The first problem I had was that the Acrobat 8 PDF Print driver would not install or work correctly on Vista or 7. Thankfully (after nearly a year) Adobe decided to fix the problem and fixed the driver.

The second problem is a little more insidious though. It has to do with Window redrawing in Acrobat 8. The problem I kept having was that if I resized the main Acrobat window the content window (containing the PDF) would not resize to match the main window. So if I made the main window smaller I would cut off the scroll bars and the content of the PDF, if I enlarged the main window then I would get a gray box in the new space.

This was extremely annoying, especially in Windows 7 with it’s new windows snapping and other management tools. However now I think I have finally found a work around that should allow me to move to 64bit without worries for now.

A great forum post about another product pointed me in the right direction. It seems the there is a very low level bug in the Windows 64bit GUI API that does not always send enough redraw messages to programs. This is exactly the problem I was having, and they seemed to be able to fix it. So I had hope.

It seems that if a Window frame is nested too many times then Windows 64 bits a loop counter (of 19! which seems ridiculously low) and will not send the redraw message to any more frames.

Of course Adobe pretty much abandons all software after one version, so I could not hope for a fix from them. But then I found a post on Adobe’s site from another user about the same problem. Apparently when he disabled Sitepoint from Logitech the problem went away. I checked for Sitepoint but did not have it installed, but then I remembered I had Display Fusion installed.

It seems that having programs that might interact with other Windows on the desktop might use up some of redraw counts you have for each window. So when Sitepoint or Display Fusion is running on my system Acrobat does not update the Window.

Very strange bug, and I am sad that this bug has persisted from XP 64bit, thru Vista, and is still in the Windows 7 RC. Maybe it will be fixed in the RTM version I will get on Monday, but at least now I have an idea of the problem and a work around.

It seems that the Windows 7 driver defaults to stereo output only, and sounds terrible on 5.1 speakers. So goto the “Manage Audio Devices” control panel and right click on “Speakers” and set them up. This control panel allows you to define your speaker configuration, and disable any speakers you are not using. The sound is now great again.

As a follow up tip, right clicking on the Volume control in the system tray allows you to open up the mixer. The new mixer allows you to set separate volume levels for different apps. Very handy.

After using Windows 7 for just a few hours I am starting to feel that Microsoft has finally started to do something right. I say “something” because I can not quite put my finger on what it is, it’s many little things that make up an intangible feeling of “rightness.”

When I first installed Vista everything just felt wrong. It was just a little off, the speed that windows opened, the way the start menu worked, the way the shutdown button did not shutdown the computer. Things were just a little off and it kept annoying me.

Windows 7 Beta is the other way around, even with the new Taskbar and Window previews I just feel at ease using it. Everything is more intuitive to use, and does what you think it should.

Personally I think that Vista was too much like Windows XP’s interface. The start button, the the taskbar, etc all looked very similar to XP, but then Microsoft changed the placement of hundreds of little things. When things looks similar to something we automatically expect them to work in the same way.

With Windows 7 the taskbar is different enough that when I see it I have fewer assumptions about how things “should” work just by looking at the desktop. I am more willing to learn how this new interface works. This combined with the fact that Microsoft have done a good job so far with making an intuitive interface lead to the enjoyable experience of learning of this new iteration of Windows works.

Hopefully development/polishing continues on schedule and we have a really solid upgrade to Windows XP before 2010.