T'is the Season to be Jolly

Above: I have three computers - Gemini, a very old Sony Vaio, and an even older Sun Ultra 5 workstation. There is my Kodak color printer on the left and my HP laser printer on the right. The sophisticated air conditioning setup (to the far left) is very handy in the summer.

So I'm talking the last half of December off from work. I've been waiting for this for a long time because I wanted to spend some quality time with Gemini and get everything set-up just the way I wanted.

Deena tells me that everyone can hardly wait until I finish setting things up so I will be less grouchy and stressed out. I can understand that, as my frustration often leaks out to those close to me. Thanks for being patient!

So a few weeks ago I finally did what I hope was last install (for a while) of Windows 7. I finally received my official version of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit from Microsoft, so now I had a product key that was all mine. Up until now I have been using the RTM from MSDN through work, but I never left the O/S installed long enough to have to activate it - until recently. A few weeks ago I had most things set up and running the way I wanted, but Windows started complaining that I would loose certain feature unless I activated it. I figured I had installed Windows 7 so many times before I was pretty good at it and it would not hurt to just install everything from scratch.

I've been keeping notes on my Windows 7 installation, keeping track of what works and what doesn't, so I wanted to do one last clean install from scratch and do everything in the correct order. At first everything seemed to go well but after a couple of weeks I noticed a couple of things that were not working right any more:

1. ShoutCast was broken. I was never able to get IceCast to stream to more than one person previously, so I was quite happy when I was able to get ShoutCast working. Unfortunately after reinstalling Windows my ShoutCast stream stopped streaming to multiple people and was behaving the way IceCast was. The problem seems to be related the firewall in my BitDefender security software. When I disable the firewall I am able to get ShoutCast to stream properly.
   
2. Aventail was broken. I have to use the Aventail software to connect to work. Unfortunately this software does not work very well in Windows 7. I have two versions of the software: (a) the beta version for 64-bit Vista, and (b) the production version for 64-bit Vista. For some reason only the beta version seemed to work, but before my last Windows installation I was able to get the production version to work. This time I had to install the beta version again, and I had to set the Setup file to Vista SP2 compatibility mode.
3. My HP printer is hosed. I've had a lot of trouble with my HP LaserJet 1018 because they do not have drivers for Windows 7 (the hosers). I was able to get it to work by setting the driver installer to Vista SP2 compatibility mode in the past. The problem is that there are two different driver installers - and HP does not tell you what each version is for. I can print to the printer from Gemini, but when Deena tries to print via her computer the Windows spooler gets hung up. Before I did the last installation of Windows I had this all working - but I still don't have a solution yet.

I've decided to re-rip all my music on CDs. I was using Windows Media Player before because it can do loss-less compression, but the directory look-up is not very good so too often when I put a CD in, WMP can't find the artist and titles. After doing a bit of research I discovered FLAC - Free Loss-less Audio Codec. There is a plug-in for WinAmp so I can RIP my CDs that way. I've spent almost 4 days just RIPing music now, and I'm only half done. So far WinAmp has only failed once to find the CD information in the directory - and it was only a partial failure - but I was able fix the meta-information on the tracks.

I'll go into more detail later, but in all my adventures over the last 6 months or more I've discovered one (unsurprising) thing --- Windows 7 sucks! In many ways Windows 7 is better than Vista or XP, but I've discovered many things that just worked in XP, were a lot of trouble to get working in Windows 7. I think to summarize things properly it's fair to just say Windows sucks! Microsoft just keep adding more and more features every time they release new products, but they never go back and fix the original problems their software has, they only add new features and new problems.