As you may have read, I have been having quite a bit of trouble over the last month regarding my 4-year-old daughter's computer. So much trouble, in fact, that I have wiped the drive clean multiple times putting on Ubuntu, gOS, openSuse, and even Windows 7 Beta. None of these OSes, would play "very well" ripped DVD backups of the movies in my daughter's collection. And due to incredibly annoying wireless network card support not working right out of the box for any of the Linux fair, I never actually got her machine connected to the net with any Linux os. A complaint for another post...
Anyway, this whole time, I assumed there was an issue with the operating systems just not being suited to read the drive as well as XP always had in the past.
I should have known better....a quick peak at the external hard drive's remaining space using Windows 7 Beta's quick glance at remaining hard disk space feature, the one really cool thing about Windows 7 Beta, I noticed that I only had about 7% of free disk space left on the hard drive. From past experience, I was aware such limited free space on any drive will cause problems so I decided first thing I'd do was to defrag the drive, move some movies off, then defrag it again. Unfortunately, it appeared that the defrag option in Windows 7 Beta didn't work. It froze up at 9% and never got any further, even after leaving it on all night.
Figuring it was a Windows 7 Beta problem, I broke down and put XP back on her machine (yet again) and tried to open the "My Book" drive for a quick view, but the drive wouldn't open. Confused, I moved the "My Book" over to the Mac, connected it, and nothing happened. Back to the XP machine for an additional confirmation and sure enough, the drive appears dead, dead, dead.
So I've lost all of the DVD backups of my daughter's movie collection. It looks like the night for me will consist of hours and hours worth of rubbing tooth paste on old DVDs trying to buff out the scratches and then hoping they aren't damaged to the point where I won't be able to get a working movie file for playback on her computer.
Oh, as far as a Windows 7 review, it looks kind of pretty, very Vista like for my taste. I was bummed doing something as simple as defragging a hard drive failed. Oh, I was also incredibly disappointed that I had to use a Vista driver for my network adapter and that driver, apparently, sucked mucho poocho. In attempting to stream Netflix via IE in Windows 7 Beta, the network connection dropped every couple of seconds, which forced Netflix to attempt to reestablish the connection. This made streaming Netflix to Windows 7 Beta impossible. Oddly, now that XP is back on the machine and the XP wireless network adapter is installed, streaming Netflix to the XP machine once again works fine (so far). So it is entirely possible that the driver support for Windows 7 Beta is less than stellar. Only time will tell.
It won't matter to me, though, because my next machines (for the foreseeable future) will probably all be Macs.