Windows 7 - Absolutely Sold
6/30/2009
Previously I had only spent about 5 minutes using a much older version of Windows 7 back in January. After fubarring up my current Vista install, I decided to go straight to the Windows 7 RC. I'm sold. It just feels right, and as "satisfied" as I was with XP, Windows simply never gave me this feeling before.
I've just installed it and have been using it for less than an hour. I will continue to blog on this over the coming days, but I am amazingly impressed with Windows 7 and am convinced that XP hold outs will be very interested in Windows 7 and Vista will be quickly put away as was Windows ME.
There are many things I like about Windows 7. But the biggest thing is, it just feels right. Things flow smoothly and it feels very refined.
Devices
I have quite a new ASUS motherboard. I also work with a partner who builds systems and we deal with dozens of board types per month. Even with Vista we often have to manually hunt down ethernet or wireless drivers to get Vista connected to the Internet so we can then add support for other devices. The same was true for my ASUS board, I needed to manually install one of the network drivers first manually. Windows 7 found nearly every device on my machine during install, including both network devices.
Windows 7 also properly found and installed the driver for my video card, rather than using a generic driver as Vista so often did.
Only the ACPI driver is missing, and it was missing from Vista as well. I tried driver search with no luck. Then, almost as if Microsoft read this post, a Windows update a few hours after this post found and installed the ACPI driver.
Applications
With Vista I had major headaches with applications even 2+ years after Vista was released. Many applications did not function, or needed special work arounds. Many shareware applications still do not support Vista. I have only installed about a dozen applications on Windows 7 so far, but every one of them has installed and has run flawlessly so far. I will continue to report on application compatibilty as I install my full suite of applications.
Snipping Tool
A small but welcome addition is the snipping tool. It works nicely.
UAC
This beast is finally dead, or at least the annoying dialogs while running as admin. I have not investigated what's been changed yet, but whatever was done its very welcome.
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