Warning: this post contains some profanity (sorry Mum).
I’ll admit it, I initially thought Windows 7 was OK. In fact, fairly decent. However, the m0re I’ve used it, the more it has disappointed me. Windows it seems, regardless of the version number, will always be Windows…
At first it was all zippy menus and I enjoyed the (admittedly aped from OSX) interface. However a couple of months on, despite installing little in the way of additional software it now runs like a sack of loose shit. Applications launch at a glacial pace - it seems as ever, the only way to keep Windows running truly lean is to re-install every few months: a situation I find preposterous.
I’ll explain the end of my brief ‘like affair’ (’love’ would be way too strong a word) with Windows 7. The part where any modicum of respect for the new OS vanished.
I’d filmed a gig for someone and wanted to knock them together a quick and dirty DVD of the show. I used Windows Live Movie Maker to trim the footage. Here the problems started. Firstly Windows Live Movie Maker won’t let you add a cross dissolve to the end of the footage - only the beginning. Having overcome that odd little hurdle I’d trimmed my imports and opted to ‘export to DVD’. Now things really started going tits up.
To export from Windows Live Movie Maker to DVD Maker it encodes the footage to WMV format. Feck knows why as it will only have to encode again to MPEG-2 to make the DVD (all DVD’s are MPEG-2 based) - hardly economical! What’s more, it took about 12 hours to convert the four files! 12 bloody hours to encode about 100 mins worth of footage - dog-shit! What’s more, you can’t select a few files at once, you have to do them one at a time and ‘baby sit’ the stupid bloody Windows box…
So, long (not to mention tedious and soul sapping) story short the videos arrive into DVD Movie Maker. I choose my menus, label the buttons and tell it to make the video. So, off it sets to encode the WMV files into MPEG-2. Hours (and hours) pass and eventually it fails with some random unintelligible message about the Disc. The message gives a link to ‘more information on this problem’ which leads nowhere (wow - thanks Microsoft) so I click ‘OK’. Thinking it must be a duff disc I opt to retry the burn and here’s the kicker - it has to re-encode the sodding disc all over again, even though that part had been done before it started (attempting) to write to the disc !
What an ill conceived piece of shit! What cruel minded bastard programmed it to work this way? Sadists…
Suffice to say, 20 minutes later the footage is on my Mac and being burned to a DVD. It will work. I know it will because it had nothing to do with Windows.
I like to be able to do things with my computer and have some time left in my life for other things. Because of that, I’d like to make one point plain and clear: there’s no way in hell that Windows 7 was my idea…
