Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar 570
Foofoobar writes "Due to a strike with the UK's postal system, people in Great Britain are getting copies of Windows 7 early and have already posted their experiences about the install process. Some have an easy time but others post installs taking 3 hours including Windows asking them to remove iTunes and Google toolbar prior to installation." The article indicates that many of these early users, though, are having better luck.
You can add them back... (Score:5, Interesting)
First, this obviously applies only to upgrades.
Second, iTunes does horrible things to your USB stack, and it needs to go.
After Win7 is installed you can add it back, and not lose any of your music.
Don't make a big deal out of Microsoft trying to remove the effects of misbehaved software corrupting the install.
There is no issue here.
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. I actually like iTunes, but damn is it a resource hog. Sometimes it will chew up 90%+ of CPU for no apparent reason. It will often be unresponsive to clicks for a couple seconds. I am not sure what is so complicated about a music player that causes this.
And then every time it asks me for an upgrade, it insists on installing Quicktime and other things that I don't want on my PC.
I don't use Macs, but wonder if all of Steve's apps behave this way...
Re:Summary is Misleading (Score:1, Interesting)
It puts back the drivers, but didn't put back iTunes (though a manual re-install of iTunes picked up the library automatically). According to TFA.
Compatibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I play a bit of devil's advocate? My guess is that the need to remove iTunes and Google toolbar might be related to compatibility issues (i.e., the version that the users have currently not being the "latest" one, or the one "100%" compatible with 7). Without any more concret info, like the version number for iTunes of all the machines involved, if 7 "demands" diferent things with the same version installed, etc, we can't really be sure what's the issue here, and assume it's for the best for the users (not having potentialy incompatible software installed on 7).
Now before someone says "but I've been using iTunes 2.0 with 7 since forever!!", well, I'm just speculating as much as the next guy :) Afterall, this is Slashdot, right? ;)
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
...you don't need to be near any computer. (Score:3, Interesting)
iTunes is evil (Score:5, Interesting)
For some reason, Apple decided to use their own USB driver; one not exactly known for it's stability, evidently. Yes, Apple would rather risk your system instability than use a standard tried & tested driver to write files to any iPod. That'll be why Windows 7 doesn't like it I expect.
http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+BSOD [google.com]
Sometimes I wonder if Apple make PCs crash deliberately to fuel their ad-war
Older versions? (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience with Windows 9x matches GP's claim. If you had a broken installation and tried to fix it by re-installing without deleting the old installation, it would copy the broken settings and usually work even less than before.
Maybe GP still remembers that time and based his statement on that ;-)
I'm not so sure about newer versions, as I made a habit of doing always clean installs back then. Never tried to "repair-install" W2k or later.
Re:That's not an excuse (Score:2, Interesting)
You mean, aside from not having to reinvent the wheel when they already have a product that they make, which is available for free, that does the job?
Then again, one performance tweak you can make on Vista/7 is to tell Windows *NOT* to index the itunes library file. I received a significant boost to the responsiveness when Windows wasn't trying to index a 50MB file every time it changed.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair, it doesn't really matter what version of Flash you're running. It still sucks, and is very insecure. The embarrassing part is more that it downgrades the version than that it exposes users to an extra security risk.
Re:...you don't need to be near any computer. (Score:1, Interesting)
In fact I am not anywhere near a computer. I am doing everything remotely: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
----------------
If you're not near a computer, what are you running sudo from?
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just One Observation... (Score:4, Interesting)
And if these people **REALLY** believe that upgrading any OS in this fashion, let alone MS Windows, will end up giving them a nice clean install afterwards, then they probably shouldn't be anywhere near a computer in the first place.
You're generalising. I've had:
In fact, while I have on rare occasions found it easier to install afresh than to upgrade, that's been the exception, not the rule.
The problem is not n00bs who are naive enough not to plan their way through an upgrade. The problem is junior and intermediate geeks who think the sum of their knowledge and experience is all there is. Upgrades require care and attention and planning. Just because it's currently beyond your capacity to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple, Real, AOL, Apple, Symantec, Adobe, McAfee, IBM and Apple I'm talking about YOU. Especially Apple, ITunes is an over-engineered crapfest that touches things it shouldn't touch in the OS. (In their defense, they have gotten slightly better lately, but itunes still lives in a dedicated VM on my computer).
Believe it or not, I have actually had iTunes break a CD-Rom.
Before iTunes: CD-Rom drive worked perfectly.
iTunes is installed: CD-Rom drive refused to read cds, thereby becoming an expensive cup holder. (While not expensive in the classic sense, the drive was much more expensive than most cup holders)
After much reinstalls/uninstalls of driver, figured out that if I uninstalled iTunes, and then reinstalled the driver, cd-rom drive worked perfectly.
iTunes has not been on computer since. Call it plain bad luck or not, but my parent's computer had the same thing happen to it less than a week later. Granted, this was years ago, and I am sure that iTunes has gotten better, due to the widespread usage of it. However, iTunes still is not allowed on my computer.
I refuse to use it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I will not install or run win7 until there is a 3rd party alternative or a MS patch that gives me explorer back.
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?
Yes. e.g: .mov if you rename them to .mp4, as for the past few revisions that's all they've been anyway)
CCCP: 5.9mb (plays damn near everything you'll encounter, including
Quicktime Alternative: 17.8mb (just the quicktime codecs and the plugin, no player)
Quicktime: 30.94mb
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, what do you guys run that causes all these problems?
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a cop out... nobody said they couldn't.... just that they didn't.
Re:Just One Observation... (Score:3, Interesting)
With all respect, you are completely missing the point.
The people who are at this moment buying and installing Windows 7 are mostly going to be desktop users upgrading from an earlier Windows release.
And I missed the point how? I gave 4 different scenarios, covering most use cases, including the 'average desktop'. In every case, the experience led me to conclude that a sweeping pronouncement that only fools upgrade just isn't valid.
If you need further data: Ubuntu's upgrade process is so smooth you can simply start it running in the background and continue working. After some time, the system tells you to reboot and that's that. (I generally toss the LiveCD into the machine first just to be sure my hardware's going to be properly supported after the upgrade, but I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy.)
Mac OSX is reasonably easy as well. Boot the new DVD, wait a while, restart.
I then speculated that the tendency to generalise might be a result of inexperience. I was apparently wrong about that.
My point stands: Upgrades for most OSes are mostly straightforward.
Early? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had it for a week or two now. Just installed it on bare metal yesterday (as opposed to a VM).
Apparently MSDN Academic Alliance gets it just as early.
My biggest issue is: eight gigs? Really?
Other than that, it does seem to be an improvement over XP, so far. And fresh installs are almost always better than upgrades.
Re:Crappy Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
makes me question how much of the bashing of MS is legitimate.
Sure it's "legitimate," but consider the possibility that Slashdot is narcissistic in this regard. They've identified so much with an anti-Microsoft perspective that they are stuck with being critical even if Microsoft improves. Their identity comes before anything else, and they are pathologically driven to post submissions such as this one in order to protect The Slashdot at all costs. In other words, par for the course.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:4, Interesting)
At other OS companies, squads of test engineers maintain "DO NOT BREAK" lists. All during development, and especially before the revision ships, these engineers test builds of the OS to make sure that the new version DOES NOT BREAK a good variety of commonly used apps. If they find breakage, they respond in various ways, including contacting the developers of the application to help with a workaround or to help build a patched revision.
Assuming Microsoft does this - and they'd be insane if they didn't - then Windows 7 should not complain about iTunes.
The point is, TO END END USER it doesn't matter who the hell used proper APIs and who didn't. If they upgrade-in-place and their apps break, they are going to blame the upgrade.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:4, Interesting)
That takes pure skill!
Not any more.
Slashdot is pretty much a Microsoft shop these days. Just try saying anything Microsoft doesn't want discussed (like Win 7 is bland and uninteresting interesting, or that MS marketing is gaming mod points). You'll be guaranteed a "Troll" mod.
MS reputation managers started infiltrating /. a couple of years ago, and the job's just about complete.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT I think they decided that it was time to break more stuff starting with Vista ( maybe in more ways than they planned
Microsoft's big problem is a Windows XP compatible O/S is dangerously close to existing, and if Microsoft does not move the goal posts in time, people might switch to it instead instead of "Vista" or Windows7. Then Microsoft loses significant control of the market.
It's just like Intel trying to get everyone on board the the Itanic, but then AMD came up with AMD64 and everyone jumped on that instead.
If Microsoft doesn't keep breaking stuff "slightly" and keep "moving the goal posts", Windows XP+DirectX9 could become a defacto standard that even they can't escape from, and the Windows market would be like the BIOS market.
Microsoft does not want to be just another BIOS vendor. They'd make a lot less.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:4, Interesting)
FUD, Damned FUD, and anti-MS-FUD (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ya well no surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of us MS haters have just wanted to see better MS products right back from before they showed us they couldn't even get "ping" right and made something so broken you could use it to crash machines on the net.
Most of us MS haters have shelled out significant amounts of money into MS pockets unlike the warez using MS fanboys out there.
You've got it wrong, we WANT to see better MS products out there becuase we all get roped into trying to fix steaming piles of malware no matter what platform we normally work on.
We really just hate the history of incredibly stupid choices giving broken software and gaping security holes (eg. wide open ports listening to do the bidding of any virus, active-x and hundreds of other easy malware vectors over the years).
Besides, Microsoft don't even rate on any sort of scale of evil that has Adobe (jailing critics) or Macrovision let alone Blackwater.
Re:Windows Upgrades (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly, and you want to know why?
Microsoft follows their publised (sic) API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.
Microsoft also adheres to their unpublished guidelines. They know in advance what shortcuts are gonna get broken in the next version and what new ones will appear. Everyone else has to use trial-and-error to discover what will and won't work, so of course they "almost always get it wrong" -- they get it wrong every time until it works, for now.
Back in the day I was still in the Windows software development world, we got to the point we told our customers that we wouldn't support the latest version of windows until the next version of our package came out. Our installer would balk if it saw an unknown windows version. And it could take 6 months for us to catch up. In our case, we had a low-volume product that relied on a great deal of third-party software components, so we had to wait for those pieces to get latest-windows compliant.
Were we "over-engineering" or product? God, no. I don't even think that word means what you think it means. Were we "touching things we shouldn't"? I guess so if by "shouldn't" you mean "stuff that MS could deprecate". And boy did we hear plenty of "If it runs on 95 it should run on 98, Me, NT4, 2K, etc." That was the awesomest, when the tech line would send those complaints to the software engineers like me. I'd just tell them that philosophy doesn't really apply to created objects like software. "Well, why isn't it fixed yet?" they'd ask, and I'd respond "Because I'm not working on it". "Why not?", "Because I'm on the phone telling some guy it's not fixed yet instead of working." That usually got me an angry call from some sales or marketing VP, but who was yet unable to provide me any technical assistance when I told them I need some latest-OS-version compliant widget -- something about "that's your job" would be his response, the irony that soothing customers being his job totally lost on him because he sent his shirts out for cleaning.
Every 3rd party developer has some issue or issues that's more important to them than being compatible with the next version of the OS. Perhaps compatibility with this version. Or user demands for more features. Or lack of staff. It's always something.
Want to bitch at 3rd party developers? Then please jump on the latest OS version. I know from experience that there's nothing that inspires me more than some user telling me I fucked it up. Really gets me motivated and you get to gripe, so everyone wins. But at least I was on a small user-base product, and I could move that one whiny customer's bug and feature requests lower on the fixme queue every time he pulled that.
Re:Ya well no surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really.
I've been quite happy to bash MS for almost everything they do for more than 15 years now. I'm quite relaxed. If Win7 is a really good product with no major flaws, it would be a first. If they don't show up now, they will show up later. Maybe they've become better at hiding them.
The people trying to turn the initial positive reviews on their heads are young and stupid. They don't have the experience with hating MS that most of us do. They don't know that MS is expert at disappointing, even if the initial hype is well engineered and the major flaws hidden too deep. Also, they forget that after Vista, it was pretty much impossible to come up with something that wouldn't look good in comparison.
And hey, after almost 20 years of trying, let's give MS the credit for coming up with a halfway acceptable system, shall we? Where's the joy in hating them if they'd produce only crap? No, the substandard-but-acceptable stuff belongs there, too. It makes the next failure more enjoyable.
So in summary: No. You are dead wrong. The real, experienced zealots are quite happy to delay satisfaction and wait until the polish has gone and the hype machine died down, and people start to use Win7 for some serious gaming/work. We know that you can make almost any car look good on the test drive. It's the daily use and the first maintainance where you find out if you've been had.
We'll wait until then. We won't even say "told you so", because that became old with Vista. We'll just smile and shrug.
And if it never happens, if Win7 turns out to be adequate after all, we'll just shrug and wait for Win8.