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claidheamhmorI installed Windows 7 Beta on my home PC a few days ago, finally taking the plunge with it on a live working machine.
Installation was a couple of hours, but it did a perfect upgrade of Vista, leaving most stuff working just fine afterward. I did update graphics and sound drivers afterward, using Vista driver packages, to make sure.
So far, so good; I've encountered very little in the way of issues. Picasa needed to have the shortcut modified to "Run as Administrator", otherwise it started up every time as if it were the first time. Windowblinds doesn't run at all under Windows 7, but given that it replaces the Windows interface, that's not surprising. The most annoying thing is that all the Vista Sidebar gadgets I'd downloaded simply don't work on Windows 7; only the 10 or 12 standard ones that come with 7 seem to work at all. I haven't read up on the issue though, so maybe it's something silly.
Otherwise, all the apps I have seem to run perfectly. On my Pentium E5200 at 3.1GHz with 4GB RAM, it doesn't visibly seem any quicker than Vista, but I was perfectly happy with Vista's performance.
I like the new combo quicklaunch/taskbar. It took a little getting used to, but it consolidates things very well, and I think as more Windows 7-aware apps come out, the context menus on the icons will be more useful. I do wish the icon sizes had a greater range though, rather than "small" and "large", both of which are too wide for my liking (I believe that's fixed in the Windows 7 Release Candidate).
The "libraries" feature is cool - it lets you show files from disparate locations in a single library, as if they're all in one place. For example, my "Pictures" library incorporates images from 5 or 6 folders scattered all over my hard drives that contain pictures.
There seems to be a lot more customisability and flexibility, and that's definitely a good thing; plenty more options to play with, and many little improvements.
Windows 7 does include IE 8 beta, which is much quicker than IE 7, but I was running IE 8 beta on Vista anyway.
Installation was a couple of hours, but it did a perfect upgrade of Vista, leaving most stuff working just fine afterward. I did update graphics and sound drivers afterward, using Vista driver packages, to make sure.
So far, so good; I've encountered very little in the way of issues. Picasa needed to have the shortcut modified to "Run as Administrator", otherwise it started up every time as if it were the first time. Windowblinds doesn't run at all under Windows 7, but given that it replaces the Windows interface, that's not surprising. The most annoying thing is that all the Vista Sidebar gadgets I'd downloaded simply don't work on Windows 7; only the 10 or 12 standard ones that come with 7 seem to work at all. I haven't read up on the issue though, so maybe it's something silly.
Otherwise, all the apps I have seem to run perfectly. On my Pentium E5200 at 3.1GHz with 4GB RAM, it doesn't visibly seem any quicker than Vista, but I was perfectly happy with Vista's performance.
I like the new combo quicklaunch/taskbar. It took a little getting used to, but it consolidates things very well, and I think as more Windows 7-aware apps come out, the context menus on the icons will be more useful. I do wish the icon sizes had a greater range though, rather than "small" and "large", both of which are too wide for my liking (I believe that's fixed in the Windows 7 Release Candidate).
The "libraries" feature is cool - it lets you show files from disparate locations in a single library, as if they're all in one place. For example, my "Pictures" library incorporates images from 5 or 6 folders scattered all over my hard drives that contain pictures.
There seems to be a lot more customisability and flexibility, and that's definitely a good thing; plenty more options to play with, and many little improvements.
Windows 7 does include IE 8 beta, which is much quicker than IE 7, but I was running IE 8 beta on Vista anyway.