Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly (episode 4)
The joys and pains of Windows Backup, the notification tray, and other Windows 7 changes
Follow @infoworldIn this final installment of my four-part series, I take a hard look at those new features of Windows 7 that have directly affected my own beta experience. Some are really good. Others are of questionable value. And a few are downright ugly. So, with a respectful nod to Sergio Leone, let us continue.
Windows 7: The good
It's no secret I'm a big fan of Windows' Image Backup facility. In fact, I've extolled its virtues many times here on this very blog. However, I never realized how dependent I had become on this virtual safety net until I managed to completely hose my Windows 7 beta installation.
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It started when I first installed the beta and realized that the Wi-Fi adapter in my Precision M6400 refused to wake up after a suspend/resume cycle. Worse still, if I tried to reboot the system to fix the problem, it hung during shutdown. I eventually identified the culprit as a buggy power management scheme and resolved it by disabling all power management features for the Precision's Intel 5300-series Wi-Fi adapter.
Of course, being the obsessive type, I would occasionally revisit the issue to see if any of my recent system modifications -- a new wireless chip set driver, some patches from Windows Update -- had corrected the problem. And it was during one of these attempts, in which I re-enabled the power management switch and tested via suspend/resume, that I clobbered my beta install.
After confirming that the adapter was indeed "dead" upon resuming the system, I proceeded to force a power-down via the ACPI "hold power button for five seconds" technique. When I then powered the system back on and booted the beta, all of my normal network adapter icons were missing, replaced by a laundry list of obscure, mostly Microsoft-authored drivers, none of which actually worked. Several fruitless hours of debugging later, I finally threw in the towel and used the new Windows 7 recovery console to restore the system image backup I had completed just a few days earlier.
Needless to say, Image Backup saved my bacon -- again. In fact, if it weren't for the ease at which I could restore myself to a known working environment, I seriously doubt I would feel confident enough to dabble with the Windows 7 beta on a production system (I still have the image I took of my Vista configuration just prior to my beta clean install). Overall, a truly remarkable feature.
