I installed Build 7000 on 3 or 4 machines. I found it fine for an early Beta and when I did encounter problems I wasn’t too bothered.

Skip forward a couple of months and I have started with a clean install of the Windows 7 Release candidate Build 7100.

My test machine is a Dell XPS 420 running an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0Ghz) with 8gig of Ram as my intention is go x64 only any legacy applications can be run in XP Mode (more later on that).

Install

The installation took about 20 mins and 100% of my Dell hardware was detected correctly.

The Windows 7 RC is time limited but Microsoft have been generous enough to allow 13 months grace period prior to the expiration of the Beta on June 1st 2010.

The install foot print with Office 2007 SP2 installed is about 24gig (remember this includes an 8gb swap file due to the size of the ram being used.

In my case that 8gb swap file is probably overkill and a quarter of that or less would be sufficient. Ill tweak it later while looking at any SSD optimisations.

This foot print size would only be a problem for users of say a 32gb SSD drives. My install is running on an Intel X25-M which has a capacity of 80gig.

Performance

This test machine is pretty well specified and runs Windows 7 very smoothly. I am running Dual Monitor and the support for this is very straight forward and just works.

The boot speed seems slightly slower than i was expecting but this could be the x64 and 8gig of ram swap file.

Annoyances

Google Chrome doesn’t work out of the box so you have to get on the developer channel and use the Dev version. The only problem I have found is when you create a Gmail Application short cut you cannot close it by double clicking the top left.

Tip: I cant remember how well task bar jump lists were implemented in build 7000 but in 7100 they are really useful. All you need to do is right click over the taskbar icons to see the jump list (see Pic below for IE8 and Excel).

Over the next few days I will rack up some hours testing the robustness of this release.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Windows 7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.