Windows 7 Beta?

billbillw

polkatese wrote: »

Guys, any suggestion for (a) course of action in opening up Homegroup file sharing with any other OS/platforms or if you could point me to any resources?

TIA

I'm no expert, but maybe try using Apple's Bonjour program. You might have to get out of the Homegroup to get it to work though. I haven't really done much with the networking aspect of Win 7 yet because my wife has had her laptop at work for the last few weeks.

polkatese

Thanks, Bill. I'll give it a try with Bonjour and see where it takes me.

polkatese

UPDATE: No dice on Bonjour.

However, I am convinced 150% now that Homegroup is the culprit. I can Ping my Mac from the Windows 7 machine, but not vice versa. Hence, I could copy files off my Mac from Windows 7 machine, but not the other way around. Minor inconvenience at this point, as long as I can get access files in both machine, whether it is Pull or Push.

Now that we narrow down this whack job (since if you think about it, it doesn't make sense and no group protection when there is a way to grab the files still.) I hope they don't plug this hole later on with an update, then I'll be screwed. Either that, or some Mac's jockey would find a way to hack through the smb workaround).

Any expert in opening up specific Windows 7 DNS/IP address?

mhardy6647

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html

Kex

mhardy6647 wrote: »

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html

Interesting read ... thanks!

mmadden28

polkatese wrote: »

Guys, any suggestion for (a) course of action in opening up Homegroup file sharing with any other OS/platforms or if you could point me to any resources?

TIA

Aside from any Windows networking, you could install an SSH server on one (or both) systems and SSH into it to do any file transferring. This will work over the internet as well. Just make sure you secure it properly.

Kex wrote: »

I much prefer W2K to Win XP....

You do realize that Microsoft will not come out with any new security patches for this OS right? That there may be some serious holes in it that will be leaving your entire home network at risk?

Just saying--I hope you are protecting yourself in other ways.
Win2K server is absolutely no longer allowed on any network at my company or on any of my customer networks.

mmadden28

I would also suggest to anybody tha wants to try this new beta out, that if they don't have a spare PC or don't want to overwrite their current one, to load VMWare Server (its free) and install it into a virtual machine. Of course that's assuming your hardware is beefy enough. Yes its a Virtual environment and so doesn't have full dsirect hardware access, but it should be enough to give you an idea on how it runs.

billbillw

mmadden28 wrote: »

I would also suggest to anybody tha wants to try this new beta out, that if they don't have a spare PC or don't want to overwrite their current one, to load VMWare Server (its free) and install it into a virtual machine. Of course that's assuming your hardware is beefy enough. Yes its a Virtual environment and so doesn't have full dsirect hardware access, but it should be enough to give you an idea on how it runs.

IMHO, it is much easier to put on a clean spare partition. If you are running a PC with only one partition, you probably shouldn't be trying a Beta operating system anyway.

mhardy6647

You do realize that Microsoft will not come out with any new security patches for this OS right? That there may be some serious holes in it that will be leaving your entire home network at risk?

Just saying--I hope you are protecting yourself in other ways.
Win2K server is absolutely no longer allowed on any network at my company or on any of my customer networks.

As of today (well, OK, yesterday) I am still getting security updates from the mothership for Windows 2000 both at home and at work. "Work" has ca.50,000 employees worldwide. I did hear (today) that work is eliminating all Windows 2000 clients on the network in (IIRC) June; I would presume this is tied to the end of Microsoft's support thereof. Doesn't seem to be quite yet, though.

mmadden28

mhardy6647 wrote: »

As of today (well, OK, yesterday) I am still getting security updates from the mothership for Windows 2000 both at home and at work. "Work" has ca.50,000 employees worldwide. I did hear (today) that work is eliminating all Windows 2000 clients on the network in (IIRC) June; I would presume this is tied to the end of Microsoft's support thereof. Doesn't seem to be quite yet, though.

My company has over 120,000 employees and its already been removed from the entire enterprise, and I'll correct my ealrlier statement about "absolutely no longer allowed"--its no longer allowed at least for any production systems or any systems that had a very specific requirement and high level approvals to keep them. The removal process started 2 years ago. And I though my company was slow to adopt.

You can't stay in the past forever-;)

disneyjoe7

Can you download this so you can make a cd? I like to try but I don't have partition so I like to replace the hard drive with another then do the cd thing with it.


BTW like Ubuntu but can't get it do play a dvd. So I not sure if it for me, but getting tried of Microsoft.

ben62670

You can't just slave a second HD and dual boot?

disneyjoe7

No Ben I will remove the drive and put another drive in it for test. That way I can redo it if I want.

mmadden28

billbillw wrote: »

IMHO, it is much easier to put on a clean spare partition. If you are running a PC with only one partition, you probably shouldn't be trying a Beta operating system anyway.

Yes, but you run the risk of hosing something up, esp with the partition table. If your going to use a spare partition, I assume you'd be dual-booting or are you talking about manually changing the active partition?
If anybody tries a beta OS, while dual booting , etc, you had better be darn sure you have a backup of your data or use a separate hard drive.

VMWare was made for this kind of stuff-for testing OS's and apps out without affecting any existing installs. It was just a suggestion/option.

Ideally you would put a fresh hard drive in-completely isolated. All production drives disconnected.

ben62670

If dual boot is scary you can set the bios to boot to either drive, or just uplug one or the other.

mmadden28

ben62670 wrote: »

If dual boot is scary you can set the bios to boot to either drive, or just uplug one or the other.

Yeah but you can't do that if you're dual booting between partitions on the same physical drive. But good advice to make it easy to disable the drive on the fly as opposed to disconnecting it.

polkatese

VMWare Fusion is wonderful: stable and easy to blow once you are ready to remove. It reminds me of Stacker (back in the early 90's) to double the size of HDD when space was premium. I use Fusion on my Mac, to run XP. But, I digress, Mmadden28 has a good point.

ben62670

mmadden28 wrote: »

Yeah but you can't do that if you're dual booting between partitions on the same physical drive. But good advice to make it easy to disable the drive on the fly as opposed to disconnecting it.

I was replying to DJ;)

mmadden28

polkatese wrote: »

...It reminds me of Stacker (back in the early 90's) to double the size of HDD when space was premium.....

Damn polkatese, did you have to pull those memories from the cobwebs?
I've dealt with way too many stacker issues back in the day when I did retail computer repair. But you had to do what you had to do if space was at a premium.

disneyjoe7

Thanks guys but I'm still confused about this can I download with a working computer and place this on a CD so I can install it on another drive all together? The new drive is just that fresh born and knows **** of nothing so I could I install it if not on a CD?

ben62670

When you download you get an ISO file that needs to be burnt to a DVD. Then you install from the DVD. I like to copy the setup file to another HD for an install to speed things up tremendously, but if you are even slightly confused about this statement you don't want to go that route.

disneyjoe7

Ok Ben understand I just like to keep it clean clean.

polkatese

mmadden28 wrote: »

Damn polkatese, did you have to pull those memories from the cobwebs?
I've dealt with way too many stacker issues back in the day when I did retail computer repair. But you had to do what you had to do if space was at a premium.

here is a walk down Stacker memory lane:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

Didn't think much about it till I use Fusion. A rather sad ending, I thought.

mmadden28

polkatese wrote: »

here is a walk down Stacker memory lane:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

Didn't think much about it till I use Fusion. A rather sad ending, I thought.

Actually, aside from the fact that it went under-looks like they did the right thing with their investors. So in one respect its a happy ending. :cool:

"Stac then renamed itself to "Previo", and tried to reposition itself as a technology yeds to get better provider to helpdesk and support organizations. This effort was pursued while the dot-com bubble was bursting, and in 2002 the company finally threw in the towel. In an unusual move, rather than spend all its cash, the company sold off its technology (to Altiris) and returned its cash to its shareholders before dissolving."

billbillw

Well, I ended finding that my virus also infected my XP OS. Rather than screw around with fixes, I restored my backup (which was made just before I installed the Beta). Unfortunately, restoring the backup erased the bootfile that Win 7 put on my master boot drive.

When I rebooted, I only had my XP choices. At first, I thought about re-installing the Win 7 OS, but I did a little searching on how the Vista/Win 7 boot files are setup. The old boot.ini files were easy to edit with notepad, but Vista/Win 7 use something called BCD files, which are not text files and not easy to edit.

Luckily, I found this article, which mentions a program called Easy BCD.

Let me tell you, Easy BCD saved me a lot of work! I installed it under WinXP and it immediately gave an error saying it couldn't find a BCD boot file and asked if I wanted to restore it. I said yes. It was done. I did some edits to show Win XP Pro 64-bit as the other choice, and renamed Vista to Windows 7. Save. Reboot, and like magic, it worked perfecty. Two choices in the boot menu, 15 second delay, and I was able to get into the Win 7 OS perfectly.

You can also use this tool to change the default "Older Version of Windows" to XP or whatever.

ben62670

Thanks for the tip Bill. So with EasyBCD you were able to get to 7?

billbillw

Well, so far, Window 7 is working pretty good. I've only had one serious lockup and i suspect that was because I hit the usb port with a pretty good load of static buildup when I tried to connect my Ipod! DoH!

A few things need to be improved, but the biggest thing I don't like is how fuzzy/blurry the text looks in the menu bars, tabs, and buttons. Mind you, I disabled the ClearType BS, which is equally horrible in Windows 7 as it is in IE7 (and 8). Even with clear type off, some of the text is fuzzy. All the other screen text is clear, but menus/buttons are blurry.

I notice if you turn off all the fancy stuff in the 'performance' menu, it gets really clear, but also ends up looking quite boring, like Windows 2000 or something. Hopefully MS can find a way to make things clearer and keep the OS looking nice.

ben62670

Yeah I ran straight to performance, and turn off most of the fluff. Much better. I like things to just open!

rayslifecycle

mhardy6647 wrote: »

After an XP desktop meltdown at home, I've gone to Ubuntu on one of the home 'puters. I don't think I'll ever go back...

www.ubuntu.com

Ubuntu all the way
I have a pentium 3 dell inspiron Laptop w/250mbRAM that I surf the internet, watch streaming video, listen to internet radio, and write with. Ubuntu runs so clean that this laptop still boots up faster, finds connections faster, and shuts down faster then any other PC in the house. All the software is distributed on a freeware license so you don't have to pay - and I have not had many problems converting back and forth with excel, word, photoshop, autocad - whatever......

Microsoft is to operating systems AS Bose is to speakers OR Monster Cable is to Cables