Using Windows 7 Full Time 1st Week Observations
Picture: My Windows 7 Desktop (on the right is my my legacy XP machine in a 1280×1024 window).
I now have the Windows 7 Beta running as my main computers Operating System.
I originally installed it on my laptop and never encountered any significant problems that would stop me from moving it onto my main day to day desktop PC.
I decided to make my trusty Dell Precision my Legacy machine, it needs to stay in Office 2003 world for database development reasons. This was a big deal for me, could I go 100% remote desktop on what was my main PC?
The answer is yes. I am on a 100mbit network connection so there isn’t any speed or latency issues. I wasn’t ready to go down the virtual PC route just yet.
I use Office 2007 on Windows 7 and only tap into my Legacy machine for Office 2003 Specific work (like database development or maintenance).
This left me free to move to Windows 7 albeit on another pc. I wanted to see it in its full glory on a decent spec machine with dual monitors.
I ended up picking the Dell XPS 420 as the most likely candidate for the job, It has Dual Core 3.0 Ghz, 3gb Ram and an 8800GTX video card with dual DVI output for multi monitor support.
Observations
Driver Support: Not a problem I only have one thing unresolved in the Device Manager that’s not crucial to the operation of the hardware.
Performance: Absolutely spot on. The right combination of XP’s Speed with the nice graphical touches of Vista. The best of both worlds.
Stability: I have clocked about 60 hours use and not encountered a system crash or blue screen.
Taskbar:
I appreciate them trying to improve this but it feels slightly counter productive. I particularly like to run multiple versions of the same software (two copies of excel for example) I can start one from the task bar but I have to start the other one manually.
Issues encountered
Some Vista sidebar Gadgets don’t work (its a UAC elevation thing),
It doesn’t always shut down gracefully or quickly.
Indexing is still annoying but ultimately useful. Placing 20,000 files into the file system and for about a day it was cranking away at indexing them.
Annoyances
In MSpaint the default format is .png not .jpg
1st Week conclusions
It looks nice (really nice), it has decent performance and most of my niggles are small and remember this is still a Beta.
What happens next?
Well Windows 7 will go to a Release Candidate 1 (RC1) then final release. Interestingly this beta will expire August 1st 2009. The timing of the RC1 and final release is going to get interesting. I would be shocked if this didn’t ship in 2009. My guess is late Q3
As I said before this isn’t a real Beta its Windows Vista 2.0 the complicated things like new driver models and security models have all been dealt with.
So far I am glad I made the wholesale move onto Windows 7.
