PC Pro

Let’s go back to the beginning.

In early November 2010, PC Pro reader Pete Grist got in touch with me. “With the recent availability of [the Windows 7] Family Pack, I thought let’s go for it.”

This was the start of an ongoing saga involving repair disks and constant reinstalls of software

“Everything seemed to go smoothly and I soon had Office installed and working, but then I needed a reboot for some Microsoft updates, and hit a black screen. This was the start of an ongoing saga involving repair disks and constant reinstalls of software the repair had removed (I installed Office four times!).

“Safe mode just stopped at classpnp.sys. I soon discovered that this is a far from uncommon problem, with next to no help from Microsoft or ATI. In all my searches I haven’t found an answer, but I’ve decided that it is related to Aero, and with that turned off things have been more stable.

“What I find most annoying is that there seems no recognition that this is a real problem – Microsoft do not seem to be asking for diagnostics to be sent or to offer remote assistance. Do I take a chance on upgrading the others?”

I advised him to upgrade the other PCs and to post the question on PC Pro’s very useful Help forum.

That was it, or so I thought. Almost three months later, Pete got in touch again:

As a long shot, I thought I’d register the problem with Microsoft Support, not expecting anything to come of it.

“For a few weeks I’ve got over my restart/reboot problem by keeping the repair disc in my DVD drive, which had the odd effect of curing the problem, without any intervention by me. As a long shot, I thought I’d register the problem with Microsoft Support, not expecting anything to come of it. To my surprise I got a reply and three of hours of phone support over a couple of days (and they rang me!).”

To a certain extent, you could reply “so he should”. When you buy a retail copy of Windows 7 you get 90 days of phone support as standard. But anyway…

“After remotely accessing my machine, the support guy decided a new format and reinstall was the answer. Sceptically I went along with this, grateful for any help. It didn’t work, giving a missing boot manager error on restart. The support guy was starting to think in terms of a hardware error, and left me to do the install again, but a quick Google search on Windows 7 boot-manager led me to the answer, which was that my install disk was second on the list of disks to install to. I disconnected the data disk, leaving Windows with just one to choose from and everything is now OK.

“It would seem that the Windows install can get the wrong disk to write the boot-manager to, and I could maybe have fixed it with a repair. However, I was impressed with getting the support help from Microsoft, they didn’t have all of the answer but between us we got there. They weren’t put off by a home-built machine and it was all free!”

So well done to Microsoft support, and a lesson to us all – if you pay for a Windows 7 retail product, take advantage of the customer support on offer.

At launch it cost £150 inc VAT, offering a massive £90 saving compared to 3 x £80 inc VAT for a standard upgrade. Street prices went even lower, down to around £120 inc VAT. So you could upgrade all three machines in your house for a tasty £40 each.

Two weeks ago I received an email from one of our readers, Daniel Cramer. “We, like many other families in the UK, have more than one computer in our household running on a Windows operating system,” he wrote. “We have three, including a laptop. Two run on XP and one, for our sins, on Vista.

“Now seemed an opportune moment to upgrade the OS for all three, so I tried to buy a Windows 7 Premium upgrade family pack. However, this is nowhere to be found, despite Amazon and others still listing it. My local PC World knew it was once available but did not know why they were unable to get any more stock.

“As the cost of upgrading the OS of the three computers virtually equals the cost of a new computer, with an Intel i3 processor and Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS, I do not think I will be upgrading soon.”

A sentiment, I suspect, echoed up and down the country. So I sent a speculative email asking Microsoft if there was any chance the Family Pack could make a reappearance, and why it only made them available for a limited amount of time in the first place?

(Family Pack officially stopped being promoted at the tail-end of 2009, but stocks carried on being sold into the early part of this year.)

The answer arrived today:

“When launched in the UK, the Windows 7 Family Pack was only available while supplies lasted,” explained Leila Martine, director, Windows Consumer Microsoft UK. “We’ll continue to explore ways of bringing value to our customers through compelling offers.”

Which is all fine and dandy, but here we are a year after launch without any more compelling offers being made. Perhaps they’ll come with the release of Service Pack 1, but frankly I won’t be holding my breath.

Ever since the launch of MacPaint back in 1984, brush-based bitmap programs have shown that computers aren’t just useful for boosting productivity but can also be truly creative. MacPaint launched a host of imitators such as PC Paintbrush and Paint Shop Pro, but nowadays the paint side of things has almost been forgotten as bitmap editors have found their true calling: photo editing.

However onscreen painting remains one of the most creatively rewarding and enjoyable things that you can do with your computer – but only if you have the right software.

Of course all bitmap-based photo-editors still offer brushes for applying colours to an image, and a lot of effort has been put into making these accurately simulate their real world artistic counterparts as seen in the recent Photoshop CS5’s new Mixer Brush. The end results can certainly be impressive, but the way you go about achieving them is hardly spontaneous and natural. This is especially the case with the market-leading art program, Corel Painter 11, where it sometimes feels like you need a PhD before you can put pen to paper.

To emulate the real artistic process, it’s crucial that the software gets out of the way as much as possible and lets you get on with painting. You probably have just such a program on your current system, but the chances are that you haven’t bothered loading it. Microsoft has included a paint program with every release of Windows since version 1.0. Microsoft Paint certainly meets the simple and hands-on criteria – so much so that it has always seemed targeted at kids.

However if you are a Windows 7 user, it’s worth taking another look. What makes the new version of Paint interesting are its new brushes and in particular the new Oil and Watercolour options. Rather than laying down clearly-artificially, solid strokes these lay down semi-transparent, varying strokes to create the illusion that they were laid down by bristled brushes. Perhaps just as importantly, they run out of paint much as they would in real life.

Artistic Number Crunching

The new brushes are far more realistic and creatively rewarding as a result. However Paint will never be able to deliver a truly realistic artistic experience or results. The problem is fundamental – it turns out that traditional bitmap editors just aren’t up to the job. Bitmap-based painting programs are essentially RGB number crunchers, taking existing pixels’ colour values and the current paint’s colour values and determining end values based on brush behaviour. Real paint simply doesn’t work like this and the interaction of paint, canvas and brush can’t be captured by RGB values alone.

To mimic real paint, colour handling is not enough. Oil paint is thick and the software needs to be able to take this into account to determine how new paint and brushes will interact with it, how far you can smear it, how much of the canvas grain will show through and so on. Modelling watercolour is even more complex as whether pigment fringes at the edges of strokes or diffuses into existing strokes depends on how wet the brush and canvas are.

Corel Painter does work like this (storing the extra information in its extended RIFF format) and it’s the secret of the program’s artistic end results, but also the explanation for its intimidating complexity. However recently I came across a program that brilliantly combines advanced Painter-style processing behind-the-scenes with simple, hands-on, front-of-house handling that is more reminiscent of Microsoft Paint.

You can read the details in my review of ArtRage Studio Pro 3, but it’s especially important to try out painting software yourself so I strongly recommend that you download the 30-day trial version. There’s also a free Starter Edition, but the full Pro version only costs US$80 and is a vast improvement. In fact it’s the most artistic, creatively rewarding and enjoyable computer-based experience I’ve had all year.

In the current climate, small businesses need to examine every cost. If you buy ten PCs to outfit an office, is there any way to reduce the cost by choosing an alternative to Windows?

Linux has been the only real contender amongst open-source operating systems for some years and during that time I’ve experimented with various versions of Red Hat, then Fedora and, most recently, the user-friendly Ubuntu. As time has gone on, the process has become less frustrating and difficult but, in the end, I returned to the prevailing version of Windows because I simply couldn’t carry out my work entirely using Linux and Linux-based software.

However, things have changed, up to a point. Firstly, a much larger percentage of my work is now done online using web applications. Since moving to Google Apps for my company’s email, I can handle email using any computer running a browser. I do a lot of work configuring WordPress installations and this can be done online, although I prefer to use a desktop CSS/HTML/PHP editor connecting remotely. Adwords management is done online and although I use Word for my writing, I’m perfectly at home in OpenOffice and even, at a pinch, Google Docs.

So, on the one hand the OS is now much less important to me whilst, on the other hand, Ubuntu has matured into a genuine contender. The final piece of the puzzle was the release of Wubi. This is an installer for Windows that allows Ubuntu to be installed alongside your primary operating system without requiring you to repartition your hard disk. It installs and uninstalls as a standard Windows application and the end result is a startup menu that allows you to choose either Windows or Ubuntu. Wubi works by using a concept called “loop mounting” which essentially makes a file act as a disk drive for the OS to be installed onto. Given that installing Linux was now a few clicks away, I decided to give it a try and, to make the experiment realistic, I would see if I could carry out my daily activities in Ubuntu for an entire week.

To install Ubuntu using Wubi, go to the Wubi installer page and download it to your hard disk. You can just go ahead and run it – it’ll automatically download and install the correct version of Ubuntu. However if your computer uses a 64-bit processor Wubi will install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu which, in my experience, isn’t well enough supported to be usable. To get around this, go to the Ubuntu Desktop Edition download site and get the ISO image of the 32-bit version. Save this to the same folder as Wubi before running it and it’ll automatically choose that version.

All being well when you reboot, you should see Ubuntu as an option in your boot menu. Choose it and it’ll complete the installation. One more reboot and you’re done.

In use, Ubuntu is a stable operating system with a mature front end. Version 10 is a pleasure to use, feeling more responsive than any form of Windows and easy to configure via the various control panel dialog boxes. It’s not entirely fair to compare boot-up speeds, because my Windows 7 installation is bogged down with lots of installed software, but I’ll do it anyway. After selecting Ubuntu from the boot menu it takes 30 seconds on my quad-core PC before the desktop is fully loaded and responsive. Thirty seconds later, I’m back editing this entry in Google docs. The figures for Windows 7 are 210 seconds and 335 seconds respectively. As I said, my Windows 7 installation could do with some paring back but, nevertheless, the comparison is a stark one.

But of course, Ubuntu doesn’t have to be better than Windows, it just needs to be an adequate replacement. As an OS, I would put it ahead of XP and Vista and just a shade behind Windows 7 – I did find myself missing “most visited” and “pinned” shortcuts on my taskbar and, perhaps more importantly, there is no equivalent I could find to searching for programs by name. Ubuntu’s ace card is its Software Library, which is the desktop equivalent of the Apple App store, except that all the apps are free – search, click and install.

So, how did the five days go? Well, I spent around 90% of my time during that week in Ubuntu and three of the five days were entirely Windowless. Yet, there are two types of challenge when using Ubuntu full-time.

Firstly there are still a few minor problems that arise from Ubuntu itself. For example, setting up my bog-standard Canon printer proved to be a little challenging and Canon’s official Linux drivers a distracting diversion along the way. I can see and interact with my PC’s physical drives from within Ubuntu, but my home network was not so accessible. Even though both NAS devices are Linux-based accessing them wasn’t always easy, especially from within programs. I don’t doubt that with work I could sort that out, but it was a frustration. What’s more, Ubuntu didn’t even recognise my Wireless-n USB stick, but since I have cabled networking I haven’t bothered to find out whether such a driver exists.

The second, and more critical, problem is program support. Despite my best efforts, some applications need to be run from the desktop. I was able to find a PHP editor pretty quickly – the excellent Komodo Edit which I now also use in Windows. It’s equally capable of editing CSS and HTML, so web development isn’t a problem. I also managed to get Twitter client Tweetdeck installed. Theoretically this should be easy enough as it’s based on Flash technology and uses the Adobe Air runtime, but it seems that the correct thing to do is NOT to select “Install” on the Tweetdeck.com site. You must install Air itself first and once that is done, Tweetdeck can be setup without problems and works identically to its Windows twin. I even managed to get Spotify working by using the Wine Windows emulator (hint: if you try this, follow the instructions on the Spotify site but be prepared to keep selecting different sound options until one of them works).

In fact, it was all going swimmingly until I needed to edit a graphic. There are a few programs for which I reserve unmitigated hatred. The entire Sage range, for example. This week, I’ve added The GIMP to that list. I’m afraid any program that has internet-published workarounds for the fact that you can’t embolden text or the lack of basic shape tools loses my interest pretty quickly. Xara has donated a Linux version of its Xara Xtreme graphics package to the community, but that is focused on vectors and for most web development, a bitmap editor is needed. Despite my lengthy searches, I’ve found nothing that approaches the level of Fireworks or even PaintShop Pro. In the end, then, I still need to pop back to Windows when I’m going to be doing anything more complex than resizing or cropping an image.

Furthermore, I couldn’t manage in the long term without access to Adobe software such as Flash, Fireworks and Flash Builder (aka Flex). Whilst there is an older version of Flex available for Linux and the SDK is open source, it would be extremely inefficient to use anything other than the Adobe software for developing Flash based applications.

In a sense, Ubuntu fell at the final hurdle. It can’t quite replace Windows for me yet because of this specific issue. However, the fact is that more than 90% of my time could be spent in Ubuntu and, from a business point of view this can be turned into cash.

Ubuntu is much more tolerant of slow hardware than Windows and it should lengthen the useful life of my various desktops and laptops. I’ve installed it on my Samsung NC10 netbook and it works perfectly- certainly quicker in use than Windows 7. It’s also been installed on a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop I bought on eBay for £70, turning  an intolerably slow block of plastic into a usable laptop for my daughter who will mainly be using it for logging onto Facebook (social networking is built-into Ubuntu).

When I need to buy a new desktop I can either build it from scratch or buy an ultra-cheap OS-free PC – they’re not widespread but Ebuyer.com do a small range. Although my companies are now “virtual” and I no longer lease offices, where I to do so in future I could now buy a single Windows-based PC to be used when necessary, whilst equipping everyone with second-hand laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, simultaneously saving a fortune and recycling unwanted equipment.

As a skinflint, I wouldn’t have spent a fortune on PCs for “the staff” in any case, but I think I could save around £300 per staff member this way purely in terms of hardware. By having a single workstation-style Windows PC with the Adobe suite on it, I could save a huge amount in licensing fees and the whole setup would be much more efficient.

After this week, I have a genuine warmth for Ubuntu. Clicking Applications |Software Centre is a completely new way of acquiring software and I like it a lot. Oh, and did I mention it’s fast? Installation is now within reach of anyone, without risking their existing setup and the interface itself can be picked up in seconds – it’s certainly closer to Windows in feel than Mac OS X.

It’s been said many times of many flavours of Linux, but Ubuntu 10.04 really might be the breakthrough. Not with the general public: people still have a reluctance to use anything other than Windows. But the commercial case for business owners to switch is now, in many situations, compelling. The more work your company does in a web browser, the more tempting Ubuntu is. Now if only I could find a way to run Windows in a virtual environment on my Ubuntu desktop.VirtualBox, do I hear anyone shout? I’ll try it and report back…

In the UK, BBC’s iPlayer has pushed the concept into the public consciousness, serving up all the TV-licence-funded goodness that any PC, Mac or Linux user could possibly ask for. Arguably one of the driving forces for the on-demand revolution, iPlayer has blossomed from a compelling concept into an intrinsic part of many people’s viewing habits. Freeing broadcasts from the confines of the living room, and allowing TV to sprawl freely wherever the internet is accessible; the on-demand revolution is set to change the face of televisual broadcasting forever.

Such bombast does, of course, conveniently sidestep the current issues. BBC’s iPlayer eschews the need for advertising as it’s funded entirely by the payments of UK TV licence holders. Other services aren’t so fortunate. SeeSaw is another service which is just starting to gather momentum, with shows plucked from ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Most of the existing content is free, but with the imminent arrival of popular US shows, SeeSaw is going to have to grapple with the thorny issue of pay per view charges. And not wanting to miss a piece of the action, Microsoft, with its recently announced MSN Video Player, has also decided to join the on-demand fray.

Even in their infancy, both sites boast an impressive roster of full-fat programming. Look past all the lightweight fluff, and MSN Video shares a fair amount of content with its rival in the on-demand playground, Seesaw. Spanning everything from car-crash classics such as Wife Swap to the really-couldn’t-be-any-more-annoying antics of Trinny and Susannah on What Not to Wear, through to a rich seam of UK comedy, there’s enough to whet any appetite. With entire series of The League of Gentlemen, Brass Eye, Marion and Geoff and Nathan Barley, just to mention a few, there’s enough to satisfy viewers until the desperate, nagging need for new content sets in.

Like any fledgling ventures, though, both services have their weaknesses. Head on over to the MSN Video Player website and the first thing you’ll notice  – beyond the bland, innocuous page design – is the vast amount of filler content. Movie trailers, music videos, brief news reports and interviews with vacuous Hollywood stars jostle for position, threatening to completely obscure the juicy viewing morsels elsewhere. It’s a far cry from SeeSaw’s efforts, where slick design and a simple, attractive layout combine with a notable absence of visual fluff and filler.

The price of all this free content is pretty miniscule, though, with both services keeping the bank balance steady with short 30-second advertising spots played before each full-length program. It’s like Spotify does video, obviously with vastly less content, but the burning question is: how will these services evolve? The cost of new content has to come from somewhere, and the question is whether viewers will soon find themselves bombarded by multiple adverts between each and every showing.

SeeSaw’s to be congratulated for boldly venturing into the realms of pay-per-view, but, if it was hoping to snare viewers with the lure of inexpensive gogglebox action, then they’re well wide of the mark. Grey’s Anatomy and Brothers and Sisters were both available at the time of writing for the princely sum of 99p per episode and £17.99 for an entire series. If that sounds reasonable, then buckle up, you’re in for a shock. That’s the cost to rent the episodes. Buy a single episode, and your 99p buys you the ability to watch it within 30 days. Buy a series, and you get 90 days. Once you start watching any episode, you have 48 hours to finish watching it before the rental expires. I think I’ll just go to Blockbuster, thanks.

Microsoft, however, has bigger plans. Internet broadcasting has allowed TV to break free from the lounge, but, as Microsoft is acutely aware, it’s the success of on-demand TV services such as MSN Video which could  eventually push subscribers away from the multi-channel, monthly subscription of Sky TV.

Just today, it announced that the MSN Video Player is seamlessly integrated into its Windows Media Center software. Fire up the TV guide, and MSN Video takes pride of place alongside Sky Player and the selection of traditional TV channels. It’s early days yet, but I’ve spent the past couple of weeks taking full advantage of all that free content, and you can colour me impressed.

Let’s face it, even if you’re a fully paid-up Sky subscriber with more channels than you know what to do with, there are still some evenings when you’d rather spoon out your own eyeballs than watch what’s on offer. Where you would have previously resigned yourself to watching some nondescript televisual dross to pass the time, brain cells dwindling by the nanosecond, classic series’ such as Ripping Yarns and vintage Doctor Who are now just a couple of mouse clicks, or prods of a Media Center remote away. It’s not revolutionary – there’s just not enough content available yet to be able to say that – but it’s a step forward, that’s for sure.

Very smoothly it went too. All the installed software was transferred flawlessly, all the files were migrated to the relevant destination, and the whole process took a little under two hours. Yes, the performance of the Windows 7 PC is probably a little slower than it would be with a clean install, but he’s 60 for Pete’s sake: it takes him 20 minutes to get up the stairs now, another 10 seconds on the boot time isn’t going to kill him.

We hit only one snag: the wireless dongle attached to his HP printer wasn’t being recognised by Windows 7. No problem, I thought. We’ll simply head off to HP’s website and download the relevant drivers.

First off, we had to download the drivers for the printer itself: all 289 sodding megabytes of them. How on Earth can a printer driver take up more than a quarter of a gig? Are they giving away a complete transcript of the internet with them or something? Anyway, the family pack of software downloaded smoothly and the printer was up and running.

Now for the wireless dongle.  A quick Google search took me to the page allegedly containing the Windows 7 drivers for the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit. I urge you to take a look yourself, because what I found there left me flabbergasted.

Instead of pulling its finger out and writing a proper driver for its wireless dongle, HP has decided to use the Windows Vista one instead. Except, of course, the Windows Vista driver doesn’t work. And so HP walks its customers through a ridiculous procedure where they have to wait for the installation to crash, kill the process using Task Manager, and then rely on Windows 7’s Compatibility Assistant to reinstall the driver using the recommended settings.

I simply cannot believe that a company the size of HP would rather customers got their hands dirty with manually killing processes rather than write a nice friendly driver for a piece of kit that is meant to make printing easier, not harder.

Have you seen any worse “Windows 7 drivers”? Let me know on comments below.

that’s because ‘an in a cramped airplane._ seat and the ride is d little bumpy. that, and everyone who can see what lam dough watching me avidly’ The XT2 uses windows7 pen extensions and as a long ten fan of the concept of pen computing I touchscreens and the business of handwriting instead of keyboarding.

the windows7 pen or touch keyboard relies heavily on dictionary prediction to figure out peoples scribbles and this brings some odd problems with it-such as entering passwords: whether it guesses right or not the handwriting paid will briefly display your password not just in plain text but clearly legible plain text at that

And now I’m sitting somewhere that isn’t moving at 450mph, I can finish this on the keyboard. The first thing that springs to mind is how the Dell Latitude XT2 compares with my ancient Fujitsu tablet PC: I was interested to see just how well a new device, powered by Windows 7, would cope in what is effectively a torture test. I admit it’s entirely unfair to expect any machine to recognise text perfectly in that situation, so all told I’d say it did pretty well.

Another obvious difference is that far less “training time” is needed to get good results: this may be because the touchscreen is much higher resolution and seems well adapted to the level of pressure and speed of movement I have developed as a 20-year fountain pen user. Also unlike my old Fujitsu, the Dell will use either the smart pen or your grubby digit: the finger works only on contact, the pen works a couple of centimetre off the surface.

The XT2 also makes a nicer regular laptop than my trusty Fujitsu 5020. This is mainly because the screen technology doesn’t add as much blur to the display as it did on the Fujitsu.

Windows 7 makes a number of subtle but smart differences to the experience, too. I find it much more natural to tap the bigger Windows 7 icons on the touchscreen than I did the various menus and controls in Windows XP, and that’s faster than noodling about with either the trackpad or the keyboard nipple.

Sadly, Dell can’t resist layering its bloatware “location manager” over the top of Windows 7’s wireless/wired network connection management; having used the default Windows 7 stack on a ThinkPad T60, I don’t really see the added benefit of most of these manufacturer-specific add-ons.

I like tablet PCs as a concept, because I like to handwrite and I need a compact device when I’m wriggling into tight corners behind server racks. I have seen one very serious application in an orthodontic surgery which relies on tablet PCs as a core part of what it does, and I have no doubt this will be a growing field.

But if I send in any more blogs spelled and punctuated like the first couple of paragraphs here, PC Pro’s online editor will stop talking to me altogether.

First of all, I should make it clear that these machines don’t have an easy life. My laptop travels with me wherever I go, and they have a fair bit of punishment on a daily basis: slung into a laptop bag and down a hill on a bike; into London on the train; and then a 25-minute walk bumping up and down before I get into the office. And then all the way back at the end of the working day.

Nevertheless, for the past six years two ThinkPads have survived without incident for three years apiece. Until I installed Windows 7 RC on the latest one, and the hard disk died. It’s currently sitting in my desk-side drawer whilst I consider what to do with it.

The Dennis IT department sprang to the rescue, offering me a spare workaday laptop from their collection. The first one lasted for less than a month before its hard disk whimpered its way into obsolescence.

Once more, our trusty IT team gazed into their cupboard and fished out a replacement – the exact same model. This one kept going for less than a week.

I initially blamed the two successive failures on the ageing 1.8in hard disks they used, but my confidence has been shaken again today. On Friday, I set up a new system: a desktop PC at work, a netbook to take on my travels. Both of them running Windows 7 and synchronising vital data via the cloud.

The desktop is still working fine, but the netbook wouldn’t boot for my journey into work, with Windows 7’s startup repair system eventually declaring it irreparable. Then, bizarrely, when I plugged it in at work the netbook started to work again (and it still is).

So, the question: am I alone in this? Or is my growing paranoia about Windows 7 and hard disks entirely unfair, and more due to my maltreatment of laptops than my choice of OS? Perhaps, as Steve Cassidy keeps on telling me, it’s time to drop the mechanical hard disk entirely and move to SSDs.

I’m now at the end of my Windows 7 experiment and I have to return the PC users’ suit and tie to the PC Pro cupboard and put on my blue jeans, black turtle neck jumper and New Balance trainers.

It’s been a steep learning curve for me, but not in the ways I thought it would be. I had Windows up and running with all the applications I needed to do my job much more quickly than I thought. I’d arranged my desktop, partitioned the hard drive and worked out the basics in less than a day, and that includes installing the software.

I’ll admit that I made errors; some based on ignorance and others assumption. However, I can tell you with good conscience that everything I’ve talked about during this experiment has been my true experience. I’ve not said anything simply to stir the Mac vs. PC hornets’ nest or to get a rise.

What’s interesting is that despite the fact that the Mac market poses no threat or real competition to the PC world, there’s so much animosity between the two camps of users. Can you imagine Tesco customers arguing the toss over bread and cheese with Spar fans?

I’ve always been aware of the potential for Mac users and PC users to become heated in defence of their OS (I used to work for MacUser, which sits in the same office as PC Pro), but I’m surprised that even after all these years the arguments are the same. The row hasn’t changed even though Microsoft and Apple are largely transformed.

As I said at the start of this experiment, I’ve used Window XP, but that’s on an office machine and an IT manager maintains it so I’ve never really had a chance to play around with the system. This truly is the first time I’ve had the chance to snoop around and install questionable freeware and other such stuff on a Windows box. Nothing has really made me long for my Mac in that time. There have been a few differences, but none insurmountable and none that required me to go back to my Mac to get the job done.

I’m not sold on the “my PC is £800 cheaper than the equivalent Mac” argument because the price differential just isn’t that high. Not to mention the really, really dirty secret that no-one dare mention: price isn’t a factor for many people. Well, enough people to keep Apple in business, at least.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll be switching my main Mac Pro for Windows 7, but my next laptop might be a Windows machine and that’s quite an achievement. I’ve set out to use Windows 7 in exactly the same way I would a Mac and I’ve found exactly zero problems. I still prefer my Mac, but whereas I find Windows XP a chore Windows 7 draws no such response.

If I were an XP user I’d upgrade to Windows 7 without hesitation. As a Mac user I’m a touch more hesitant, but that’s quite a shift in my opinion.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Brennan’s blog on converting from Mac to Windows 7

CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST NEWS OF THE WINDOWS 7 CHKDSK BUG’S LINK TO ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE

Well, it appears the problem isn’t going away. A recent flurry of comments on the August blog reveals that the chkdsk flaw isn’t restricted to the beta software we were running at the time. The problem appears to be afflicting users of the final Windows 7 code, and in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. A number of people leaving comments on both our blog and the various web forums discussing the issue pointed the finger at Avira’s free antivirus software (which both Stuart Turton and I were running), but there’s a groundswell of non-Avira users reporting the issue too, so that appears to be a case of mistaken identity.

I no longer have the problem – but only because a cataclysmic hard disk failure forced me to swap out my laptop’s drive (which I hope and suspect was entirely unrelated). That’s put the fear of God into poor Stuart, who’s now become a PC hypochondriac, convinced his hard disk is about to keel over any second.

Microsoft, meanwhile, appears to have found a head-sized hole in the sand. Despite the countless reports of the issue on internet forums, the software giant has yet to acknowledge the bug on its official Support site. PC Pro readers who’ve contacted Microsoft directly claim they’ve been told to simply disable chkdsk, which rather reminds me of the Tommy Cooper gag where he complains to the doctor that “it hurts when I do this” and the doctor replies: “don’t do that, then”.

We’ve asked Microsoft’s press wallahs to find out whether the chkdsk bug is a known issue that’s likely to be addressed soon. We’ll let you know the outcome. But if anyone’s got any theories on what’s causing this ridiculous bug, feel free to elaborate on the comments below.