Windows 7 Has Landed
The delivery of four new laptops for another purpose presented the ideal
opportunity to get some mileage in with Windows 7 and to do some comparative
benchmarking on identical technology platforms – a low-stress, low-risk look
at the sequel to the Vista farrago.
Presently the vast majority of the Windows user-base is entrenched in XP,
having spurned Vista as being too bug-ridden and altogether a nasty little
mess on the carpet. The most likely opportunity then is to leapfrog Vista
altogether and jump straight to Windows 7 – but only if you think you're
hard enough! Dell are wised up to this desire and the subject laptops were
provided with Windows 7, but with an opportunity to 'recover' back to XP
should the need arise. An additional backup is the provision of 'XP
compatibility' mode as standard in W7 Pro Ultimate. Interestingly all the IT
professionals for whom these Dells were destined plumped for XP – a
conservative lot indeed!
The machines were Dell Latitude E4300, equipped with 6-cell batteries, Intel
Core 2 Duo P9600 2.5GHz processors, 4GB of RAM and 250GB/7200rpm hard drives
(phew that sounds like the script for a PC World advert!). Each was equipped
with two 6-cell batteries which are swappable and each carries its own
state-of-charge meter. The 6-cell batteries protrude outside of the case
area by some way, but the benefit is almost 12 hours of running time with
two batteries. The machine weighs 1.8kg, light for a 13-inch ultra-portable
and some 200g lighter than the equivalent Macbook Pro. The screen is a
back-lit matt surface encased in a metal alloy frame and back panel. The
black, brushed finish is quite attractive.
The power brick is quite neat and has a unique reverse plug which grabs a
bit of space and also keeps the PSU from being flat on a surface (for
cooling). An exceptionally neat feature is the ring light on the power
insertion socket (the laptop end). This will be a boon when you are
scrambling about under a dark podium trying to find the end of the lead!
The screen bezel boasts an ambient light sensor, microphone, web cam and an
'on air' warning light. The porting consists of an Express Card 34,
Headphone, Mic, 4-pin Firewire, a single USB on one side and a combined USB/eSATA
on the other. In addition there are GigaBit Ethernet, VGA out and a
SmartCard reader.
Testing
We started with the installed XP on one machine and loaded Windows 7 on
another (the 32-bit Professional version). We then loaded the full Adobe
Creative Design Suite and the full Microsoft Office suite. Installing W7
took 28 minutes and we noted that the DVD was quite noisy in operation.
After installation we carried out benchmarks for the various operations, as
tabled. We noted that Windows 7 booted more and more quickly with successive
uses to reach the tabled value; as is often the case, XP started to slow as
more software was installed.
The Dell is also able to operate in 'Latitude ON' mode. This works in
conjunction with Microsoft Outlook so you can have a quick look at your
email, diary and contacts without waiting for the entire operating system to
fire up. It took 20s to fire up then an additional 4s to bring the email to
the screen. Power off took just 5 seconds.
Overall Windows 7 behaved well, right out of the install. We were able to
connect to the local WiFi and quickly obtain access to the entire local area
network and the web without any drama. All the installed software behaved
normally, although the 13-inch screen was very restricting after twin
22-inch monitors.
After the general troubles with Vista, and Snow Leopard's refusal to work
printers, we were gratified to find that we could install the drivers for
the Epson 3800, download and install profiles, plug the printer in and get
on with it – it just worked!
For a more stern test we installed X-Rite Eye 1 software. The spectro was
immediately recognised, the driver fetched and we then upgraded to the
latest software version over the web; again no issues – it just worked!
We then calibrated the screen. The baseline luminance was way too high at
230cd/m2 but the audit delivered an error value of 0.91ΔE₀₀ average. We then
dropped the luminance to 95cd/m2 and re-audited the result for an average
error of 0.93ΔE₀₀. Although these are good statistics it is foolish to
pretend that you could do graphics work on this monitor; move your head by a
couple of inches and the screen density changes massively (to be fair it is
a business machine!). Also the installed graphics card does not support Open
GL in Photoshop. One little thing we did notice while prowling about was
that when you click on the Photoshop icon you are offered a list of recently
used files to open directly, which is very neat. Other than that we were
somewhat under-whelmed by the W7 interface; fancy transparency effects look
cute, but add nothing to your ability to grind up files on a daily basis.
We next installed BabelColor as a likely candidate to cause trouble with a
long list of available spectrophotometers – it worked flawlessly! Flush with
success we attempted Monaco Profiler. Now this does not work on Vista
because the dongle gets in the way of operation. Previously X-Rite could
offer no solutions and we are talking about many thousands of pounds of
investments here in both spectros and software. We tried in XP-compatibility
mode, again with no success. Next we tried to download updated drivers for
the HASP dongle key and blow me the thing burst into life! Installing the
new drivers was open-heart surgery for geeks but nevertheless we got the
brute going. Just to spite us, the DTP94 (Monaco XR) monitor calibrator
still refused to work though! Overall we made quite good progress over our
endeavours with Vista. The utility of Windows 7 is that it asked if you
would like a better driver and then goes and fetches one, just the way
things should work, but gratifying even so.
Making PDFs
One of the things that persistently bugs us with InDesign is that you cannot
make a full magazine for Professional Imagemaker (ie more than 150 pages)
without InDesign crashing. We rather hoped this might be fixed, but alas it
crashed almost immediately so we are back to making four pdfs and joining
them together in Acrobat.
We successfully installed Corel Painter, a program that will not run on our
64-bit/16GB Ram workstation (too much RAM allegedly).
Digital projectors
Windows 7 has a new interface for dealing with projectors – it just works!
You are given the option of duplicating your screens, leaving the laptop off
or extending the desktop across both projector and laptop (can't imagine
why!). Gratifyingly the laptop graphics card recognised the Epson projector
and rearranged the resolution to give a true shape of image, again a source
of irritation on other systems.
Overall
So far then, Windows 7 gets a tentative blessing although it needs to be
tested using RAID drives, external hard drives and many types of printers
before we would commit fully. The signs though are good – good enough to
start thinking about building a full machine and giving it a real hammering.
Thus far we found W7 a bit pedestrian using Photoshop and we are not sure if
it is the laptop restricting things or the drop down from 64-bit. Time will
tell, watch this space. Windows 7 seems to be the program that Vista should
have been in the first place. There is no need for us to forgive Microsoft
for producing such a poor release with Vista, we simply never bought it in
droves and have punished them in their pockets – they seem to have learned
their lesson, perhaps next time the engineers will hold sway over the
bean-counters and the launches will be made when the software is actually
ready, not when the balance books demand an inrush of revenue.
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