My first day using Windows 7 Beta 1

A couple of days ago I sacrificed a laptop to the deities of experimentation and beta by putting Windows 7 on it. Turns out that the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7 completely blew away my boot record and the system actually lost track of my NTFS so the bootable recovery disks (yes people, I actually had a reco disk!!) saw my original drive partition as free space.

So I figured, "What the hell..the drive's already empty anyway... might as well put Win7 on a fresh drive!"

So that's what I did. That process, in stark contrast to the Vista->Win7 upgrade, was ridiculously smooth. It's a fairly high-end laptop which typically means a crapload of OEM drivers that confuse Vista and prevent things like sound cards from working. Win7 recognized the 512MB laptop video card and it recognized the audio driver and the keyboard and trackpad worked...as did the WiFi and bluetooth and built-in camera. The only thing it didn't recognize out of the box was the custom keyboard functionality like the volume controls that trigger various HUD displays... 10 minutes after hitting the manufacturer website for the Vista drivers, that too was working.

My first impression was mixed. By default, Win7 gave me the crappy theme with no transparency. After changing to the good theme, things started looking up. The most completely surprising thing that happened to me is that after using Win7 for a couple of hours, I am absolutely addicted to the new taskbar. I absolutely hate all taskbars in comparison, including my beloved OS X dock.

The quick preview you get when you hover over an item in the task bar is really useful. But what makes it MORE useful is that if you hover over the preview, all windows on the desktop become transparent borders, allowing you to see the full contents of that window. If you then click the preview, that window becomes the foreground window. This is HUGE for me. I typically have 10+ windows open and can't find squat when I'm knee deep in some programming task with an IDE open, a couple command lines, two browser windows, an SDK manual, and various and sundry other gadgetry. IE8 even goes so far as to give me a preview of every single TAB in every single IE8 window in a nice grid format. I don't know about you, but seeing a quick preview of a browser window does me no good if I can't see all 15 tabs. Win7's taskbar + IE8 makes that possible...I only hope Firefox will eventually work the same way.

Couple other observations that people might find interesting:

• UAC prompts seem to be a little less frequent (though this could be entirely wrong... that's just how it felt)
• Win7 Beta 1 is noticeably and quantifiably faster and responsive than Vista SP1. Try copying a file from a network share to your local disk on Vista. Time it. Do the same on Win7. Rejoice.
• The "libraries" thing seems like a good feature. I know my wife would get a lot of use out of it because she has literally thousands of documents on her computer. Me, not so much but I'll have to see how it works when I start tagging code directories and the like.
• WiFi configuration seems to have MORE clicks required than Vista and somehow bends the laws of user experience physics to be MORE confusing than Vista's configuration. That said, once WiFi is configured, it doesn't seem to fail nearly as often as my Vista one. Also, I no longer have to reboot when the wireless router obtains a new IP... that one "feature" of Vista is enough to make me want to stab my eyes with rusty forks and I've already decided I shall never use Vista on my home router again...not when I've got Win7 available.
• Downloadable content. Even in Beta 1, there are like 10 additional desktop themes that you can download from the gallery website and they auto-install when you click on them. This is often underrated but dammit I love my extras and the fact that Vista's "ultimate extras" never added a single damn extra throughout the entire lifetime of the product was vastly dissappointing. The fact that Win7 already has downloadable extra goodies is a promising sign. Let's hope MS keeps it up and makes it so there's like 30 pages of fun crap people can download when they get Win7 on day 1.

Bottom line is that I've already removed Vista from the machines that I have that are not mission critical. I didn't do that to XP even after Vista SP1. Win7 (beta 1!) seems to be faster, smoother, more sturdy, and even looks a little better than Vista. All MS has to do is deliver what's in this beta and I'm sold.

Of course...I was sold when I used Longhorn and then they trashed Longhorn and turned it into Vista and it had none of the stuff I really wanted anymore, so I'm still a little leery. As I use Win7 beta 1 more I will post more blog entries if I find things that are really cool or really crappy :)

tags: win7  windows7  vista  windows  microsoft  beta  review  

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