far.
First of all, there is massive lag. My CPU is almost always running at 100%, except that the processes are only taking up ~20%. How bad is the lag? Resizing a window lags. Scrolling in IE 8 lags. And right clicking the desktop makes me wait 2-3 seconds for the actual menu to pop up. Next, I decide to try UT3. I put the disc in, but since I don't know the UI (which is actually very good) I go Start Menu>Games. It suggests I run the performance test. I think "sure, why not," and click it. It starts the performance test, but freezes on a Direct3D 9 Batch Assessment. I decide to click Send Feedback to tell Microsoft it froze. Nothing happens. I figure it did not register my click, so I click again. Still nothing. Knowing what happens when you click something like that excessively, I leave it alone. Ding! A win32 system dll crashed. I click cancel on the performance test, which then freezes the entire system, including explorer.exe. I open task manager and force quit explorer.exe, thinking it would automatically restart (you know, like it should). It doesn't. I'm stuck looking at the desktop with nothing on it, when 8 feedback windows suddenly open. I ctrl-alt-del, but don't see the little red square that shuts down the system in the corner. I'm forced to hold in the power button. I wait a few seconds, then restart the machine. I get this error message:
"Windows did not shut down successfully. If this was due to the system crashing or to preserve data, your information might be recoverable by choosing one of the safe mode options below."
By the time I read that message and the safe mode options, it's already booted into Windows normally. Thankfully, I did not lose any data. After messing with it some more during which nothing exciting happened, I decide to shut down. I am then given this message:
"A program was not quit successfully. Choose force quit to exit the program, or click cancel to return to windows."
The program was explorer.exe. What was it doing? "Playing the log-out sound."
I click cancel to return to windows, and am treated once again to the beautiful view of my empty desktop. I ctrl-alt-del again, and this time, I see the red button there. I shut down, and that was my experience so far.