Yesterday I made a decision to try out Windows 7. For my surprise it was way easier than I expected. Installation went without even a minor problem. After about 40 minutes (maybe a bit longer) system was set up. I have installed the system on my quite old (ok, I admit it, it almost ‘ancient’) desktop PC: Athlon XP 2200+, 1.5GB of RAM, GeForce FX5900XT (GeForce 5 series), ASUS AV880 mainboard and old Seagate 40GB hard drive (quite old ATA drive) – I didn’t want to spoil my system. The only thing I was wondering about after the installation was, why Windows 7 didn’t recognize the graphics card. I know that it is old, but I was quite surprising that right after installation it was detected as ‘generic VGA adapter’. Anyway, after couple of minutes I had it working with the best drivers I found on nVidia’s site (it is great that Windows 7 is able to use Vista drivers). The other thing that didn’t work out-of-the-box was sound driver. ASUS mainboard on which the desktop PC is built has some strange AC97 compatible on-board sound, which I believe is ‘not the best one’ (I think full chip name is: ADI SOUNDMAX, or something similar). Searching for sound driver could have been much more exhausting, but… I had the driver prepared ;) I found it while installing Windows Vista. If you have problems with similar sound hardware search for “wdm_3665.zip”, unzip it, and choose the installation with ‘have disk’ method (the proper driver is in on of extracted folders – the one that contain files for Windows 2k / XP). Anyway, after about and hour, everything was configured, and I could have started using the system.
First impression was: wow, it really seems that this is a bit faster than Vista. But this impression didn’t last long. After installing couple of applications everything slowed down, and I started noticing some strange things: sometimes it takes a lot more time to launch some apps. Much more comparing to Vista or XP. You can even thing that app hung while loading, but it just need a bit more time to start. And it does not only affects big apps, I have this problem with Total Commander – after clicking it’s icon, it shows screen with my registration data for a couple of seconds, and then starts. It’s not a big problem, but rather something you would expect to be fixed.
I can’t get used to the new taskbar. There is (by default, it can be changed) no ‘quick launch’ (well, the standard one), the idea of making programs icons, that are launched a bit more ‘rounded’ is not the best – in my opinion. It is quite hard to know at the first sight which program is actually run, and which doesn’t. The cool thing is, that if you’re downloading file using Internet Explorer the icon on the taskbar shows actual downloading progress – I like it. And even IE8 beta is quite nice, the first impression is very, very positive, but it is gone, when it hangs (it seems that IE’s JavaScript engine lacks some performance) on Windows Live site. I must admit, that I had some problems with printouts – it is strange, because the same program generates proper printouts on Windows XP (I was printing to .pdf files in both cases).
There are dozens of small changes in Windows’ UI – but I am sure you already read about them, so I won’t repeat it. System is very stable, there is no ‘ah… this is beta…’ feeling. Taking under consideration Microsoft’s software release cycle, BETA 1 (which Windows 7 BETA build 7000 is) is never optimized for performance. It may consume less memory than Vista (although I didn’t check that, so I am not sure) but one may be disappointed if expecting huge performance boost (again: comparing to Vista). At the moment there is no point in comparing those two versions of Windows, because of immaturity of Windows 7 (everyone expect it to be Vista killer, we’ll see in next couple of months). So what’s the point in installing Windows 7? There are some new features you may be interested in (shortcuts, famous ‘make window half screen wide’ feature and alike). Concepts of home network and document libraries (did they take the WinFS back from grave?) are very interesting. If you have some free GB’s on your hard drive – I think Windows 7 is definitely worth installing.
Tags: Windows7
