I'd been managing to avoid versions of Windows newer than XP. This week, however, I was confronted with Windows 7.
Yeah, I'd had a brief exposure to Win 7 on Joy's new laptop, when she had the WLAN problem. That doesn't really count.
Off to a client site yesterday, to see Egbert ensconced in a real toaster for the first time! I hauled my old laptop along, 'cause it's got the toolchains on it, and I haven't worked out the details of seeing up the build environment on Windows yet.
The IT department had provided two shiny new laptops for the project. Actually, one normal-sized laptop and one netbook. Both from Acer.
Installation of the bare necessities (Subcommander, Ruby, Ruby-Gnome2, and Tera Term Pro 3.1.3) went smoothly.
Now we need serial ports! Plural. One RS-232 and one RS-422. We've got USB serial dongles for both. Both dongles have been working with XP, and both are simply plug-n-play with Linux. With Windows 7? Nope. Can't find the drivers. Uninformatively can't find the drivers.
After a while, the IT guy (a Mac type) persuaded Windows to find a driver for the RS-422 dongle. For the RS-232? Well, I plugged it into my laptop and used dmesg to learn that it had a PL2303 in it, which was enough information for the IT guy to find a suitable driver on the Web.
So, eventually, we had communication.
Switching back and forth between the two machines - these are factory-fresh machines from the same vendor, now - the user interface is distractingly different. The main menu is not only awkward (kind of KDE 4 type awkward); it's differently awkward on the two machines.
And the shiny new UI? Dreadful. Still has many of the old crocks (such as undersized, non-resizeable file-selector dialog boxes), and it offers no clue where to start on... well... just about anything, starting with calling up a file manager, and progressing to setting the view options on the file manager once you've got one called up. (Hey, show me the freakin' filename extensions, stupid!)
It's buggy, too. Plug in a thumb drive, and usually a window pops up asking what to do with it (and, in a case of finally getting it right, it defaults to "open a folder to view files" or whatever they call it). But... sometimes that window is in the background, and you have to futz around to get to it.
It looks like other things may have changed subtly under the hood, too, 'cause old Tera Term Pro, what we've all been using these many years, exhibits decidedly strange behavior, and needs to be restarted frequently. Well, mayhap the new Tera Term 4.65 will work better. Have to try that next time I'm over there.
Also, despite the zippy-fast processors in the new machines, a Ruby-Gnome2 app takes for-freakin'-ever to launch. On the other hand, starting the same app the second time goes pretty fast. Is it really taking all that time to load the interpreter and libraries into RAM, and after that, they're cached?
Stay tuned; any day now, I'll be kvetching about OrCAD's horrid UI, with the tiny, fixed-size dialog boxes containing huge lists. Scroll, scroll, scroll your mouse, halfway down the list....
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