Tue Jan 27 14:53:08 2009 by Eric Hokanson
Modified Tue Jan 27 15:23:52 2009

As I posted a week ago Microsoft has made Windows 7 available for public beta testing.  I haven't been very happy with the Vista experience so I downloaded my copy of the 64-bit Windows 7 ISO and took the plunge.  I'm running it as the sole OS on my main system.  Here are my experiences so far.

Install was the same as Vista, same look and feel, with no real problems (other than the first DVD I burned didn't work for some odd reason).  The first boot and login were noticeably quicker than Vista and everything felt just a bit more responsive.

Some of the first things I noticed were the tidied up Start menu.  The system tray now expands upward rather than stretching outward which feels odd but I can't really say anything bad about it.  The window previews in the task bar are much improved with a cool morphing effect when you move between them.  The much talked about "Superbar" is...interesting.  It's basically the quick launch bar merged with OS X's Dock.  You right click on an application (or its shortcut) and pin it to the Superbar.  Then when you launch it, rather than showing up in the task bar, it lights up the Superbar button.  It's actually a cool idea but I'd wish they would make a couple changes.  When you have several apps open it can be hard to tell which apps are active at a glance.  Also I would love it if you could undock the Superbar and dock or pin it elsewhere on the desktop like you could with the quick launch bar.  My last complaint is that the Windows Key + E shortcut now goes to a folder called Libraries rather than My Computer which is really annoying and something I hope they add an option to revert to the old behavior.

Thankfully 7 uses the same driver model as Vista and all the drivers I installed seemed to work except for the Alcohol 52% virtual DVD-ROM drivers.  Oh, and of course my 4 year old Creative Audigy 4, which Creative refuses to fix (those bastards).

Software also seems to work okay and the only problem I ran into was anti-virus applications.  Apparently there is a bug in Windows 7 that causes it to blue screen if you have an anti-virus application installed and running.  It caused quite a headache and I hope they patch this soon.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it.  Is it amazing?  No.  But if we computer users are forced by M$ to move on, I could probably live with it.  Think of it as Vista SP2.5 and I sure hope they offer a deep discount for us suckers who bought Vista.