Three Days of Win7 (Build 7000)

I figured I'd give a run down of what I have been able to accomplish in the past 3 days of playing with this beta. For the record, I am not an IT person or "professional" beta tester.

A bit of background. I installed the beta onto my company laptop. I have proven to my local IT person that I am quite knowledgable about hardware and software, and I can often fix small problems around the office and save him a 2 hour trip, so as repayment, I get some autonomy in regards to running software on this PC. The stipulation is that I also get no support. I'm on my own . The rest of the company is still on XP and Office 2003.

So, what do I need to do my day to day work? Office (I run 2007), Groupwise for corporate e-mail. We run a Novell server, so the Novell Client. I also do some custom application work, so I run Visual Studio 2008. We have custom web apps, so IE is also required.

The laptop was purchased in May 2006, is a Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 gHz). It maxes out at 2 GB RAM (which I have). Video is an ATi Radeon Mobility X1600.

I wanted to dogfood this, so I installed fresh on a new hard drive. So far everything seems to be working. I have not compiled anything, yet, so I don't know how VS 2008 is working. I'll be working on that this weekend.

I also played with Vista Beta 1 and Beta 2 back in the day, and they were nowhere as polished as this beta. It took Novell almost 7 months after Vista went RTM to get a working client. The Vista Client SP1 works fairly well in this Beta. It doesn't seem to run the login scripts automatically when I use the initial login screen. If I just login as a windows local user and then login to Novell, the scripts run and my shares are added.

One thing that doesn't work is the email shortcuts in Office 2007. Eventhough I have Groupwise selected as my default mail app, Excel and Word don't recognize it. I'll play with setting and see if I can fix that.

As far as the UI enhancements go, I love the new taskbar. I am slowly learning the library structure. That may take some getting used to. I also run a separate monitor when in the office, and I really wish that MS would support dual monitors better. I have display fusion for Vista and I love it, but the OS should have basic settings, like separate backgrounds per monitor, and options on how the task bar operates with one or two displays functioning.

On the whole, I think this is the best OS MS has put together. I'll qualify that with this, I really like Vista. I think MS got Vista right, they just ran out of time. Five years of development, including a major reset hurt them. I do believe that Windows 7 is a polishing of Vista, with Sinofsky UI enhancements, and that's good.

I'll come back with more as I continue testing.

Good writeup sir and welcome to sevenforums :)

Welcome good sir, I will hand in my paper late, sorry guys, but I will report back to you as soon as I'm finished.

Nice mini-review. Thanks for taking time to post with us

Well let me start by saying, Windows 7 has what it takes to be a new OS, its functional, quick & looks very nice. I was at a party last night & brought my laptop with Windows 7 installed on it & people liked the way it looks, one of my friends that is tech savvy loved how fast he was able to move in what looked like to him an upgrade to Vista. I have Ableton Live 7 installed on it, its a software I use to DJ & edit music so I connected my laptop up to their sound system & had a small performance. It works well with my USB midi controllers M Audio O2 & Triggerfinger, the latency was really low even with a bunch of effects running & I for got to set the desktop background off from slide show mode so that was running as well. I had no sound issues of any kind & now I feel confident that Windows 7 works well with Ableton Live & hope that the final release of 7 will be this compatible.

I also use it for Email, Office, web browsing, movie editing, & other things & so far the only issues I have are small so here it goes.

1. The gadgets gallery doesn't work anymore.
2. Sometimes compatibility mode in IE8 still doesn't display pages correctly. (but Chrome does!)
3. You have to turn off a feature through device manager for your HDD so that you can get a better WEI rating.

Like I said its not much to complain about but I would really like my gadgets to work, I had workarounds for the other things. I don't know if this will at all be of use to any of you guys but this has been my experience since I installed just a few days ago.

Mike

Thanks Ted, I'll look in to it in a bit to see if this fixes it.

Great write up Phreephly and welcome.