Windows 7
Rocks. So far.
The first thing I noticed was that all of the hardware that I cared about worked out of the box (somewhat expected, but still good) - dual displays. check. sound. check.
Still more impressive was the fact that upon downloading and installing my graphics drivers, I was not prompted to reboot. At all. I was actually dropped out to text mode for a split second and the monitor blanked and flashed a few times, and I came back up with the installation complete.
Would I have been less impressed if this hadn’t happened? No. Frankly, I never expected MS to care.
Nice work, MS. Very nice.
The default desktop was clean. I was impressed with the default background. It added to the overal feeling of clean on the system.
My initial impressions of the start menu/taskbar rewrite can be summed up in one word: Nice. Anything I’d normally put on the desktop, including the recycle bin (If I ever used the thing, I’d leave it on the desktop - the right click menu doesn’t work quite like I want it to - if I could get the proper context menu when I right clicked, instead of, or in addition to, the windows explorer “You put something inside this popup menu” context menu, this would be the -perfect- feature) is now on it’s own nice, neat little popup menu. Think OS X. It’s kinda like that.
One word for the windows 7 desktop: clean.
Installation of my apps (Firefox, Pidgin to start) went cleanly, and more or less 100% as expected. Some very small graphical glitches with pidgin, but nothing TOO obnoxious.
The UAC Improvements went largely unnoticed for me - I’ve been using Vista since not long after it came out, so I’m used to it. I think it functions appropriately considering what it’s supposed to be doing for you. Meh. *shrug*
One thing that i’ve noticed - things that would normally pop up and annoy me (such as the firefox “Downloads” window are conspiciously absent. They remain in the dock. I might like this. We’ll see.
It’s at this point that i’ll mention my first hiccup with Windows 7, because this is where everything just started to suck. Technical and detailed, I know.
I decided to install iTunes 64bit - this may have been a bad idea. Before the install really started, it essentially locked up my computer - first completely, for a few seconds, and then it caused some kind of issue where explorer would chew up all available resources, and I was unable to get the installer to even start again. I was met with the same issue with the 32-bit version.
After some playing around, I was able to get it to install by running the installer as administrator and choosing Vista SP2 compatibility mode. Fun times had by all.
After the installation, my iPhone was detected correctly, and the application did work as expected, however, there were some audio skips, and a quick check confirmed that a decent amount of CPU was in use, possibly enough to cause the chopping. Why that’s the case when I have firefox, pidgin, and iTunes open (and not doing anything TOO demanding with any of them, as far as I know) I can’t tell yet. Maybe it’s time to pick up a quad core. I hate that logic, but maybe.
While I was ready to post glowing reviews of Win7, I’m not quite so sure anymore. This will be my first 64 bit instance of windows, and i’m not sure how much of my issues are due to the fact that this IS a 64-bit OS, and the rest of the world doesn’t quite have their head attached correctly when it comes to 64-bit.
Is Windows 7 the shizzle? No.
Is Windows 7 good? Maybe.
Is Windows 7 better than Vista? Maybe.
Expect to hear from me again.