Installing Windows 7 on the Q1 Ultra

Though I initially had problems with the Samsung Q1 Ultra I have grown to like the UMPC, the main benefit being the five hour battery life (even longer with the powerbank).

Samsung Q1 Ultra

However the operating system has always been a bit of a pain, yup you’ve guessed it, it runs Windows Vista. Though the Q1 Ultra has 1GB of RAM, this really isn’t sufficient for Vista, and as a result boot times are too long, and there are performance lags which I blame on the OS.

I was seriously considering downgrading to Windows XP and to see if that would improve the performance. Now though I am thinking I might install the Windows 7 beta and see if that could improve the performance.

If all else fails, I will install Ubuntu!

Hold your breath…

Generally upgrades and updates go smoothly, but not always.

As jonmul posted recently on Jaiku, sometimes if not always you hold your breath.

Although Apple have made firmware upgrades a painless process I still hold my breath every time. Bricked to many devices in the past…

He’s not the only one who holds their breath…

I do it quite often, especially with firmware upgrades.

Having said that, I actually now rarely upgrade unless I am “forced” to. Sometimes I have been “forced” into an OS X upgrade as a piece of software I want to use is only compatible with a newer version.

If it works I generally leave it well alone. In the main as updates sometimes just do weird things.

Good example, I upgraded the iPod touch to 1.1.3, but I ain’t upgrading to 1.1.4 just yet.

I was downloading a file!

So there I was thinking which office suite I should put on my new Q1 Ultra UMPC. I did consider Office 2003, but of course the Q1 does not have a CD drive, and my external drive is Firewire only. I know I could copy the disk onto an ISO image and that mount that as a virtual drive, or I could share a drive on a network computer, but that sounds like hard work (or so I thought).

I then decided to download and install OpenOffice, okay so it’s an 120MB download, but that won’t take too long, or so I thought.

So I started the download…

Well this according to Firefox is going to take an hour, okay no worries, I’ll leave the Q1 on, the batteries fully charged shouldn’t be a problem.

Left it for a while, did some stuff on the Mac, went back to the Q1  and it was off.

What?

It must have thought, “ah nothing’s happening here, I’d better turn myself off to conserve battery life”.

I was downloading a file!

“nope, mouse hasn’t moved, no taps, no keyboard entry, time to turn off”

I am downloading a file, I don’t want to stare at the screen for an hour, I just want to download the file.

“okay, time to turn myself off”

NO!

“I’m off….”

What about my file? I was downloading a file.

Well that sucks, and of course restarting an interruped download with Firefox means downloading all over again from the beginning.

So here I am now with the power brick plugged in, you’re not very ultra-mobile now are you?

Well that didn’t work did it…

Okay removing and reinstalling the wireless adapter on the Q1 Ultra didn’t work, once more Windows Vista disabled the wireless adapter once more for no apparent reason or with any justification.

There doesn’t seem to be any solution to this problem on the web, others are having problems with the wireless card and video playback, but at least their wireless adapters work.

Trying a different driver to see if that helps.

Certainly couldn’t recommend the Q1 Ultra if this is “normal” behaviour, it should work out of the box without issue. Yes if you install software and hardware, sometimes this can cause issues, but out of the box a device should just work in my opinion.

Vista, stop disabling my wireless…

Windows Vista did it again…

Annoying to say the least. Windows Vista on my Q1 Ultra discovered a (so-called) problem with the wireless adapter on the Q1 and decided (without telling me) to disable the wireless and not allow me to renable it at all (well not easily).

In the end I decided against doing a system restore (like what I did last time) as obviously some kind of Windows update was causing the problem. This time I removed the adapter from Device Manager and rebooted the Q1 and let Windows reinstall the drivers, which it did without finding anything wrong!

I wouldn’t mind so much, but this is a new Q1 and I haven’t done anything except install updates…

It’s annoying.

I just want to do stuff…

So there I was looking at my new Samsung Q1 Ultra and seeing how the graphics were working, working on a document and looking at a few things online, when I got called away.  Knew I was only going to be a few minutes to just placed the Q1 on the desk and left.

I came back to find that Windows Vista had decided (in my absence) to update Windows, restart, lose my wireless connection and then admit that it had lost the document I was working on and would I like to create a new one!

I do find this very frustrating, if I wanted the Q1  to run itself I would leave it switched on and never use it, however I want to use the Q1 to do stuff, create stuff, read stuff, reflect on stuff. I don’t want the Q1 to try and be nice and update itself in the middle of me doing stuff. I want to retain my wireless connection so I don’t lose my blog entry, or lose the thread of the online discussion I am involved in.

I don’t want software to continually nag me that I haven’t either set it up or registered it, or run it for a while, and I don’t want the software to do it in the middle of me doing stuff.

I don’t want the Q1 to download huge updates whilst I am trying to do stuff online, downloading will slow my internet connection, download updates while I am doing other non-online stuff such as making a cup of tea.

Please just let me do my stuff, don’t do your stuff and pretend mine isn’t important!

Samsung Q1 Ultra Wireless Problems

I have been messing about with evaluating a Samsung Q1 Ultra over the last couple of days. I was trying out Internet Explorer and was surprised to find that the Q1 was not connected to my wireless network. After some investigation I found out this evening and was disappointed to find that Windows Vista decided that the best thing it could do was disable the wireless adapter as it had a found a problem with it.

Samsung Q1 Ultra

Initially the problem I was having was that the device failed to connect to my wireless network, which surprised me, as I hadn’t really done very much with the Q1 except switch it on! I hadn’t installed any software (or even uninstalled software).

The wireless was on according to the Samsung software, but as far as Windows Vista was concerned there were no networks to connect to.

Very strange, after checking device manager (something I doubt any general user would do) I found that Vista had disabled the wireless adapter because it had found a problem with it. It didn’t tell me what the problem was, but was willing to go online to find a solution (well I would have gone online, but the wireless wasn’t working was it).

There didn’t seem to be any way of re-enabling the wireless adapter. I could have uninstalled it, but I wondered if Vista would let me reinstall the wireless adapter, I was pretty sure it might have got pretty obnoxious about it.

In the end I went with a system restore, something I do like about XP and Vista and restored the Q1 to this morning’s configuration which I know was working, and is working now.

I wonder if it was a Windows Update that caused the problem, I am not totally sure of the cause.