Windows 7 – Some Problems

Biggest problem so far: antivirus programs. They simply do not play well with Windows 7 – or at least the two I tested so far. TrendMicro was really bad – it locked me out of making changes to my computer. I could not even uninstall it. That one made me have to zero the drive and start over. I wasn’t happy. Then I tried the Norton 360 3 beta. I have had problems with Norton in the past, including the time it began erasing my hard disk (that was the GoBack program). But I figured I’d try it out. The beta is only good for 15 days. It lasted on my system for about an hour. Boot time increased by 100% or better, then I started having crashes. I have not had those before. The crashes and the slow boots stopped the minute I uninstalled the program. I’m going to try Kaspersky next.

Programs: Some older programs appear to run well, others are a no go. Games appear to be able to run very well, even some that are several years old now. (My son was playing Halo 2 with no problems and rather good performance.) I had to get a new version of Palm Desktop, and had to spend a goodly amount of time getting the Bluetooth connection set up. (That wasn’t all Windows fault – I had to relearn the Palm’s quirks as I went along.) But Bluetooth headphones linked right up and have great sound. My Motorola telephone will not link correctly at all, however. W7 reports that the driver won’t load.

Speaking of drivers: Drivers have been updated for several things on the system via Windows Update. So there appears to be interest by some manufacturers to make newer drivers available for older hardware. That’s a good thing. My new sound driver works like a champ – really, really nice sound. Better than I remember this particular computer sounding with XP.

Internet Explorer 8: Frankly, I am having issues with this program. It crashes at odd intervals. I cannot add my own site to the trusted zone because IE8 demands an https connection to do so. I suspect IE* has issues with scripts running, but doesn’t report this – it merely crashes and then sulks. FireFox is running rock-solid without any of that behavior.

Incidentally, I threw a spare drive into my “work” laptop, a Dell D800 and am running W7 on that, too. I’ll do another post about that adventure soon.