Live Mesh, Windows 7 and Traitors :)

Before Christmas, I had to make sure that the modem (remember what those are kids?) worked in my slowly maturing (read: decrepit) laptop as I had not been able to get it working in Ubuntu. To cut a long story short, I initially blamed Linux in general but after reinstalling Windows XP, I reneged on my accusation and realised the modem itself was dead.

So with a basic XP install, I used my mobile phone connected to the USB device instead. This has left me with a very empty laptop. This has been a blessing in disguise as I have some testing to do.

This has enabled me to look at LiveMesh and soon Windows 7.

Live Mesh

Thye first thing I have looked into is Live Mesh. Appreciating that there is more to Mesh than just Folder Sync, I was interested in just the latter. Two reasons: increasing needs to keep documents between various computers up to date and secondly the need to have a backup of important documents. This was pretty much the perfect excuse to try Live Mesh out. I was also aware of its Mac compatibility but I wasn’t aware that it only runs on OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and my eMac runs Tiger. As such it looks like I will just use the Live Desktop part of it on the web interface on the eMac.

Overall it’s pretty impressive and is helping tick the requirements I had in mind.

The overall process of setting it up is simple enough. You sign up using your Windows Live ID (or register for one, mine dates back to the Microsoft Passport days…) and then install the client on each PC/Mac that requires it. Needless to say, Windows XP is the minimum. Once installed you complete some basic registration details for the computer and bingo it’s all up and running. Then using Windows Explorer you can set up which folders should become part of your Mesh and how they should be synchronised between the other computers in your Mesh and the Live Desktop (your on-line storage space or to use Web 2.0 parlance — cloud storage)

I may consider upgrading the eMac at some point but for now I’m happy to stick with Tiger on it (mostly because it’s working and I’ll have to upgrade the RAM which is more expense as I’m saving towards a ‘new’ car. If a ten year old car or so can be considered new, which it is in my book being half the age of my current motor.)

Windows 7

With said laptop being somewhat bereft of anything on it at the moment I have taken the opportunity to try and get Windows 7 installed on it and test it out. Now, my notebook is not likely to be the most flattering benchmark for the system but it’s not awful. It will be slightly stymied by th 1GB RAM and the 1st Generation Pentium M 1.5GHz (Banias) in it is no longer exactly cutting edge like it was in 2003. The worst bit is the ATI Radeon 7500 in it which was pretty out of date when the laptop was launched and is now seriously only up to the task of business orientated applications such as Word and Excel. This might be the biggest stumbling block.

My main intrigue with Windows 7 is to see really how that new taskbar works. I’m curious because right now I fear the worst: it’ll work like the OS X Dock. The Dock on Mac OS X is horrid and is in my view one of the big reasons why I can abide by Windows much more for general getting down to it work. The Dock is a cumbersome fuck up (if you excuse the French.)

Mac OS X Dock - Arrrgh!

Windows 7 Taskbar - Arrrgh!

I don’t have any real plans to migrate any machines to Windows 7 when it is launched as I’m finding Vista just fine on the Desktop and XP does run well on the Thinkpad T40 — appreciably an old laptop but one that I have no real need to get something better/faster than.

What I am really hoping for is a slightly less messy Control Panel (something that worked fine in XP I think and then was reorganised in a haphazard fashion for Vista) and that the taskbar can work somewhat like the taskbar we have had since Windows 95. My biggest gripe over the OS X taskbar is that it mixes up window management, the launching of new applications and management of a running application. Plus, the fact that all versions of Windows from 95 to Vista use some kind of textual description next to it is handy. If I have three Word documents open or a few browsers, I can see it being quicker for me to click the window button in the taskbar (as you do now on XP, Vista etc.) than hovering and then clicking a thumbnail. That’s two actions to task switch rather than one.

Otherwise I’m not expecting any major changes from Vista SP1 which is a decent enough OS, and Microsoft still has that horrid sinking truth that you really can run virtually everything you would on Vista on XP still. Ok Windows Explorer isn’t quite as nice as it is in Vista, and the instant search is nicely integrated in Vista… But largely XP will still chow down on some serious work.

We will see what happens, either way you won’t be hearing me saying it’s slow etc. because I’m sure it will be but I hardly have a fast laptop as I keep saying. I’m sure after a week or two I’ll revert it back to XP as the beta will expire.

OpenSUSE

11.1 is out and yes I was very happily using 11.0 on the laptop (Thinkpad) but again XP is on it. For the reason I mentioned way up the top: the modem wasn’t working on my laptop. I think I’ll stick with XP and toy with Linux elsewhere for the time being mostly because Live Mesh is really good and the Radeon 7500 does grind somewhat with KDE 4. Yes I was using Gnome by the end, yes I’m making excuses, yes I still really like Linux — most of the time — but for the time being I’ll stick with XP like the great big traitor I am.