Windows 7 Nightmare

[Philippe Cordier]

I know this has nothing to do with DS - but, well, we do need a computer to access DS Boards, don't we ... so maybe it will be relevant to some people.

The hard drive on my 5-year old Dell laptop went a few days ago, taking all of my data with it, although I do have a backup from about a month ago.

I bought a new laptop (ThinkPad) at Best Buy, and all their computers have "Windows 7 Professional." I haven't kept up with operating systems, Vista this, Vista that, but this sounded like a good thing. Now the problems I'm having are about to drive me mad.

Here are the main problems I'm experiencing.

- Uncontrollable zooming in Word and IE. (Moving the cursor with the touchpad causes this.)

- Moving the cursor up to the toolbar in Word causes the pages to flip up or down so I can't keep my place in the document. The Word document page jumps around vertically, top to bottom when moving cursor on page.

- Pasting with cut & paste won't go where cursor is positioned.

I won't even get into the horrid "libraries" that have replaced Explorer. As far as I can tell, you can't organize folders the way you want to. Instead you have to have memorized what's in each file and then "search" for it.

I don't know if the problems is that I just don't know how to use it after having used Windows XP for the last five years, or if the product is defective. Does anyone else have Windows 7 Professional with MS Office 2007?

Thanks.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Wow. I've heard some complaints about Win7 (it IS Windows, after all - and what Windows is perfect - or possibly ever will be?) but nothing like you've described. In fact, though many reviews have been lukewarm, they've all said it's an improvement over XP and certainly over Vista.

I hope you can get to the bottom of all that weirdness...

[Philippe Cordier]

Thanks, MB. It turns out that the problem was the computer, not Windows. I called IBM/Lenovo and it sounded as though this problem is typical because that particular machine is so complex with the way Windows interacts with it. Although the solution might have been simply to erase the operating system and re-install it, I was tired of dealing with the problem and didn't think it should be a problem right out of the box. The clincher was that the battery also wasn't holding a full charge. Too many things wrong right from the start, so I returned it and got an HP Pavilion laptop instead. I like this one pretty well, but Windows 7 is very different from XP and I don't always enjoy having to retrain to do something. Also the keyboard is very "slickery". My fingers slip on the keys ... my old Dell had a matte finish which I preferred. This is my second day of using it, although Day 1 was spent mostly installing things, copying the OS to disk (easy, step-by-step wizard-type thing guided me through that nicely, which I'm sure the Lenovo didn't have). The salesman I talked with practically sold me on Apple, but they're twice as expensive.

[Philippe Cordier]

Forgot to say that I also tested a DVD, which worked out well - DS, of course! 

My only complaint is that the DVD drive will only allow you to change the region 5 times before it locks in on the last used region. That's the same as my Dell and the Lenovo. Can't some of these computer companies buck the system?    Wonder if Apple has ...