Windows 7
Posted by Stropp on October 28, 2009Wolfshead has a handy little trick for fixing some network problems that he’s been having with Windows 7. It seems that if your LAN properties are set to use TCP/IP version 6, you might lose your Internet connection every 30 to 60 minutes or so.
Of course, that reminds me why I usually wait for a while before I upgrade to a new version of any operating system. No software is bug free, and it actually never becomes bug free. All any developer, be they an Operating System vendor, an accounting package supplier, or a MMORPG developer, can hope for is to minimize the most egregious creepy crawlies that inhabit their code.
This week there was a couple of blog posts by Eric of Elder Game, and Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green regarding a bug found in the Champions Online swear filter (why they don’t make this a swear jar, and charge players a few cents for each cuss, I don’t know. They could raise a bucketload of charity cash!) These posts were on opposite sides of the ‘it’s easy for a dev to do x’ debate. This case being, it’s easy to implement a swear filter, so why did this one go wrong?
Simple. No code is bug free. And changes to a game as complex as a MMORPG is going to have run-on effects elsewhere in the code.
Still I suspect that the game industry hasn’t caught up with the software development community at large in regards to the software quality practices that (I admit slowly) are being adopted by main stream development houses. This, I believe is likely the reason we see so many critical bugs in our games.
But… back to Windows 7. I have 2 Windows PCs to upgrade, my XP gaming rig, and my Vista laptop.
I’ll give it a few more months and upgrade the laptop first.
But Microsoft has done XP users a disservice by not providing an upgrade path. Instead I have to copy all my data and apps off the harddisk, do a clean install, and then reinstall everything.
Screw that!
I have way too much to reinstall, and since much of it is digital download (the downside of that distro method) I’ll have to spend hours redownloading games and patching.
Sadly I think I’ll wait until I get a new gaming rig. Until then… Viva la XP!
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I’ve been running Win7 beta RC and did the upgrade to Win7 proper last weekend for which I had to blank my drive anyway. Probably the easiest installation I had with any M$ product and I’ve not seen any intarweb dropouts either while using beta or release. That said, I automatically apply the Latency Fix to stop the OS waiting for a couple of TCP packets to arrive before acknowledging their receipt which speeded up my WoW performance considerably. In fact, as my ISP supports and uses IP6, I’m getting better performance internet-wise than I had using XP.
Also upgraded the XP laptop to Win7 but didn’t have anything vital on the system partition that I couldn’t afford to loose, so it wasn’t too much of an issue for me. I can understand the frustration on your part though.
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