Honeymonster's Lair

Windows 7 was released as a public download on Monday. I downloaded yesterday, and am now testing on my tower system. A clean installation was a breeze and had finished within 30 to 45 minutes. This is much faster than a standard clean install of Vista.

The user interface of Win7 hasn’t had much tweaking since Vista, with the main new feature being the updated taskbar. I can’t decide whether this lack of UI change is indicative of how the final product will look, or whether Microsoft are keeping the new design under their hats for a big flourish at launch time.

Rumours have surfaced about the launch date for the final product. These have indicated an “October” launch, with the writers of various articles about the leak stating that this is October 2010. However, the RC expires in June 2010, and previous history has shown that the final pre-release of Microsoft’s products have had expiry dates up to 6 months beyond the projected/final launch dates. One such example of this is my copy of Windows 98 Beta expiring somewhat after the final release had come and gone. (I forget the actual figure, but I do remember getting around the expiration by resetting my system clock before booting: I was a real rebel back then! :-p)

I’m now also trying an upgrade install using my laptop to see whether there are any major problems on that front. I really should try both a clean install and upgrade install on the two architectures (x86 and x86_64) rather than just a clean on x86_64 and just an upgrade on x86.

The upgrade process on my laptop identified only two issues prior to beginning. Those being the presence on the ATI drivers along with McAfee Internet Security. Neither of these two products are compatible with Win7 at the versions I had installed.

I’ve not decided upon which Internet Security suite I want to settle with, as I have had issues with Norton complaining once I’d installed more times than they allow (even though the installs were all on the same machine) and technical difficulty when downloading McAfee approximately one year ago.

On a technical note, however, I have found Norton to either not prompt enough, or in the right circumstances, or prompt too much. McAfee was the first ever anti-viral product I had ever used, way back in the days of DOS; ever since I’ve always found the product to work well, with my only bad experience being with the third party that McAfee had used for the download store. I guess I can’t really blame McAfee for this third party’s shortcomings.

All links removed as per request from the File Extension IFO site owner. The blog entry will remain here minus the links.

OK, so some of you might be wondering why I’m posting yet another File Extension related site (this one being File Extension IFO ). Well, truth be told, while the sites aren’t my own, and I have no vested interest in seeing you go there, I do gain a small sum for every review I do. So there we have it, the cat is out of the bag; which wasn’t very well sealed as the company I do these reviews for is linked-to prominantly in the footer of my site. So, anyway, to the point of this article, the review of the File Extension IFO site.

The File Extension IFO site has a large proportion of the body dedicated to the advertisement of the Driver Detective software which purports to download and upgrade any drivers which you either don’t have or are outdated. I have downloaded this software and scanned it with norton and adaware, and both come up clean. Running the software does indeed list all my hardware correctly and prompts me to upgrade any outdated ones. However, this upgrading is a paid-for feature of the software, and I didn’t want to pay, so I can’t tell you how reliable it is.

Despite advertising Driver Detective, File Extension IFO does have some relevant information about the file extension that it is named after (i.e. ‘.ifo’ files). That, however, is all you’re going to get from this site. While the information is accurate, it doesn’t link to any vendor websites where you can download software that actually reads the file. The File Extension IFO site is purely an advertisement for Driver Detective, and you shouldn’t expect much more from it. The Driver Detective software is listed as able to fix registry problems, which I saw no evidence of, so that you can read the file type that the site is named after. This is absolute rubbish, as if you don’t have software capable of reading the file, no amount of messing with the registry or downloading hardware drivers is going to help!

The WPS file-extension is the supposed reason for the File Extension WPS website existing. However, this is just a blatant advert for the same Driver Detective software listed on sites I’ve also listed in previous posts. File Extension WPS does include quite alot of detail about the WPS file extension, however, and despite the advert, you can still gain some information about this Microsoft Works filetype.

File Extension WPS also lists information about macro viruses and their impact on the Works Suite. They list the obvious, but all too commonly missed step (especially among less experienced users, who are the kind of user that would be using the Works Suite) of scanning any file you get from an external source (such as your brother or the internet or a magazine) before you open or otherwise run the file.

The File Extension List website appears to be very similar to the page about the M4p file extension that I reviewed in a previous post. The main aim of this site is to advertise the Driver Detective software, which does a good job of determining which drivers are outdated on your windows system.

While File Extension List is very similar in this aspect of advertising the Driver Detective, there is also a nice list of common file extension types and the software required to open them. However, File Extension List does not link to any of these softwares, presumably because it would take traffic away from their one-page site rather than directing the reader towards the download. What’s interesting is that the site doesn’t just list File Extensions for windows-based programs, but also includes a few OS X extensions along with a couple Linux and UNIX types.

If you don’t mind the blatant advertising of Driver Detective, File Extension List does include quite a few different file-types at the very bottom of the page, which are (minimally) categorised to help in reading.