Tag: Technology

In my personal life I’d walked away from Windows YEARS ago. However there are always applications that require some form of Windows to be available.

A couple of examples of this are my Suunto dive computer and more recently an operating system updater for my cell phone. To accommodate this need I’ve maintained either an old slow windows machine or more recently a VMware container on my Mac running windows XP.

I recently purchased a netbook with Windows starter 7 loaded on it. As I was setting up the system I considered the possibility of installing Linux instead of Win 7. After some albeit brief searching around on the net and finding no references to my model netbook and Linux I decided to drink the kool-aid and go with the pre-installed Windows.

I just didn’t want to get into the whole Linux load only to discover that the netbook battery wouldn’t last an hour or something equally annoying.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have done the Linux experiment.

Windows 7 as an OS does seem stable mostly, (Of course my VM Win XP partition has never crashed) Win7 hasn’t crashed nearly as often as MY Work computers XP (another story).

Some of the changes under the hood of win 7 particularly in networking are amazingly bad and downright annoying.

Win 7 has this concept of locations and appears to try to configure firewall rules based on the location it’s detected.

Great idea in theory…  I’m just not sure about the implementation. And I think that somehow this location issue is screwing me up while I’m at home.

The netbook while connected to WiFi… CAN get to the internet, it can print to my network printer, it can see the DLNA media available at various locations on my network and reports all these things correctly.

It cannot see my fileserver! I can ping it, I can even get to the server via the web. But I can’t, while using the wireless connection access the file storage.

If I plug a LAN cable into the netbook I can see everything including my fileserver just fine.

The crazy thing about it is that this is the same network, same domain, same IP space (my WiFi router is bridging WiFi to the internal network), and yet… Something is obviously different.

I’ve spent a lot of time making sure that everything I could actually see and adjust within the Win 7 adapters and  firewalls was the same. All to no avail.

From searches on the net, I’ve found that apparently I’m not alone. There are a lot of folks who have the same problem if they’re using network attached storage. (I’ve got a Buffalo Technologies 8TB array).

I’ve tried all the fixes posted and still can’t get the netbook WiFi to access the storage. Like everyone else My Mac machines, XP machines, and iPad access the storage fine.

This leaves Win 7 as the odd machine out, and makes me wonder yet again why Windows is the “leading OS”?

I even drank MORE of the Kool-aid and purchased an “anytime upgrade” based on the internet research I was doing.

Seems that no-one was trying the networking with anything LESS than Win 7 Home. Still no joy and I’m out 80 bucks. But I can change the desktop backgrounds now!

In truth I can live without accessing the NAS wirelessly, I have cat6 throughout the house.  I’m just compulsive enough that I want to know why I’m having the problem and how to fix it.

It is really a moot point since I’m going to be using the netbook mostly for trips and knockabout and won’t be accessing the NAS while I’m traveling.

I’ll probably eventually buy a Mac Book air.  I’m waiting for the next generation (gen 4). By then, the netbook will have reached it’s end of life and Win 7 will have all the bugs worked out of it.

Was just thinking about all the versions of MS Software & Windows that I’ve worked with and there are a surprising number that I’d call FAIL

MS-DOS 1 – 6 <– Anything above 3.2 was a royal pain in the behind!
Windows 286 <– Worked mostly, and staved off Apple
Windows 3.0 <– We’d already drunk the kool-aid, demand for ease of operation was growing
Windows 3.1 <– We’d already drunk the kool-aid and now had little choice as apps stopped running in DOS
Windows NT
Windows 95 <– FAIL (Worked well enough to keep market share)
Windows 98 <– FAIL (Worked well enough to keep market share)
Windows ME <– FAIL
Windows BOB <– EPIC FAIL
Windows XP
Windows Vista <– EPIC FAIL
Windows 7

Of this list MS-DOS 3.1, Win NT, Win XP are probably the most stable. I think most people would think of Vista as being an EPIC Fail.

I’d switched to Apple by the time Windows 98 rolled out. I was testing software that ran on Windows at work. At home I had the bliss of systems that simply worked. 

I personally think that MS has lost their mind in creating all the “Flavors” of Windows. I suspect that is part of the problem with Win 7 too There’s probably some module or modules that are missing from the Win7 I’ve purchased.

They’ll show up eventually as a patch… In the mean time,  I’ve got a trusty Ethernet cable.