Windows 7 almost a year old

I enjoy that the performance is better on my old hardware than windows XP. How often does that happen with a new version of windows?

I really like all of the information that the user can mine. Coming from a Unix/MaC background, it was always very difficult for me to cope with the lack of information provided in a windows environment when troubleshooting problems. Windows 7 is a big step forward in that respect.

I skipped vista because of all of its problems, but really wanted to move to a 64 bit system as Photoshop was always crashing on my in my 4G 32 bit XP when editing enough pictures simultaneously, With Windows 7 it may slow down, but 64 bit Photoshop doesn't crash (not much worse than loosing lengthy photo edit IMO!), and it is faster and the graphics support is better.

One other thing -my XP box had lost its ability to fgo to sleep on its own. After much investigation I could not correct this. Windows 7 is bittersweet. It will almost always go to sleep. Unfortunately it will go to sleep while performing a scheduled scan or other scheduled task that wakes the computer to run in the middle of the night. I have found ways to prevent this so I am more happy than with XP in regards to this.

The BCD boot config is new to me since I skipped Vista. This seems an archaic step back and is difficult to use, but I understand the motivations, though the interface sucks big time.

I also am semi-happy with the color management since I do photo work. However, there is a lot to be desired. I have a monitor (NE spectraview) with calibration that manipulates the monitor's hardware LUT. I have a second extended monitor that I have calibrated using the Windows 7 calibration that I use for non-color critical windows. I would like to have windows manage that monitor, but not my NEC spectra view. That is not possible as far as I can see,

I sure wish windows 7 UAC would let you say "always trust this program" so you wouldn't always get the same pop-up. I was tempted to turn UAC off entirely because of this, but I didn't. I am sure a lot of people have, however. This nullifies the value of that feature IMO.

Well that is off the top of my head my thoughts after about 3 weeks of use.

- Gene

GeneO said:

The BCD boot config is new to me since I skipped Vista. This seems an archaic step back and is difficult to use, but I understand the motivations, though the interface sucks big time.

You might consider going to EasyBCD, which is a free 3rd-party replacement for the standard Win7 boot manager. (link for download at the bottom of the page)

It's still a boot-time boot manager (to allow boot selection from multiple available operating systems on your hard drives, e.g. Win7 vs. WinXP vs. xxx) in the end, but at least it has a flexible and intuitive GUI interface running under Win7 that allows you to configure the boot control files with text names and priorities as you see fit.

Of course once you get your multi-boot setup in place you'll likely never ever use it again (at least not until the next OS install). I myself haven't come back to it again since last December when I installed Win7 x64 on a new partition, retaining WinXP x86 on my old existing partition. I then changed the default text descriptions for boot-time choice to be more meaningful for me, changed the default priority to point to Win7, and that's the end.