Archive for October, 2009

Why Windows 7 is not yet ready - MORE BUGS!

james October 7th, 2009

Here is the quick list of my problems with Windows 7:

1) This is by far my biggest gripe and most persistent problem I have 3 monitors, 2 HP LP2065 (1200 x 1600) monitors tilted vertically with 1 Dell 3007 (2560 x 1600). I power the Dell 3007 with a Quadro FX 580 and the side monitors with a Quadro NVS 285. The same system has 8gb of ram, e8400 processor, intel g1 80gb ssd and gigabyte P35-DS3L motherboard. The new Win 7 system of transparent windows and taskbar selection is brilliant, IF IT WORKED. Instead, roughly twice a day when I am moving too fast or have too much going on, I am treated to my screens blacking out and flashing twice on and off over a 30 second period. Then I get an error message saying “NVIDIA Graphics Driver has stopped working properly.” This slows me down and is a constant annoyance.
2) Network driver problems. When this computer was an XP station, the networking was reliable. Very reliable. With Windows 7, I have to reboot 1-5 times before the networking driver will come up and work properly. I cannot disable my nic at any time either because it will not come back up properly. The hardware is not flaky, the windows driver is and this is an unacceptable problem.
3) Until late September the error “This driver is blocked due to compatibility issues” would appear constantly while using Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0.4. An upgrade to 11.0.5 solved the issue however I expect many non-compliant anti-virus programs to cause problems with Windows 7.

My initial impressions of Win7 were good but as I use this computer on a daily basis to evaluate putting Win7 across our network, I can see that it is not yet ready. I am running the newest drivers and have tried various fixes all to no avail. So for my situation and for our company, Windows 7 will have to wait until the reliability is there. Many of our employees have the same monitor configuration I do and this is an immediate show-stopper for corporate installation!

10-2-2009 Gmail service down again

james October 2nd, 2009

Gmail has gone unresponsive and/or our users are seeing response times of 1-2 minutes when sorting their email in Thunderbird rather than the usual 1-2 seconds if it works at all.

We have seen gmail downtimes of several hours in the past month and this month is not starting off well. For personal use, this would not be a huge issue. For business use, this IS a HUGE issue. With the September outages, many bloggers have commented that this is acceptable for a free or low-cost service. This is not how I see it. If I could pay more for better service with google, I would. We are currently using their “premier” business service and the downtime affects our productivity.

Another point many bloggers make is that corporate email downtime is typically higher than the gmail downtime we see on average. Here again, I disagree. Perhaps we are unique but our email downtime is correlated to our dedicated server downtime which is approximately 99.99% (four nine) reliability. Even if our downtime was the same numerical value as google, so far less than 99.9% (three nine) reliability, it would not pose the same issue as our down time is nearly exclusive to maintenance performed late at night outside of normal working hours.

Another interesting point is that they claim “99.9% uptime guarantee SLA and 24/7 support.” I would have to start logging their times but in September, they failed to meet their 99.9% and their support is awful even with a support plan.

I want (and am willing to PAY MORE FOR):
- 99.99% uptime
- Better support / remediation for performance issues

Apparently I need the Super Enterprise Premier MAXX edition of google apps and I bet MANY other business users would be interested in a higher reliability plan.