All over the internet Windows 7 has been receiving praise. I had been hearing about how Microsoft got it right this time and how it is the first version of Windows to have lower minimum hardware requirements. Since my current financial situation prohibits the purchase of a new laptop with Windows 7 I decided to go the upgrade route.

My first discovery was that Microsoft is offering a $30.00 Student Upgrade Home Premium version. Coming from the Open Source world of not paying for feature rich applications this price seemed reasonable for an entire operating system with Windows Media Center. What was not reasonable was the fact that Digital River the company offering the $30.00 download did not supply a ISO image of the installation disk. Their digital download was simply an executable file meant to be launched from within Windows Vista. I simply found this unacceptable. After some Googling I discovered that Microsoft had addressed the issue and supplied links to ISO files for each of the four version of Windows 7 offered through Digital River.

The overall theme of Windows 7 seems much improved over Vista. While the core layout is unchanged color schemes and navigation have had a over haul. Overall the operating system feels more uniform and coherent. All of the default icons in the notification area are white with a gray background instead of all different colors. Many of the navigation issues from Vista have also been corrected.

Lately, I have been largely a Ubuntu Linux user. Coming back to Windows Vista from Ubuntu is very aggravating.  It always felt as though Vista was waiting to do everything. I would boot into Vista and simply get mad at how long it took things to load compared to Ubuntu. Windows 7 relieves that pain.

Seven is very stable. I have been running it for about four days and have not experienced any problems whatsoever. When Vista was first released I would experience hanging processes, it would refuse to take updates, and it would corrupt my external hard drive as to be unreadable. These were all issues I have experienced on three different machines. Windows Vista wasn’t even bearable until Service Pack 1. Here we are at launch of Windows 7 and I have yet to even experience a hanging process.

Windows 7 is simply sleek, fast, stable, and with the student upgrade version affordable. Is it better than Windows XP? I don’t know if it is better but it does continue to receive updates. If you are on XP I would consider upgrading. Anyone on Vista should definitely upgrade.

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“I have a question for you. My girlfriend recently got a trojan horse generic 13 virus on her computer and we are having a hell of a time trying to get it off of there. AVG detects it but wont delete it off of her computer. Same with Mcaffee. what would you recommend for us to do in order to get this shit off her computer? thanks”

When a system is infected the best way to take care of it is to use what is called a live cd. A live cd is a disc that your computer boots off of and runs an operating system environment from instead of Windows. This link “Jiri’s - Virus and how to get rid of it using free Bootable Linux Antivirus CD” has the steps to create the cd and use it to scan for viruses while windows is dormant. The advantage of this is that the trojan is inactive while the virus scanner is trying to take care of it.

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My newest Ubuntu endeavour has been backing up my DVD collection specifically for use with my Xbox 360. The traditional way of doing this under Windows would be using Dvd Shrink, Dvd Decryptor, Any DVD, DVD 43, or a number of other rippers then re-encoding the video using Handbrake. This is a simple task except that I don’t want to use Windows.

There are a number of DVD ripping applications for Ubuntu including K9Copy which is considered to be equivilant to DVD Shrink. In my experience using Acid Rip DVD Ripper, K9Copy, and DVD::Rip none of them consistantly worked with a variety of films. Often they would not see all video tracks or would not detect the disc in the drive. Instead of messing around and trying to get the specific applications to work I found a different way.

My solution to ripping DVDs for my Xbox 360 in Ubuntu was to install DVD Shrink using Wine and then install the native Linux Deb package of Handbrake. DVD Shrink allows me to select only the video track of the main feature and output it as a .vob file. I then use Handbrake to encode the .vob file to a .mp4 file using Handbrakes Xbox 360 preset. The only modification to the preset was to select the video tab and choose the bullet for quality and set it for 70.

All you have to do then is either copy the files to a FAT32 format external hard drive for the 360 or stream the files using a NAS or Windows Media Center PC.

Filed under: Linux, Video | No Comments »