Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Windows 7 Beta: How well does Lotus Software work?

When I first tried installing Windows Vista I used a Thinkpad T41. The results were very poor. Whist the operating system did install it was pretty much incapable of doing anything useful. I quickly reverted to using Windows XP again. With the launch of the Windows 7 Beta1 I thought I would try the same test again. And I am very encouraged by the results. It is clearly a step up from Vista both in terms of stability and performance.

From downloading the code (over 2GB) to burning it onto a DVD to installing it onto my venerable Thinkpad only took a few short hours. Within a couple of reboots it was recognising my Wireless Lan, Graphics Card and the other computers on my network. Impressive although nothing you wouldn't expect from a Mac or Ubuntu.

But the big question is does Lotus Software work on it? The answer is a resounding yes. The first thing I installed was Lotus Mobile Connect to get VPN access to IBM's internal systems. Then of course it was Lotus Notes. It installed a treat and after I copied my bookmarks, workspace (OK I'm occasionally old school) and ID file it was like working on my main PC. As you can see, Lotus Sametime also works brilliantly as well.


I also checked out the Lotus Symphony editors and they all worked faultlessly.


All in all you would have to conclude that Windows 7 is a massive improvement on Vista. I happen to know that IBM Lotus Quality Engineering always test out latest software on older hardware. Specifically, they have used a Thinkpad T30 which is over 5 years old to ensure that performance would be fine. Despite a slow start with Notes 8.0 the performance optimisation in 8.0.2 and 8.5 is really impressive.

So in conclusion, Lotus Notes 8.5, Sametime, Symphony, Quickr and Portal all work fine on Windows 7 Beta 1 on a three year old computer. But beware if you want to edit a picture, watch a video or play a simple card game!

Update: The first version of Lotus Notes that officially supports Windows 7 is release 8.5.1 Fixpack 1. See Here

12 comments:

DJ said...

Glad to see you got it working. I installed Lotus Notes 8.5 on Windows 7 and it won't let me into my mail file. I guess since you have it working I'll have to go back with the notion that it was a bad install or something.

Anonymous said...

Key Ports!!! Long time!

Good to read about your 7 experiences. Now we gotta get you a copy of O14. :)

Anonymous said...

Darn return key got a bit happy.

From Ror yin Sunny SA.

JR said...

I've installed Notes 8.01 on Win 7 beta and it gives me an error immediately upon launching referring to "Shared memory from a previous Notes/Domino run has been detected". Any ideas?

Mr Ports said...

@Kreapr Best bet would be to try 8.5 (which is out now).

JR said...

Was able to get 8.0.2 and that installed and is running just fine.
Thanks.

Anonymous said...

@Kreapr: I got the same error. Turned out, Notes doesn't use the same .exe file to start as it does to run. (notes.exe vs. notes2w.exe) When I got it up and running, I pinned the program icon to the taskbar, which turned out to be the notes2w.exe process, and Notes subsequently gave me that error message when I tried to start it from there. Pinning the shurtcut Notes put on the desktop (which points to notes.exe) solved the problem, but it is just a static shortcut. When Notes starts, it of course starts the notes2w.exe process, which is given its own icon on the taskbar, it does not merge with the pinned shortcut. Mr Ports, I hope you would suggest to the development team to do something about that... :-)

In other news, I have major problems with Notes 8.0.1 (Norwegian btw. Not shure if 8.5 exist in Norwegian yet.) on Win7 32-bit. It seems to have a memory leak, as often the Notes client itself and sometimes also Sametime locks up, and I have to kill it in Task Manager. Last time, notes2w.exe had consumed over 650 MB of RAM. All I had up were Sametime, my workspace, my sent-folder and a contacts database we use for external addresses. After that, it won't start again before I take a reboot.

Sorry for any misspellings, english is not my first language... ;-)

-John H.

Stefan said...

Unfortunately, I was not successful with installing Notes 8.5 (in case of both the basic client and the Eclipse client) on Win7. I use a "fresh" Win7 installation (within a Sun VirtualBox VM). At the end of the installation processes an error occurs concerning "registering services" (a problem with wsnd??). Does anybody know what that mean or could give me a hint?

Many thanks,

Stefan

Anonymous said...

I have been running Notes 8.5 with Win 7 RC. Experienced the problem with external emails taking forever (around a minute) to open. The problem went away (I don't know why), but when Notes 8.5 was reinstalled the problem has reappeared. Installed Notes FP1 today which did not fix the problem. VERY AGGRAVATING!

Anonymous said...

Found this fix for slow opening of outside emails - it seems to work:
File - Preferences - Basic Notes Client Configuration - Check “Disable embedded browser for MIME mail”

Anonymous said...

Tried Lotus Notes 8.5 on build 7100 - using all compatibility options and right on the first Lotus Noted Install screen it says the install was interrupted and closes out. Anyone experience this?

gamefan12 said...

Windows vista does not work well with a thinkpad. You definitely need to go to windows xp. There is definitely no other options to go with here. storage and moving blog