Not Your Typical IT Guys

Every day I’m impressed with Windows 7.  Please, don’t get me wrong… I have sworn at Microsoft in the past and I am far from a Bill Gates groupie (unlike all you Steve Jobs groupies!)  I do however have an appreciation for a fine piece of technology… and this time W7 is it.  I’ve now been running W7 x64 for quite awhile on my beefy HP laptop and been very pleased with it’s performance and overall handling.  Here is my post about the upgrade from Vista.

With such good experience I didn’t hesitate a moment to install W7 on my daughters HP Netbook, 1GB RAM with 16GB Solid State Drive. When preparing for the install I was apprehensive because I read all these posts about how you couldn’t install W7 from anything other than a DVD, here was the hack to make it work, yadah yadah yadah. I decided to be bold and do my own thing, I went ahead and put the install package on a USB and installed a fresh copy to her netbook straight from the USB.  It installed without a hitch and it is running awesome!

So the Netbook was cool, but now it really gets good.

Sitting around the house is an old Dell Latitude D600.  When I say old I mean seriously old… circa 2004 :0P , 1.5 GHz Intel with 768MB’s of RAM. Even MS says W7 requires at least 1GB RAM… but I figured, why not.  The current Windows XP install with almost nothing else on the system barely runs and my youngest daughter needs a WebKinz machine.  So what the heck lets install a fresh copy of W7 on it and see what happens.

WOW!  It runs better than the day it came from Dell with Win XP.  Now in all fairness, the video leaves something to be desired but hey…so does the video on WebKinz World so it will do.  But other than that it really runs fantastic.  It installed every driver except the audio drivers during the OS install.  I downloaded the XP audio drivers from Dell and they installed without issue, game on!  I’ve been playing with this thing to really try to hose it up and I can’t, it really is solid.  The touch pad that wasn’t working on XP… now works, the Wireless Card that I had disabled on XP and replaced with a USB wireless…. now works!  The system really runs like a champ.

It has got me thinking… W7 is looking like a great candidate for revitalizing some old systems and turning them into Dumb Terminals for Citrix…… stay tuned…..

OK, so Daniel’s love for Windows 7 has motivated me to make the leap. Honestly I wasn’t entirely upset with Vista but apparently the beefs that I did have seem to have been addressed in 7 so…what the heck!

I backed up my full system and got ready to install 7 and realized…hmmm, maybe I can just upgrade my system and sure enough there is an upgrade path.  Of course prior history of Microsoft Operating Systems clearly tells me I should wipe it clean and do a fresh install.  But hey I’m already jumping so why not get really cRaZy! I’m going to do the upgrade.

Before performing the upgrade I received  a report to tell me the applications that were going to break with the upgrade.  It listed 4.  Two of whom I downloaded the beta versions for Windows 7 and two that I really could care less about.  The one application it failed to notify me about was SecondLife… hopefully there will be a beta viewer out soon for that.

It took about 3 hours to run but well worth it.  Windows 7 so far is outstanding.  My CPU runs significantly cooler (which means no more humming fan constantly running), the memory utilization is not even coming close to the normal 80% of 4GB that Vista was using, and the Sleep function is far superior to any of its predecessors. Here are the other positives for PC:

• The new functionality of the Task Bar and Peaking of applications is very nice
• Overall application responsiveness is smooth
• The sidebar has now become just Gadgets, which don’t seem to be the resource hog they once were
• MS Search is much cleaner and more responsive
• Navigating folders is cleaner
• The Start Menu has some actual useful enhancements to it

And so far I have yet to find any downsides to performing the upgrade.  Of course one benefit I have, the applications that I really need all live in the HSI cloud and are free from concern of Windows 7 upgrades.  So for me, Life with Windows 7 is good!

So how does Windows 7 ranke after a few days of use… well so far, I really feel the OS is more stable. Operation like sleep and resume work like I would expect them to.  I’m not seeing any sluggishness when my computer resumes.

However there were a few bumps! Don’t expect to use your current AntiVirus. Windows 7 does require a “certified AV software” see here for more details. The good news is that most of them are in Beta right now and free!.

Overall, first impressions are good. So far the RC is more stable than Vista!