Windows 7 – First Impressions
I decided to install Windows 7 on my laptop today. The primary reason for installing beta software on this computer? Speed. Bottom line is Vista ran like a dog on my laptop (Lenovo x61) and it was worth it for me to start over in the hopes that Win7 really is as fast as people are saying. It also helped that Ryan decided to take the Win7 plunge a few days ago and since nothing caught on fire for him I decided it might be safe to give it a go.
So far So Good.
The install was very smooth, took about an hour+, and ran into no problems whatsoever. Everything but the biometrics scanner came up working on first boot which was pretty impressive considering this was a clean install.
From a speed perspective Win7 is a huge upgrade. But then again so is a fresh install of XP, so we will see if I still feel the same way about performance in a month or so. The start menu is snappy, window cycling is very fast, and coming out of hibernation is about 200% faster than Vista. With a 5400 RPM drive, disk churn is a killer, and Win7 seems to keep the crunching to a minimum resulting in the OS staying on its toes.
IE8 also seems to be tweaked for performance. I stopped using IE7 about 6 months ago because I hated waiting a minute and a half for the browser to start up. Then the painfully slow rendering engine put me over the top and I switched to Firefox. It was like going from dial-up to broadband when I made the switch. IE8 seems to be about as fast as Firefox so I think I will hold off on putting FF back on this machine for a few weeks and see how it goes.
Other things I’ve noticed so far (1/2 day of usage):
- Daemon tools doesn’t work – I don’t have a CD drive on this laptop so having a good tool to mount disc images is a must. While I prefer Daemon tools, PowerISO seems to work in 7 just fine.
- You cannot use the WIN-E shortcut twice in a row. It seems Win7 will only open up 1 explorer instance at a time. In order for WIN-E to work a second time the existing explorer window cannot be in the Libraries location. Even if you navigate away but go back to Libraries folder it wont open another instance. Very odd.
- UAC is noticeably less obtrusive. Simply click on “show all processes” in task manager and you’ll quickly realize that you no longer have to “allow” yourself to do the things you’re trying to do (crazy right?).
- My laptop actually runs cooler. Because less churn is less burn.
- Windows media player doesn’t seem to dock in the taskbar anymore. You can still access the play and pause buttons by mousing over the icon and waiting a second but this seems a lot less convenient to me.
- Network connections are easier to manage. Instead of having to click on the network icon in the tray, open a window, and pick the network you want to connect to, you can simply access the list and connect/disconnect right from the system tray. Very nice.
I will continue to post additional things as I come across them. Tomorrow I will get all the dev tools installed and see how everything works with using 7 as a dev platform.
