"World of Goo" and Windows 7 problem - SOLVED

A couple of days ago I decided to finally make the move from Windows XP to Windows 7. The installation was a breeze with no problems whatsoever and it took around 30 minutes for Win 7 to be up and running with the latest updates.

Although it is a bit early to judge, I have to say that my initial impression of Microsoft's latest OS is very good!

Ten minutes ago I encountered my first problem when I tried to install World Of Goo which I purchased some days ago through the pay what you want offer.

The installation started just fine but when it completed, windows informed me that the program may not have been installed correctly and asked me if I wanted to re-install it using the preferred settings. I did that and after the second installation tried to run the game. The screen went black and after a few seconds an error message appeared saying that World of Goo had a problem and windows needed to shut it down.

Running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP did not help so I decided it was time to exercise my google-fu! Sure enough after 2 minutes the answer was discovered on the official 2DBoy forums (thanks GMMan!).

I edited the config.txt found in the World of Goo folder and I changed the resolution from 800x600 to my monitor's native 1920x1080. That did the trick and now the game runs just fine.

Now I can enjoy an excellent game on a very good OS. But that is a story for a future post.

Windows 7 upgrade may take up to a day

Microsoft has done it again. It really never stops to amaze me how low quality software and insulting assumptions from the side of Microsoft quality assurance team result in crappy Microsoft products. A Microsoft engineer posted on his blog the results of internal experiments on how long it takes to upgrade Vista to Windows 7.

The experiments involved 3 different hardware configurations and 4 different system condition as far as the data and the installed programs where concerned. One of the experiments took 1220 minutes, over 20 hours to complete the upgrade and that was not even on the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario was not even reported.

Data Profile	Low End Hardware	Mid End Hardware	High End Hardware
Clean No data and 0 applications	32-bit: 40 minutes 64-bit: 50 minutes	32-bit: 30 minutes 64-bit: 35 minutes	32-bit: 30 minutes 64-bit: 35 minutes
Medium User 70Gb of data and 20 applications	32-bit: 175 minutes 64-bit: 185 minutes	32-bit: 115 minutes 64-bit: 95 minutes	32-bit: 100 minutes 64-bit: 85 minutes
Heavy User 125Gb of data and 40 applications	32-bit: 345 minutes 64-bit: 355 minutes	32-bit: 185 minutes 64-bit: 165 minutes	32-bit: 160 minutes 64-bit: 150 minutes
Super User 650Gb of data and 40 applications	N/A	32-bit: 1220 minutes 64-bit: 675 minutes	32-bit: 610 minutes 64-bit: 480 minutes

It is stated that the transition from XP to Windows 7 is more complex and it will take significantly more time. How much more? Are they kidding us?

Realistically speaking I would say that most users(at leats the ones I know) fall between the Heavy User to Super user. Even simple users have not formated their XP installation for years and have all sorts of crappy software installed on the machine(let alone the dll nightmare). How long will it take for them?

Comparing this with the upgrade process of Mac OS X or certain Linux distros such as Ubuntu makes me lough out loud. System upgrade is something that should be painless and automated but I guess in Redmond they have diffferent ideas(they still live in mid 90s wearing funny shirts).