First Impressions of Windows 7 Beta

I installed the Windows 7 beta (build 6.1.7000) x64 edition on my Dell XPS 710 late last week. I've been known as a "computer geek" for over 20 years; why should I change now? I'm always itching to try the latest and greatest, and after attending an MSDN developer conference on Thursday--and seeing what seemed to be a pretty stable-looking OS--decided to give it a whirl.

The Good
Overall, I've been quite pleased. The installation was surprisingly smooth--and fast. I decided to go with a clean install, as opposed to an upgrade. Upgrade installations always upgrade past problems. Whether it's Windows 95 to 98, 2000 to XP or XP to Vista, a clean install is just the way to go.

Windows 7 detected every single piece of hardware my XPS had. Looking in Device Manager, I didn't have any question marks or exclamation points decrying unknown hardware. I've never hard that happen before. The whole installation took maybe 40-45 minutes, if even that long. So I was able to start playing right away.

Obviously when you upgrade to a new OS, especially a beta, you never know what's going to work and what's not. I had a whole host of applications I used in Vista, an OS I'm pretty happy with. If only Vista was faster...

Speaking of faster, Windows 7 boots up and logs in a LOT faster than Vista. Whether it's as fast as XP may be debateable, but if it's not, it's close. In terms of speed, it blows Vista away. I also noticed the speed improvement in Windows Update. Updates install super fast, even faster than they do in XP. (Updates seem to install at about the same speed in Vista and XP, I've found.)

Now for the applications...Office 2007, Adobe Web Premium CS4 suite, iTunes x64, Zune and Diskeeper. I was able to install them all without any trouble, except for Diskeeper. I was using DK 2008 Professional; the installer said I was using an incompatible OS. I went out to DK's site and downloaded 2009 Professional for a 30-day trial. That installed and seems to be running fine (I checked a few blogs to see if this worked because DK doesn't officially support it).

I've been running Outlook 2007 a lot and haven't had any issues, so I'm pretty confident the whole Office suite (updated via Windows Update) will be just fine. I fired up a few of the Adobe applications, and they all seem to be just fine as well. I haven't tried out Roxio yet, but it installed, so that's a good sign.

Visual Studio 2008...that's a monster to install, but it installed faster than I've ever seen it install. VS 2008 Service Pack 1 -- one of the most painfully slow installations I've ever seen. This installed in less than an hour.

User Account Control (UAC)...they give you the flexibility to specify how much prompting you get about privileged operations. You get 4 levels of prompting. The default is to prompt for stuff like installing applications or programs making system changes. But you don't get prompted for trying to change Windows settings yourself, like launching Computer Management or copying a file into the Program Files directory. The result: a LOT less UAC prompts!

The Bad
Okay, so it's not all kudos. Now for the complaints...

Windows Explorer...I've found that if I do some major file operations, such as large copies or moves, Windows Explorer may lock up. It'll seem responsive; you can click around, but you'll just get the green progress bar moving perpetually across the top of the address bar. If you click another folder, you'll reset this progress bar but the folder won't actually change. But that's not the real problem--the real problem is an "unkillable" explorer.exe process. You can't shut down the machine, nor can you kill the process (you can try, but it'll remain in Task Manager). Long story short, you have to power cycle the machine.

One of my favorite tools was Magic Disc, a freeware application that allows you to mount ISO images as a virtual CD/DVD drive. This worked flawlessly in Windows Vista and Server 2008, so I had hopes for Windows 7. It installed just fine, despite the unsigned driver warning (this appears in Vista/2008 as well), and I could mount an image. But as soon as I tried to use that virtual drive, the OS would become horribly unstable. It wouldn't blue screen, but just became progressively and generally unusable. Explorer would crash, and eventually other applications would become unresponsive or crash themselves. I rebooted in safe mode, and rolled back using System Restore. I don't trust uninstallers to uninstall completely, and since this one made the OS unstable, I wanted it removed completely. System Restore plucked it without a problem. Peace and harmony was restored. I found an alternate program, called PowerISO, and it works just fine.

Diskeeper 2008...wouldn't install. Had to upgrade. Version 2009 goes in just fine. I downloaded a 30-day trial version. That'll give me enough time to decide whether or not I like this.

Logitech...if you have a Logitech camera (I have a Communicate Deluxe model), and you download the driver from Logitech, it won't install. It says your OS is unsupported. Hmm...this could be a problem. So I plugged in the camera. Windows gulped down a driver (version 11.8) from Windows Update, and the camera was usable. Sweet! Immediately this caused Logitech Update to run, which then said my OS was unsupported when it downloaded the new version. No biggie...version 11.8 works and it works with Yahoo Messenger. Good enough. So if you have a Logitech camera, just plug it in. Looks like the driver will come from Windows Update.

Kaspersky AV...this was one of the antivirus recommendations from Microsoft. I tried this one. It worked, but it made a lot of system operations slow, slow, slow! And it was popping up alerts about all kinds of things, like password protected files, despite the fact I chose the "recommended" option which was supposed to be less obtrusive. Since it was the last change I hade made, I used System Restore to rip it out. I went with the Norton 360 option instead. This works better.

The Undecided
The new taskbar...they did away with QuickLaunch and merged it with Jump Lists. By default, when you run apps, they don't appear with their names in the taskbar, just as their icons, although you can enable the labels. According to a Wikipedia article, the taskbar has seen its most major modification since Windows 95. I'm not quite sure I like it. I probably will; it'll just take some getting used to.

Windows Media Center...allegedly this has received quite an upgrade. I haven't tried it out yet. I have a Blu-ray drive in my computer so it would be nice to see native Blu-ray support.

I guess that's about all for now. As I said earlier, overall I've been pretty pleased. This is a beta, so it's bound to have problems. Hopefully Microsoft and driver vendors won't drop the ball like they did with Vista. Driver support in Vista was a fiasco, and hopefully the parties have learned their lessons.

~M

This blog was composed in Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7 Beta x64.