All the positive buzz around Windows 7 made me decide to give it a shot, so I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Pro to use on the Dell I bought to do cross browser testing earlier this year. And, despite being a relatively inexpensive machine, it has much faster hardware than my PowerMac G5 which I have traditionally used for this task. So, I decided to pick up a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (and they apparently came out with a new version right after I bought 7, and the upgrade cost is the same as the full version cost, lovely).

The XL1 only has a firewire port on it, so I had to install my PCI firewire card in the Dell. I thought it was going to be pretty simple, because Windows 7 recognized the device and automatically installed drivers for it. Neat. Unfortunately, the drivers it so helpfully installed were wrong. Thanks to a tip, I found out that in Windows 7, you have to go to the device manager, and then update the driver for the device. From that dialog you click on browse a specific location, and then pick from a list of drivers. You have to pick the legacy driver. Finding that little gem was a waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

Now I have Windows recognizing my firewire card, and the camera. Hurray. I started a project in Premiere, and went to import the video. Didn’t work. The import screen knew that I had a camera, but simply refused to work with it. Piece of junk. I had to do some digging around, and I discovered that I could get Windows Live Movie Maker, which sucks, but it was able to import video for me.

After importing from WLMM I was able to import the video into my premiere project. From that point on it was mostly just annoying dealing with the issues with Premier Elements, and its generally lagginess and poor stability. Of course, the first DVD I attempted to burn turned into a coaster, thank’s Adobe. Luckily, on subsequent attempts the burn process completed successfully.

The whole process took a really freakin’ long time. During the first DVD took about as long as it would have taken to do it on my G5 with iMovie/iDVD. The difference being that the G5 spends most of the time encoding because it is ancient. Whereas on Windows I spent the time dicking around just getting stuff to work at all.

This entire process has made two things quite clear to me:

1. Windows still sucks.
2. I need a new desktop Mac.

Early this month, Apple announced that owners of Leopard will be able to purchase Snow Leopard at a discounted rate of $29.99. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Today, Microsoft announced that owners of Vista will be able to purchase Vista 7 for a full blown $219.99. What a deal. To put this in perspective, the full version of Snow Leopard will be $129.99. Microsoft => FAIL.