It’s been a week. What have we learned from Windows 7?
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Remember, you can go here to get information on the Windows 7 beta. This is a recap of the posts, my experience, and the future direction I will take with Windows 7.
This post was NOT written under the influence of Microsoft Mind Control.
This has been the most exciting week that Windows has ever seen. I have had not one Blue Screen. Not one Total System Crash. There was 1 missing driver, but Windows Update found it for me yesterday. The experience I have had with Build 7000 has been terrific. The only way Microsoft could top my 9/10 for Windows 7 (in pre-beta) is if it were given to us for free. People have whinged and moaned in my presence about how they’ve ripped off all the Vista adopters. I feel their pain with a Windows Vista business tablet PC myself. I don’t know what it is, but I am not whinging — I’m amazed. If this can only get better (which it has, since build 6801) then I will pay for Windows 7 for all my computers.
Anyway, moving away from that, and onto the actual O/S, I’ve tried several pieces of software that can break O/Ses, cause BSODs, etc. The three I mainly have trouble with on Vista are virtual drive managers, VNC servers, and security software.
After using Windows 7 for three days, it was growing on me. I decided that I should try playing the full Black Books seasons 1-3 on DVD in Windows Media Centre. Trouble was, a friend had realised how good the show was, and nicked off with it for a few days. Luckily, I keep a backup on my hard drive just in case. I was feeling lazy, so I downloaded the first free thing I saw: Slysoft’s Virtual CloneDrive. That program scared the jibblies out of me when it didn’t create the drive and I couldn’t even access the control panel in Windows 7. Trying to delete it as quickly as possible, I found the related SCSI driver and bahleeted it. Luckily, I used PowerISO in the past, and knew it wouldn’t let me down (and it didn’t). It worked seamlessly with four drives running (all the ISOs I had! :D).
Since the house and my wonderful shed are 50 meters apart, it’s good to be able to control computers at a distance. I do enjoy using Windows’ embedded Remote Desktop Connection software, but it doesn’t have any enthusiast features like File Transfer, etc. For those situations, I use UltraVNC. It worked perfectly as a server and as a viewer. Wouldn’t crash in when using a Direct3D game, which was great (this crashes in Vista regularly).
Last, but definitely not least, security software is an essential with any build of Windows. I had previously downloaded ESET’s Smart Security (combining NOD32 and a firewall) for my Vista PC as I’d never had the flexibility to buy anything other than Norton 360. (I will probably try that in the coming days when my ISP resets my quota). It works a charm, also.
I’ve managed to get Windows 7 working with my XP computer upstairs, and the Xbox 360.
I haven’t really run into any major problems that could bring me away from wanting to be an early Windows 7 adopter.
I have to mention this, but it seems to be the perfect storm at Apple in favor of Microsoft. Windows 7 is being heralded as an “incredibly stable” operating system by huge companies that banned Vista from their own departments (Intel blog), while Apple seems to be confused and bewildered by Steve Jobs taking six months’ leave. Shareholders have sent their share price tumbling, and the fact that a “succession plan” has been handed to the public seems to be like waving a red sheet in front of a pack of bulls.
2 Comments
the oracle
January 16th, 2009
at 4:09am
While it may be stable for you, it has been less than swell for me, on a machine that has run Windows XP without incident for a couple of years, and Vista Business for a couple of months.
Sure, the thing is a bit faster than Vista, but there is much less software being loaded by the install (letting Windows Live and its fitful installations of 32bit programs on the 64bit version is not terribly smart of MS.)
Windows 7 also has, from the things I’ve seen (and they are many, because I have much interest in whether my clients will be moving) many medium to large businesses decrying the menu system changes, due to inconvenience, lost productivity, and retraining costs.
If you look at my post about Paul Thurrott (a major MS fanboy with a well known Windows site) you’ll see he is also finding it hard to get excited about that portion of 7.
Bryan Price
January 16th, 2009
at 12:41pm
They must have just updated Virtual CloneDrive because it works just fine on my Win7 install. I installed the complete Office 2003 repertoire with it. No problem. The problem is that the new virtual drive won’t show up until you’ve got something mounted in it. That blew me away, but when I just found the ISOs and right clicked them, then I could mount them and all was fine.
I did have to run the desktop icon and tell it that I wanted 1 drive, as the default was 0(!?)
Mozy is working as a backup (I haven’t tried any of the other backup software yet) and I’m running ClamWin for antivirus. It works, but it’s still throwing a false positive on Microsoft’s associate.exe from the Resource Kit, even after I submitted it and got feedback that they had corrected it. Virustotal reports that it’s the only one that thinks that it is a virus.
I’ve unpinned IE and pinned Firefox. I wanted to pin Firefox 3.1preB3, that’s a portable program and it pins the running executable and not the starting program, so that it actually looks at my FF3.0 install instead of the portable stuff.
And it hasn’t been a full week for me yet.