Windows 7 (64-Bit)

[Martha]

I am purchashing a new computer and would like to get Windows 7 64-bit operating system. Will Flare work on the 64-bit system? Thanks, Martha.

[ChrisBradley]

Works fine for me in Windows 7 64Bit Ultimate Edition.

[Andrew]

Yep. I have 64-bit Windows 7, and it works just fine.

[Martha]

Thanks for the replies.

[RamonS]

I strictly recommend against Windows 7. It is the second worst Windows version ever (the worst one is Vista). Unfortunately, using proprietary, .NET based software like Flare doesn't give you any choice. So you have to deal with an utterly dysfunctional OS that gets an F- for usability.
Definitely go with 64 bit, although in regards to Flare it won't get you any advantage, neither does multi-core. Some functions of the OS are optimized, so it isn't totally useless, but software development is lightyears behind what the hardware offers. One reason is that the users are not multi-threaded either. We humans can only do one thing at a time.
MadCap, when do you optimize Flare to run on Mono? The tools are there!

[ChrisBradley]

I strictly recommend against Windows 7. It is the second worst Windows version ever (the worst one is Vista). Unfortunately, using proprietary, .NET based software like Flare doesn't give you any choice. So you have to deal with an utterly dysfunctional OS that gets an F- for usability.
Definitely go with 64 bit, although in regards to Flare it won't get you any advantage, neither does multi-core. Some functions of the OS are optimized, so it isn't totally useless, but software development is lightyears behind what the hardware offers. One reason is that the users are not multi-threaded either. We humans can only do one thing at a time.
MadCap, when do you optimize Flare to run on Mono? The tools are there!

I couldn't disagree with you more. Windows 7, both 32bit and 64bit edition, is the best operating system Microsoft has ever made. It is stable, secure, very fast, and significantly improves the performance of older computers. We are in the process of upgrading our entire documentation department to Windows 7, and we haven't had a single writer make any of the complaints you make, even when they have had zero experience with Windows 7 and Vista in the past. Due to my TechNet subscription, I've been using Windows 7 since long before the public beta. I can count on one hand the number of tiny issues that I've experienced with it, all of which were fixed by the time the release candidate was made available.

Perhaps you could give specific problems you're having with Windows 7 to help the OP decide if they would be affected by those issues as well?

[RamonS]

The core problem is that no matter which arguments I can give you cannot buy anything else other than Windows 7 as desktop OS from Microsoft. In that sense, the exercise here is quite pointless, but I list my complains anyway.

Stability:
I have several Windows 7 systems running as VMs and on bare metal and many of them are very unstable. About half boots straight into a BSOD and starts up only on second try. A good portion of those are Dell systems right out of the box. The ones with our own image run a bit better, but none have the stability that for example XP 64bit has (no wonder, it is Server 2003 with a desktop UI).
I consider stability when even a crash of a driver or app does not hose the entire system. The OS needs to recover from such failures gracefully, log the problem using plain language, and then go on with its job. W7 does nothing like that. Other OS are much more robust in that regards.

Hardware support:
Any hardware that is older than three years is likely not to run on W7. For no real reason Microsoft decided again to change the driver architecture. Hardware vendors often don't see the point in writing new drivers for last generation products. I think that issue is more annoying and expensive for home users because businesses tend to swap entire boxes rather than do what I'd call an upgrade.

Software support:
Microsoft's goal was to be backwards compatible as much as possible. This was especially interesting for businesses as they can invest in long-term software solutions. W7 no longer cares much about backward compatibility. That Microsoft packages a free license for XP in the more expensive W7 versions says it all. Apparently, they have to throw XP in the box with W7 just so that people buy it. I understand that eternal backwards compatibility is counterproductive, but many very good programs do not work under W7. That adds especially for home users another expense to an already overpriced OS (and yes, W7 is insanely expensive in my opinion).

Performance:
The performance boost is clearly because Windows 7 requires much better hardware to run. Again, using a few Dell systems I found that performance especially for desktop database applications (SQL Express) is better under XP than under W7. Overall, W7 is on par in performance with XP. My complaint here is that on the same hardware Microsoft cannot produce any better results with an OS for which they spent ten years of development time. That is embarrassing and a customer rip-off.
Booting takes still very long, the changing display of graphical artwork only gives the illusion that things go faster. My timings showed that my test systems boot only marginally faster than XP using the same hardware (any other comparison is invalid IMHO).
I often encounter that W7 is out for lunch for no apparent reason. There is no drive or CPU activity, but the system appears to be frozen. It recovers after 5 to 10 seconds, but there is no indication if and if yes what failed or hung.
I am absolutely disappointed by the performance of W7. After shelling out a lot of money for a new OS it really should do better, especially after such a long development time (and I count the one for Vista as well because Vista really was the beta release for W7). Any reasonably performance gains come from better hardware and better drivers from vendors. W7 doesn't do much here.
I even find that I get better performance out of Windows 2000, especially when it is about accessing network shares. Networking under W7 is just painfully slow. It is bad under XP already, but it got even worse. Setting up networking got easier, but I rather have a difficult setup once than lackluster performance always.

Security:
UAC adds just prompts, but does not add any security. Given the amount of prompts even in the default setup the user gets trained to click OK or Yes in every prompt. Might as well turn off UAC, which is what many do.
A plus is the disabled Administrator account by default (something other OS do for a long time). The problem here is that many applications make calls that now require admin rights. I take issue here because these apps followed Microsoft programming guidelines. Microsoft screws every SW developer with these half-baked changes. I work in SW development (QA) and we spent a lot of time just to make our apps work on W7 wasting time and money we could have used to serve our customers rather than circumvent the quirks in W7. Here are some in detail:
- virtualized directories: while I understand the reasoning the implementation is horrible. You can write a file from within an app to the Windows folder and W7 claims that it all worked fine. When you then look in the Windows folder using Explorer the file is not there.
- sandboxing apps and user accounts: this cannot be done (properly) in W7...unless you run XP mode, which at least sandboxes XP, but doesn't do anything to protect files on the host system. From what I read a feature to do proper sandboxing was planned for W7, but got pulled.
In the end you still need firewalls, content filters, passive protections, virus scanners and everything else you bought for XP. W7 has some security improvements, but the underlying design is not based on security concepts. And no, turning features off is not the same as making them secure.

Usability:
- ribbon interfaces: with the ribbon interfaces introduced in MSO I find myself doing more mouse clicks than before. Not only that, with the menu structure the menu bar never changed. With the ribbon the content changes based on context, which I find utterly confusing and reducing productivity.
- task bar: I didn't see a need for changes here, but OK. The problems arise when you deal with applications that happen to use the same application icon (and I do frequently). You get the same app icon in the task bar and every time it is a big guessing game which one is which. The old task bar included the app name in the task bar button and that was not an issue. Now users are at the mercy of developer and marketing departments to provide intuitive and intelligible app icons. How can that be an improvement?
- renaming rampage: half of the items in the OS again were renamed, placed somewhere else, and repackaged in new categories. We are used to that from previous Windows versions, but as before there is no rhyme or reason to any of that. That means the user has to constantly search for things, especially when it is about settings that aren't changed on a regular basis
- File explorer tree view: well, there is no tree anymore. The folder all float in mid air and once you get deeper into the file system any orientation is lost. I looked for an option to get a real tree view again, but there is none.
- introduction of the 'User' folder space: while better than the Documents and Settings garbage it doesn't really change much, other than adding more complexity and problems. Some applications don't do well with the linked folders that mimic the old paths. While I find this annoying as heck it the cases where this causes problems are manageable. Nevertheless, why change in the first place? The Documents and Settings structure would not be a problem at all if Microsoft finally removes the DOS restrictions from Windows where paths/file names are not allowed to be longer than 256 characters (which also includes command line switches).
- Multiboot is still ignorant to other non-Microsoft OS
- Even the administrator gets locked out from many folders. I agree that for regular use restrictions are life savers, but as admin I want to have the big knob to the system and have the full and unrestricted right to hose the entire box. Especially for VMs this is an issue as it is now even more difficult to clean out all the gunk that W7 produces (backups of updated files, log files, etc.). Tools like EF Commander or the DOS box help, but only so much. It annoys me that Microsoft considers all of their customers to be gosh darn stupid.
- lack of customization: sure, there are plenty of choices for all kinds of pretty things, but getting back to a bare bones, functions oriented UI like we had in Windows 2000 is not possible.
- drastic changes in IIS: the solution is to use Apache, has much better performance anyway.
- tools for the IT admins: the IT admins I talked to (which, I know, are not all there are) loathe the new tools, especially on the Server 2008 R2
- no chance for non-Microsoft technologies: anything not from Microsoft does not exist for W7. You can force feed it in, but do we always have to resort to tricks to get things working the way we want with the tools and platforms that we like to use? Especially annoying is the total ignorance of any non-MS file systems. The only chance to talk to anything that is not FAT/NTFS is to run it on a different box and make it to be an NFS share.
- why do we still have to reboot so many times just to get a bunch of files updated? Unload the old ones and reload the new ones, no need to take down the entire system. And that is an exercise we have to do on a monthly basis. In that sense stability for W7 is good enough as long as it makes it until next Patch Tuesday.

Although not as fat as Vista (how could that be even possible) W7 is still way too fat. There is too much stuff in there that is either useless (the eye candy) or of such dismal quality that one has to download alternatives, which usually are free and much better. Other OS vendors stick a top notch OS, a full set of application suites, and a bunch of servers into half of the space. Out of the box W7 doesn't do schnix. I also don't like the huge icons on the desktop. That makes W7 look like some Fisher Price toy. I haven't looked into changing that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that isn't possible either.

The only thing I really like is the new shutdown/logoff menu command. And yes, the thing that many mention, W7 is not as bad as Vista, but that isn't difficult.

My point of view is that of a power user working in software QA. Does W7 work for casual office work, email, and browsing the web (means after downloading a browser that works)? Yes, but if that is all we want to go by then getting an old PC from the scrap heap and running Ubuntu (or whatever else the distro of the day is) is the much better and by far less expensive choice. And as I mentioned before, for the features that W7 offers I find it to be hopelessly overpriced. I bought my XP 64bit version for 50$ a few years ago and I find that is a fair price for a Windows OS.

Lastly, as I mentioned at the beginning, I like these discussions, but they are fruitless. If you buy Microsoft you buy Windows 7. There is nothing else unless you go back to XP, but that is about to get killed by Microsoft for no real reason. XP offers the same level of functionality as W7 does. XP works and if it is up to businesses, XP would stay around for a long time if it wasn't for Microsoft's my way or the highway attitude.

So what does one get that is so awesome that it is worth spending the money and effort to switching to W7. What is the ROI? I just don't see it.

[ChrisBradley]

Ramone,
I certainly won’t argue with you. You obviously have good reasons for disliking Windows 7 . I will however offer my own experience where it differs from yours.

Hardware support:
Any hardware that is older than three years is likely not to run on W7.

During our testing we pulled together PC’s from spare parts that were greater than 3 years old. Windows 7 ran fine on all of them. If it is a Pentium 4 system with 1 gig of ram it will run fine. We use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe FrameMaker, Madcap Flare, and Microsoft Office. Less than 1gig of Ram doesn’t cut it when those apps are all open at once. The original poster mentioned this was for a new PC purchase. Any new PC will run Win 7 great, and most have 4 gig of Ram standard. Still, I personally have upgraded dozens of machines to Win 7, and all of them run Win 7 great.

W7 no longer cares much about backward compatibility.

Backwards compatibility is a major concern for win7, except where older apps violate the new security policies. I don’t think it is possible to create new user levels like admin accounts, UAC, and restricted areas, while preserving every single application ever made. In our testing, we only found one folder Adobe Distiller 9.0 uses for custom PDF settings that required the administrator account access. Once we gave the folder the right access everything was working fine.

You did mention “many very good programs do not work under W7.” Could you name the applications that didn’t work for you? If you feel the list is too big, could you specifically name applications you think people in the writing field would be using? Here is a list of applications we use, and they all work fine under Windows 7:

Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and the following 3rd party Frame Plugins:
- IXgen
- FrameScript
- TimeSavers
Adobe Acrobat Professional Version 8 & 9.
Madcap Flare V 4, 5, & 6 (previous versions were not tested).
Madcap Analyzer V2
MadCap Capture V3
PaintShop Pro 7, 8
Photoshop CS3
All versions of SnagIt

The performance boost is clearly because Windows 7 requires much better hardware to run.

I completely disagree. We have experienced much better performance from the same machines now running under Windows 7. We see much better restart times for the laptops which are now using Windows 7 Bitlocker for encryption. Restarts take less than half the time.

I often encounter that W7 is out for lunch for no apparent reason. There is no drive or CPU activity, but the system appears to be frozen. It recovers after 5 to 10 seconds, but there is no indication if and if yes what failed or hung.

Have you looked at the Event Viewer Logs? I haven’t encountered anything like you describe.

why do we still have to reboot so many times just to get a bunch of files updated? Unload the old ones and reload the new ones, no need to take down the entire system. And that is an exercise we have to do on a monthly basis. In that sense stability for W7 is good enough as long as it makes it until next Patch Tuesday.

One restart a month is nothing to complain about, and a huge leap in stability. You can schedule the updates to occur over night and never miss a second of productivity during working hours.

I like all of the new UI changes, and haven't felt like any of them have tripped me up at all. Different strokes I guess.

[i-tietz]

Our development and QA departments are enthusiastic about W7 and say everything improved even compared to XP. And watching and listening to media (printed IT magazines, internet, TV) I read and hear the same. Let's just say: You can always generate a situation in which everything works "sub-optimal". But if that's not your situation, that sort of "minority report" is not helpful. In most cases W7 seems to work fine.

[RamonS]

Ramone,
I certainly won’t argue with you. You obviously have good reasons for disliking Windows 7 . I will however offer my own experience where it differs from yours.

Hardware support:
Any hardware that is older than three years is likely not to run on W7.

During our testing we pulled together PC’s from spare parts that were greater than 3 years old. Windows 7 ran fine on all of them. If it is a Pentium 4 system with 1 gig of ram it will run fine. We use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe FrameMaker, Madcap Flare, and Microsoft Office. Less than 1gig of Ram doesn’t cut it when those apps are all open at once. The original poster mentioned this was for a new PC purchase. Any new PC will run Win 7 great, and most have 4 gig of Ram standard. Still, I personally have upgraded dozens of machines to Win 7, and all of them run Win 7 great.

Then let's blame this squarely on the Dell hardware. It is about the worst I've come across with high failure rates. But hey, businesses like Dell because it is dirt cheap.

W7 no longer cares much about backward compatibility.

Backwards compatibility is a major concern for win7, except where older apps violate the new security policies. I don’t think it is possible to create new user levels like admin accounts, UAC, and restricted areas, while preserving every single application ever made. In our testing, we only found one folder Adobe Distiller 9.0 uses for custom PDF settings that required the administrator account access. Once we gave the folder the right access everything was working fine.

You did mention “many very good programs do not work under W7.” Could you name the applications that didn’t work for you?

The ones that don't work for me personally are Ulead MediaStudio Pro and some apps of the Nero suite I have. The solution in case of Nero is to buy the new version, for MediaStudio it is the end of the road. After Corel bought Ulead they also managed this fine company into the toilet. There are more that don't work for others, but those are the ones that don't work for me => have to spend more money to buy new software although the one I have works fine when not on W7. So my decision was to stick with what works for me, and that is XP 64bit. Unfortunately, it is set to EOL the same way like XP 32bit although it was released three years later. Another customer scam.

The performance boost is clearly because Windows 7 requires much better hardware to run.

I completely disagree. We have experienced much better performance from the same machines now running under Windows 7. We see much better restart times for the laptops which are now using Windows 7 Bitlocker for encryption. Restarts take less than half the time.

As mentioned before, I made the opposite experience. W7 performance is on par with XP and sometimes slower. I don't think booting under W7 is any faster and I consider boot time from pressing the power button to having the system in a state I can start working. Which hardware are you using?

I often encounter that W7 is out for lunch for no apparent reason. There is no drive or CPU activity, but the system appears to be frozen. It recovers after 5 to 10 seconds, but there is no indication if and if yes what failed or hung.

Have you looked at the Event Viewer Logs? I haven’t encountered anything like you describe.

YES! (Sorry) There is nothing in any of the event logs. I wouldn't blame W7 if there is a legitimate reason (bad app for example), but there appears to be none, or better to say, W7 is incapable of logging anything. Even performance counters didn't give a clue, no drive activity, low CPU and network activity, so no indicator as to what causes the 'freeze'. It also has nothing to do with the app running or the action taken or the time the system is up. I don't encounter that under XP. Don't know about Vista, I decided to ignore that Vista even exists, hehe.

why do we still have to reboot so many times just to get a bunch of files updated? Unload the old ones and reload the new ones, no need to take down the entire system. And that is an exercise we have to do on a monthly basis. In that sense stability for W7 is good enough as long as it makes it until next Patch Tuesday.

One restart a month is nothing to complain about, and a huge leap in stability. You can schedule the updates to occur over night and never miss a second of productivity during working hours.

I disagree, for the type of updates applied I should not have to reboot, period. Other OS can do that, some even replace the entire kernel while running, why can a pricey Windows 7 not do that?

I like all of the new UI changes, and haven't felt like any of them have tripped me up at all. Different strokes I guess.

I agree on the different strokes, but I find that the new improvements are detrimental to productivity and make things more difficult. I detailed that in my previous post. In those cases, where is the improvement? I am happy that my company has such a long cycle time for desktop PCs. I get to keep my XP box for a few more years....although, it is a Dell, so who knows.

[RamonS]

Our development and QA departments are enthusiastic about W7 and say everything improved even compared to XP. And watching and listening to media (printed IT magazines, internet, TV) I read and hear the same. Let's just say: You can always generate a situation in which everything works "sub-optimal". But if that's not your situation, that sort of "minority report" is not helpful. In most cases W7 seems to work fine.

My report is empirical, I'll agree with that, but I doubt it is that uncommon. Look at the various reports that are posted and Windows 7 is a far cry from "just works" (but so is Apple). I can deal with issues in a product, but that depends on how much investment I made and how the vendor deals with the issues. If Microsoft had such a customer focus like MadCap or other companies have we wouldn't have this discussion. I guess as long as increasing shareholder value is the only goal for Microsoft this is what we get. This isn't news, Microsoft produces dismal products for a long time. We all have gotten used to it and are happy when Windows does not crash twice a day. If Microsoft would sell toasters the number of apartment fires would go straight up.
In regards to the media, it depends on what the source is. If I'd read only Preston Gralla's blog than everything from Microsoft is golden. It always comes down to who signs the check.

[i-tietz]

In regards to the media, it depends on what the source is. If I'd read only Preston Gralla's blog than everything from Microsoft is golden. It always comes down to who signs the check.

I wasn't talking about "source" I was talking about "sources" - PLURAL that is ... that's what I usually do before I issue a judgement ... apart from that: the "chaos computer club" and the publishing company called Heise have got a downright excellent reputation in the German-speaking part ...

[doc_guy]

I almost hate to get back to the original poster's question, because nothing is quite as fun as encouraging RamonS in a anti-Microsoft rant (you know I like you, David), BUT, I'll point out that in my Win 7 64-bit, I was unable to get the 64-bit version of PushOK's SVNSCC plugin to work with Flare. Flare just didn't recognize that it existed.

I have yet to install the 32-bit version, but know that for me, I can't get Flare/SVN integration to work with the 64-bit SVNSCC plugin.

[RamonS]

I wasn't talking about "source" I was talking about "sources"

So was I, I just gave one prominent example of even reputable sources (ComputerWorld) who still let brainwashed Microsoft fanatics engage in spin doctoring. One common reason is the money trace. I do not know who funds CCC's activities, in case of Heise it would come down how much money they make with Microsoft-centric publications.

[i-tietz]

*Smirk*
We have the same phenomenon in Germany with a premier ligue football club that wins the German championship on a pretty regular basis and provides about half the German national team. For quite a few football fans it's good manners to go Bayern-Munich-bashing all the time ... but that doesn't mean that Bayern Munich plays bad football ...

[NorthEast]

Possibly a rant about Bayern Munich would be more entertaining!

On a general point about stability - I would say that Flare crashes far more often than any other application that I use for my day-to-day work; it's almost a daily occurence. Thankfully, it never seems to cause any problems with data loss.
However, to me Flare doesn't seem to be any more or less stable with any particular operating system - I've used it with W7 (64-bit), Vista (64-bit) and XP (32-bit) so far.

[RamonS]

*Smirk*
We have the same phenomenon in Germany with a premier ligue football club that wins the German championship on a pretty regular basis and provides about half the German national team. For quite a few football fans it's good manners to go Bayern-Munich-bashing all the time ... but that doesn't mean that Bayern Munich plays bad football ...

We will find out when they lose in Mönchengladbach on Saturday.

[Robotman]

To follow up on Dave's post, I use Flare 8 hours a day and have done using W7 64, Vista 64 and XP 32 and it might crash once a week (like Dave, no data loss).