TOPIC: PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE
Some things don't mix...
10th May 2009Now that the Release Candidate for Windows 7 is out, I have been giving it a whirl in a VirtualBox session and it, like the Beta that I had been trying too, feels a sold enough affair. I went for the complete installation route in place of the upgrade path. I was surprised to find that it bundled my old files into a single folder called Windows_old and that my old user bits and bobs were folded in with this too. There was nothing there that I wouldn't have missed, but this is a nice touch.
However, I have a spot of fixing to do after adding Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. Like the beta, mixing Windows 7 and Kaspersky seems not to be the way to a stable system. Whether this is down to the virtualisation aspect of the business is something that I don't know, but I have found that removing Kaspersky and replacing it made everything sing along together. Booting into Safe Mode and using msconfig to remove any incidences of Kaspersky being called at start up provides a partial restoration of service. Because the msiexec service isn't running, you need full mode before any software but pulling out any cause for execution of Kaspersky gets that back. I suppose that I could go and put Windows 7 on a real machine to see if Kaspersky causes problems there, but that's not a road that I really want to travel.
A performance improvement?
4th March 2009Having just upgraded to VirtualBox 2.1.4, I noticed something surprising: a performance improvement. However, I didn't notice this with a Windows 2000 guest, but a Windows XP one now ran freely when it felt like it was immersed in treacle before. Since I had some photos to process for the hillwalking blog, that was a welcome boost and will be well-used if it continues. What's more, a Windows 7 VM that I have doesn't run so sluggish now either. These observations do point towards 2.1.2 being a sluggard on my Ubuntu box, though Windows hogs like Norton 360 didn't help matters either. Whatever the truth was, things now feel much better and any enhancement to system speed has to be a good thing.
Losing formatting with Windows copying and pasting
25th July 2008Copy and pasting between Windows programs can cause unwanted formatting to be carried over. Copying text from Internet Explorer into Outlook is one example of this that I see a lot, and Word to Word does it too. A trick that I picked up for avoiding this copying of formatting comes from a while back: copying into Notepad and pasting from there. Doing the copy/paste shuffle in that way strips off the formatting baggage and allows the default formatting for the particular destination to be applied. There may be other and slicker ways to do this, but what I have described works for me.