I bought a new laptop for my wife and had some time to waste so I played with the installed Windows 7. Oh my, what a real waste of time was it!
- As I remember, when you install XP, it asks you to enter an admin password first, then to add users. W7 asked me for a user password (well, there was nothing to mention an administrator) so I entered a user name and password. Everything’s got installed and set up. (I must add, this Samsung laptop is the first laptop I’ve seen which doesn’t include ANY cr*pware, or how do you call those pre-installed programs, with the exception of Norton Anti-virus. I respect Samsung for that.) And right away an avalanche of pop ups started. It’s ridiculous how annoying and disruptive they are!
- Then after a while I’ve realized the user I created was indeed an admin. So I changed the username to Admin and created another normal user. Logged in as the normal user and I was simply overwhelmed by pop-ups. Once you get pop ups under control in Admin, they sort of become less frequent. But I just can’t believe how they’re doing that. When you’re an admin and set up a wireless connection it pops up to ask you to make changes to the harddrive. Oh, and that wireless applet is so freaking annoying, it pops up every few minutes even though I’m already connected to my network. Why the hell do I need to know what other networks are available every few minutes? But then you log in as a normal user, but you can’t use your laptop until you enter admin passwords in 4-5 pop ups, 1 of them being the wireless connection. It connects but for some insane reason asks me to authorize it to make some changes to my harddrive. WTF? Every single time you log in!!! Every single time! Not to mention another 4 admin password asking pop ups. STUPID!
- Then I tried to install a few programs. Installed LibreOffice, Firefox etc. - no problems. Tried to install 7Z - couldn’t install it because it couldn’t create a folder in Program Files. What? The other programs have just done that. No, not this one. Not even with an admin password. And it wouldn’t install even after I created the folder there myself. VLC wouldn’t install either, FreeCommander won’t install… then I stopped trying. I logged out of the user and logged in as admin. Tried to install the rest but it gave me some cryptic errors, something was messed up. I went into the admin folder but the file manager hangs and see that it’s called the same as the users. I deleted the normal user, deleted the user’s folder, went into the Admin folder - the file manager hangs. WTF? Alright, something’s really messed up. I don’t want to waste my time on it so I do a Rescue (or whatever it’s called), that is reinstall everything’s and start again.
- This time I create an admin user and only later create a normal user. Install the programs from admin - all is good this time. But using the laptop from a normal user account is impossible. The pop ups drive me absolutely to the wall. So I go back to the admin and use it from there. So much for security. I don’t know if those stupid pop ups can be set to remember the settings and stop poping up every single login, but I don’t care - it’s defective by design. They should have done that from the first place. What are they doing to the harddrive every time it connects to wifi? Saving settings in the Admin folder? Stupid or what?
- Comparing GUI of W7 to KDE4 - there’s just no comparison. W7’s is really rough. It may look good from the distance, but when you look closer, all those small things like borders, round window edges, icons, task bar - they all look pretty ugly and rough on closer look. KDE4 designers have done such a tremendously great job polishing the interface. There may be some problems in the System Tray in some themes, but overall KDE4 is so much more greater looking than that ugly Aero. You know, even such small things like for example, the task bar icons touching the top border, but having a gap at the bottom and so on, there’s so many such small inconsistencies that are really noticeable when you try to compare. If you make the icons smaller in W7, they’re unreadable, that is I can’t see any more what’s on them. In KDE4, I can make them really tiny and still see everything. Long live SVG! Are MS still so stupid to only use bitmaps? Do they still only have 2 icon sizes as they had in Win95? And this is after all software which you pay for, weather you want it or not.
And PS a few good words about the laptop (NOT windoze) - it’s a Samsung RC510-S07AU:
- Resume from suspend takes literally 2 seconds! amazing!
- Sound quality is just awesome!
- As I said, I’m impressed with Samsung for not clogging the laptop with cr*pware.
- Videos play great on this laptop, colors seem to be good as well, considering it’s an anti-glare screen (my wife wanted it).
Too bad she doesn’t want Linux on it, she needs MS Office for Uni (stupid uni policy for requiring only MS Office formats). But I’ll see how long she lasts with this W7 piece of cr*p, I’ll count the number of days the pop ups driver her nuts.