Greetings and Salutations….

Well, my meditation for today focuses on Windows 7, and what a joy it is proving to be. While I am sure that MANY systems are happily ticking away with this version of the OS on them, I have had two show up where it has been filled with issues.

On the first system, a Toshiba laptop, four different folks, including Toshiba support tried re-installing win 7 to deal with the problems. No joy in any case. At best, the system would last three or four days before performance starting plummeting and it became more and more frustrating to work with. Finally it would get so slow that the user was convinced it was crashed. Mouse movements would take literally minutes to happen, and, sometimes mouse clicks would take an hour to take effect. Although I am not entirely sure I found the problem, it appears that Win7 was, for some strange reason, creating infinite loops in the directory structure. All was ok, until the indexing program or the file opening program would hit one of these loops, then, a task would spin off and sit there, running round and round the loop forever, burning more and more CPU cycles as it went.

When I installed Linux on the above system, it ran for days with no problems, no slowdowns and no locking up.

On the second system, there were security issues. Apparently someone had installed malware (probably a keystroke logger) and code to hide it, which was both causing the system to not perform properly (It was impossible to run Administrator functions or to even access the Administrator account), and, of course, information was leaking out.

Because the user needs windows, I ended up having to backup his data, format the hard drive, and do a re-install from the original CDs. I also put Linux on the system, to give him a slightly better tool for keeping a secure house and keeping track of attempts to break into his system.