Review: Windows 7 Beta pt 2

There was so much cool new stuff in Windows 7, I decided to make a second post. This is more of a "Here's where you can go for more info" kind of post, and I'll update it as I find better links, but a good one is here, at the How To Geek's site.

In addition, here's the information from Microsoft's help site on getting to know Windows 7:

Review: Windows 7 Beta pt 1

As soon as it was announced that Windows 7 beta would be available for a limited time, I knew I had to grab it. I did, and threw it on an older laptop I had. The laptop doesn't meet the requirements (it's only a 1.7 Mhz proc, 768mb of RAM, and a 32MB video card), but I wasn't about to throw it onto a live machine and have it die. It is a beta, after all.

This isn't going to be a review of under the hood features. This is more of a review of the shiny chrome additions, like the new rear-view mirror, or the new stereo.

So, where to begin? The desktop, of course.


Obviously, there are a couple of things that jump out right away. It's based on the look of Vista, but with changes. The icons are bigger, and the taskbar is bigger, which is nice. Also, you can pin icons on the taskbar easily. Another nice thing is that sticky notes are built in. You can see a couple there on my desktop.


The next change I love is the ability to close items straight from their taskbar icons.


You also have the ability to customize your taskbar with simplicity. I know you could customize it before, but not as simply.

And you see that flag? That's the new action center, a way to control which messages Win7 sends you. Don't want to see backup information? Okay, turn it off.


UAC has gone through an overhaul as well (let all users of Vista rejoice!), allowing the user specifically how tight to control their machine:


All I can say about that is that it's about time.


The calculator has been overhauled as well, allowing built-in conversion tools, a programming calculator (with binary, qword, dword, and other tools), and lots of other changes.

And the speed? Even on this 'slow' machine, it's nice and peppy. I can only imagine what it would do on my beefy machine with a dedicated video card, an AMD x2 proc, and 6GB of RAM.

My favorite change though is the auto-fill and auto-split. If you drag a window to the left, it will auto-fill only the left side. Same with the right side. If you drag it to the top it will fill the whole screen. That's awesome, especially for people with large monitors, like myself.

So, my decision? I will be upgrading. I like Windows 7. It took some major work to get a WEP2 driver on this laptop, but it's a beta, so I'll cut it some slack. Other than that, I have 0 complaints.

For a beta, it's stable. It's almost cliche at this point, but Windows 7 is everything Vista should've been, and more.

Review: Garmin Nuvi 750

Early last year, my wife and I decided to join the throngs of the lost, and purchased a GPS unit. I found a great deal online and purchased a Navigon 2100, a little 3.5" unit with a clumsy windshield mount and terrible GPS speed. But, I got a good deal, and when we went to Denver for 2 months for an IT internship, it saved our lives.

The last little while though, I'd been selling some old crap on eBay and decided to take the splurge and purchase a better GPS. I was able to grab a Nuvi 750 from Best Buy's eBay outlet for $100, and was a little unsure of what I would find.

The Good:
Where to start? There's a reason Garmin is one of the industry leaders in GPS technology.

First and foremost, the response time to commands is AMAZING. Granted, coming from the Navigon to the Garmin is like moving from a Geo Metro to a Corvette, of course it's going to be faster, but either way, I'm sufficiently impressed by how quick it performs.

It also finds a satellite extremely efficiently. This was my biggest gripe with the Navigon. There were times we'd be driving for 5-10 minutes before it would get sufficient reception. Driving in the same locations, the Nuvi connects on average within 1-2 minutes, most times less.

Intuition. The designers of the Nuvi software were really smart. Even the little things it does are great. Take a few examples: You start your car, the GPS is plugged in. It recognizes that and will boot the GPS for you. You start driving, but haven't touched the GPS yet, it will automatically switch to the map, showing you where you are. As you drive, it will show the next cross street, even if you aren't having it navigate. When you turn the car off, it will give you 30 seconds, after which it will automatically shut down. All of these little things make it a no-hassle, think for you approach.

Map updates. The moment I got my Nuvi, I registered it with Garmin. Imagine my surprise when I found it qualified for a free upgrade to the 2009 maps. Most places charge an arm and a leg for a map update, but Garmin handed it out. Granted, I'm sure the next ones will charge, but it was a pleasant surprise.

The mount. It's nice, it's simple, it works. Getting the unit on and off the mount is a snap. Can't say the same for the Navigon.

The Bad:
These aren't so much bad things, more just picky things. First, the rerouting capabilites are slower than the Navigon. This isn't such a big deal, but it's interesting.
The amount of data on the screen is lacking. Now I know you're not supposed to watch the screen of the GPS all that much, but on my Navigon I could get worlds of awesome data on the screen all at once while navigating: est arrival time, current speed, miles left (total), altitude, traffic, etc. The Nuvi offers most of this, but it requires going to separate screens, something I just can't do while driving.

Overall:
I like it. A lot. It was well worth the upgrade. It's lighter, faster, bigger (4.3" vs 3.5"), etc etc. I'm a happy Nuvi-er as of 2 weeks ago.

The Office Quote of the Day

"I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great that I literally wanted a second one. In my Second Life, I was also named Dwight. Absolutely everything was the same, except I could fly."

-Dwight

Finding Duplicates in SQL

First off, credit for this goes to Pete Freitag here: http://www.petefreitag.com/item/169.cfm

Anyways, if I haven't mentioned it before, I currently am a jack-of-all-trades at my place of employment (Digital Gateway). It's an ERP software company that mainly focuses on the copier industry. I currently work in support, but additionally handle training duties as well as some implementation and conversion duties. Officially when I graduate I will move full-time into implementation and conversions. I'm the highest you can get in our support department without going to a manager or a development team member. That means I work a lot with MSSQL, because that's the backend our software sits on.

Earlier this week, I had a ticket where the customer needed some custom SQL scripts run, as they had incorrectly labeled over 2,000 items, inserting a ',' instead of a '-' in their item numbers.

Obviously this is easy, right? Simply run a SQL replace statement:

UPDATE Items
SET ItemNumber = replace(ItemNumber,',','-')
WHERE ItemNumber LIKE '%,%'

Problem was that out of the 70,000 items in their database, they already had items that they had entered with hyphens, so running the script wouldn't work, because ItemNumber can't be duplicated. So, after fighting for a while, I ended up doing the following:

--DROP TABLE #ItemNumbers

CREATE TABLE #ItemNumbers(
ItemNumber VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
NewItemNumber VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL)

INSERT INTO #ItemNumbers(ItemNumber, NewItemNumber)
SELECT ItemNumber, REPLACE(ItemNumber,',','-')
FROM Items

Cool thing about this is that I now had a new temp table with only the old item number and the new item number, and if the item number didn't have a comma in it, then the ItemNumber and NewItemNumber were the same. So all that was left was finding the duplicates in the NewItemNumber row. That's where Pete came in. Modifying his query, I came up with:

SELECT ItemNumber,
COUNT(NewItemNumber) AS NewItemCount
FROM #ItemNumbers
GROUP BY ItemNumbers
HAVING ( COUNT(NewItemNumbers) > 1 )

and voila! I had it. Now all I needed to do was modify these 10 items and then run my original script.

In the meantime...

I should be embarking on some geeky projects this semester for school, as I'm going to be learning a variety of technologies as well as VBA. I'll keep the blog updated as often as possible.

Until then, my sister got me the Office daily calendar for Christmas, and so I will also update the blog with the funny quotes as they come up.


For yesterday:
"Ever since I was a kid, people have been telling me that I can't do things. You can't be on the team, you can't move on to second grade. Well, now they're telling me that I can't win back clients using old-fashioned business methods. We'll see about that. And FYI, I eventually aced second grade, and I was the biggest kid in class."

-Michael Scott