Saturday, January 24, 2009

My Windows 7 Experience

 

Once again, its Beta time!  The vista beta program was full of thrilling crashes and incompatibilities, and so I approach 7 with a bit of caution.  So far so good!  Main home PC.  Build 7000  -  64 bit.  Full install, not upgrade.

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The install process seems to be faster than Vista 64, but i neglected to time it.  Suffice it to say that at 5:30 pm I was double checking that I had saved things from Vista, and the clock in the corner shows almost 7:pm.

       At this point, I have run every available update from Microsauce, Installed OpenOffice, Firefox, my extensions, Utorrent, and Nero Burning Rom.  After that I installed the Windows Live Suite which gives me Mail and Writer.

      Current hardware:  Intel Core2 Duo E6600, Geforce 8800GT, 4 GB DDR2-800.

 

I had installed 7 earlier on my laptop, a Dell D620 that does not have enough oomph to run vista very well at all.  7 however, runs almost as nice as XP does on that machine.  So far the only compatibility issue i have come across is NetStumbler.  It simply will not find the network card.  I use that laptop when going to customers homes and checking their internet connections.  The wireless connection utility on 7 is light years beyond Xp or Vista! Simply click on the tray icon and you are presented with a pop-up list of available networks to select from.  I had no driver issues with that machine.  They were all loaded already when I booted it up.  On the D620, Firefox seems to be a slow starter, slower than IE8 anyway.  On the home PC, that is not an issue.  Given the performance gap between the two machines, that is perfectly acceptable.

        On the home PC, there were no driver issues either.  In fact, it even found my network connected HP printer without any input from me!  With Vista I had to scream, pull my hair out, and download a huge slow file from support.hp.com and then hope that it ran.  That took three tries and waiting for 64bit support.   

Here is what I was presented with the first time I clicked the “devices and printers” thingy on the start menu.

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Notice that it sees my G15 Keyboard even though I have not loaded the Logitech software yet.  And it even shows my mouse as the right color!

OOH !  : correction, there is one driver issue.  Sound.  This is what i get for using a Soundblaster.  Creative Labs (the manufacturer of Soundblaster sound cards) has the worst driver support of any hardware vendor around.

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I couldn't resist setting this wallpaper:

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So, my Windows 7 experience has been low key enough that I am wasting time playing with wallpaper.

I have yet to do any gaming on it, that will be forthcoming.  Off to SoundBlaster.com to try and find a driver………. 

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