Ask DACS
October 2009

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Last month I promised to have an installation of Windows 7 ready to demonstrate at the meeting so the AskDACS session began with that. I downloaded and installed both the Windows 7 Starter Edition, a minimal version with few features and the Ultimate Edition. The download files are the same size. A little investigation revealed that all Windows 7 installations are the “same” in that everything needed for any version is installed on the disk and then only selected features are enabled. In other words, you install the Ultimate Edition but Microsoft hides the features not included in your particular version. I plan to do a “Windows Anytime Upgrade” to see how this works. With my limited experience with Windows 7, I am not much of a demonstrator. We will have a meeting on Windows 7 sometime early next year.

Q – How do the hardware requirements for Windows 7 compare to those for Vista?

A – There was no clear answer to this at the meeting and the discussion centered on problems with the Vista “minimum” hardware requirements which may hold over to Windows 7.

Q – How do the administrator controls compare to Vista?

A – It appears that Windows 7 generates fewer “mother may I” prompts. One member said that there are account control settings in Windows 7 that control the “level of paranoia” and thus can increase or reduce the number of such prompts.

Q – In Vista is there more than one place where documents and downloaded files are stored?

A – From the floor: Documents can be stored in “Documents” or “Public Documents”. To find these on Vista Ultimate, I clicked on Documents on the Start Menu which opened a Windows Explorer window. The Public folder was included in the folder list in the tree-view pane on the left, but I had to scroll down to see it. In XP these are “My Documents” and “All Users” or “Shared Documents” depending on your version of XP.

Q – How long should I wait to upgrade to Windows 7?

A – The consensus was that it is wise not to upgrade the day that Windows 7 comes out. If there are widespread problems, they will be covered by the general media; lesser problems will be covered in the trade press. Personally I will wait until after I have completed my taxes, which should be adequate for major problems to surface. It has been normal practice at many large companies to wait until Microsoft releases the first service pack before beginning an upgrade cycle. This is a good guideline for the cautious.

Keep in mind that there is no direct upgrade from XP to Windows 7. The word is that the install program will reformat the hard drive and thus wipe out everything on an XP machine, while a Vista machine can be upgraded “in place” without losing documents or settings.

A member pointed out that there can be issues when upgrading from 32-bit Windows of any flavor to a 64-bit version. 64-bit drivers may not be available for older peripherals like printers and even if the printer remains connected to a machine running 32-bit Windows, it may not work when accessed over a network from a machine running 64-bit Windows. This problem will not go away no matter how long you wait to upgrade as it depends on the peripheral manufacturers to release 64-bit drivers for older gear. There is absolutely no incentive for them to do that, so you may need to add the cost of a new printer to your Windows upgrade costs, even if your existing 32-bit machine will remain in use. At this point we do not know how well Windows 7 will accept Vista drivers. The consensus was that most Vista drivers will work, but only time will tell. My recommendation on this is to buy a new network-ready printer that includes both 32- and 64-bit drivers and be done with this issue for a few years. If you own a fancy color laser printer that does not have a built-in network connection (shame on you), then purchase a device called a print server that provides the connection. Such a print server will not solve the driver issue.

Q – I (personally) have a PowerMac 7100 that has a bad hard drive and cannot boot. Can I replace the drive with another narrow SCSI disk?

A – The consensus was yes with the suggestion to try installing Mac OS 9.

Q – My second Mac question involves a Mac Performa 200; this is a “classic” all-in-one Mac that looks like the original Macintosh. This machine which worked just fine about five years ago when I last turned it on, now displays vertical black and white bars interspersed with seemingly random characters.

A – Check the power supply. Since the meeting, someone on a vintage computer-oriented email list pointed me to an Apple document on how to repair the Performa.

A note on these notes: I have been trying different locations for placing my recorder on the stage with widely varying results. This month much of the recording was garbled so if your comments do not seem to be included, it is because I could not interpret much of the recording.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!

 


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