OK, so tell me how to get it to see the factory installed legacy parallel port on an HP machine. I'm over Windows, having found that Ubuntu Linux can do everything I need without aggravating the crap out of me every time I use it, but I was trying to help some poor souls with legacy apps and no choice get a big (if aged) medium-duty HP laser printer to work with the new machine. Finally found where M$ has hidden the device manager in the 7 iteration, but even with a fresh driver specifically tagged to that hardware downloaded from HP, no joy. Kept telling me it didn't have a driver.

Eventually gave up (for now) and hooked up a little multi-function inkjet fax with a USB connection from the back office so they could start working on a three-day backlog.

And this is all before it's really had a chance to get pwned and rootkitted by Russian mobsters. It won't get any better, but maybe there will be a service pack in a few months.

good grief, Randy. Your one post on Windows 7 and whatever ad server you are using has completely rebranded your site top and right with an ad for Windows 7 for Dummies.

Is that a reflection on us, your dear readers? lol.

I was planning on the $149 upgrade for three machines from Vista Home Premium for its 7 equivalent. Can you tell me if filesharing and printsharing is any better? We're wireless, but Vista never can find the printer I map.

I was helping a friend with her computer issues a couple of days ago. I can't say for sure which Windows version she was running but I guess it was Vista. My Gawd what frustrating sucktitude. I'm with Hayduke, why anyone who did not absolutely have to would put up with that when there is a perfectly good FREE, high functioning alternative is beyond me.

I bitch a lot about the Macs at work and generally it is well deserved but, Windows would drive me crazy. I say pick a distro and never look back. I too use Ubuntu but I could go back to Mandriva or pick up Debian or most any of them. Life is good in sane land.

(yea, yea, I know. plenty of you have magical softwarethat you have to use that only runs on yada yada yada.)

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It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
  - William G. McAdoo

Randy, you've got to be the one person on the planet to complain that Outlook Express went away. Google it and you'll find thousands of people on XP trying desperately to get rid of it (myself included - I clicked on a mailto link earlier and the damn thing popped up again).

I downgraded to XP from Vista a few months ago, but now I'm considering Win7. The RC I ran was pretty nice, especially since XP only recognizes 2gigs of RAM. Still thinking about it, though, as that's a lot of money for a small change, especially since I'm not interested in eye candy or the security changes (I'd do away with both immediately).

A couple of cool new things I found.

1. When you're looking at your network, you can right-click on any machine and connect via RDP.

2. There's a new version of Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7, and they have a pre-packaged XP SP3 "compatibility mode" VM you can download. (Available for Win7 Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate.)

The Windows 7 Virtual PC and prepackaged XP VM have enhancements so you can start the XP "compatibility mode" VM and it can interact with the Windows 7 desktop, such as adding an icon to the start menu for an app installed in the XP VM and launch it and run it just like an app on the Win7 host. Pretty nice if you have old stuff that won't run on Vista or Win7.

All my stuff works on Vista and Win7 so I haven't tried the prepackaged XP VM. If like me you don't need it you can download just the new Virtual PC; you don't have to get the XP VM although that's a little confusing at the Microsoft Virtual PC website. They really seem to be pushing it.)

I setup a VM and installed Server 2008 (legit MSDN copy) and it works great. It only supports 32-bit as far as I can tell, which is OK with me because that's what I use anyway.

This will be pretty nice for development, testing and support.

I took the plunge last week.  My 6 1/2 year old Gateway refused to boot up after a short power failure.  Turns out it was an outboard hard drive causing the problem.  It would run if connected after windows loaded but could not be connected during the boot sequence.

Since my old main drive was getting noisy, I was expecting a crash and this was enough to push me over the edge.  I bought a new machine, a home-built with an Asus motherboard, an AMD processor and Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.  I tried to hang my two 500 GB drives onto the board's one eide connector but no sale.  The machine wanted to boot from one of them instead of its SATA drive and nothing in the BIOS would change its mind.  So I added a 1 TB Seagate outboard drive and started the task of moving stuff - a lot like cleaning out the basement.*

I love Windows 7 except:

I learned to write my web sites using a copy of Pagemill 3.0 that Adobe abandoned over ten years ago in favor of more complicated (and more expensive) apps.  Pagemill will not run on this machine.  I installed my Dreamweaver 8 on it but it would take this old dog six months to learn to upload a page with it.  Cascading Style Sheets?  I don't need no stinkin' cascading style sheets to produce the Times-Picayune.

I also have software on my old machine that would either be costly or impractical to put on the new one so I bought a copy of Norton Ghost and used it to copy the Gateway's old 200 GB 'C' drive to a new 500 GB disc and then networked the two machines.  I removed a lot of extraneous software from the old machine so it is now a little faster and everything is working again.  I can still write my rag on it.  Plus, now that I'm temporarily between dogs and can close the office door, these two machines keep the temperature in my tiny office at a balmy level while the thermostat for the rest of the house is set at a chilly 60°.

Oh, and I use Eudora for my mail client so it easily transferred to the new machine with all saved files and address book intact as did my Firefox bookmarks.

* Those two storage drives are now back on the Gateway and set to share in the network so the 'basement' is still a mess.

Visit us at:

The Home

If you haven't already, right click on the Pagemill exe or the shortcut to it and click the compatibility tab and see if there is an option that will make it work...

(P.S. if you want a cheap graphical web site/page editor, Microsoft Expression Web 3 is pretty decent, believe it or not.)

I had to replace my laptop about a month ago (at 5 yo the harddrive was giving up on me) -- new laptop is running Windows7 (64bit), old laptop was running XP. I love Windows7, it's very easy to use. Was a little bit disturbed by the libraries at first, but after a couple of days,I found it to be much easier to use and much more organized. Didn't worry about the email since I use Thunderbird as my email client. I'm really enjoying the previews of open programs, since I often have to switch between various programs.

The only thing I goofed on was not making sure that the new laptop had bluetooth as the Palm OS cannot hotsynch with the Windows7 64bit via a corded hookup (it will hot synch to the 32 bit W7). According to Palm my beloved Centro can only be hot synched via bluetooth now.

I'm guessing you could get a plug-in USB BlueTooth transceiver of some kind?