My Experience With Windows 7 RC1 – Part 2: Installing Software And Configuration

If you read part one, you might remember that I formatted my HD and started from scratch. What I didn’t say is how I set built it in the first place. The main HD (the OS drive) is a Western Digital 150GB Raptor. I also have a Seagate 1TB that holds everything else from music to program files. This made the transition so incredibly easy. Here is the best example: Steam. I downloaded the steam installer and ran it. After I changed the install path to where it was previously, I clicked close … and it disappeared.

 

Well actually, it did flash the install screen for a second, but just for a second.  Steam recognized that all of my files were still there! I didn’t have to re-download and install a single Steam game! That’s not due to Windows 7, but still cool. Take this as a lesson: Always separate your OS install from as many of your files as possible via separate hard drives or at least partitions.

 

On the other hand we have Stardock. This company is awesome in that they develop games for gamers and don’t hamper our ability to play them with DRM. Three cheers for Stardock! They have Impulse, which is analogous to Steam. Impulse installed fine, but completely fails to run. It just dies with an appcrash report. I checked around and it seems that they just don’t support it yet, but are “looking into it”. I don’t know how up-to-date that is, but the newest version doesn’t work. Oh well, I’ll have to wait a while for Demigod.

 

The control panel got a couple of additions/upgrades. One new one is HomeGroup which seems to be a rebranding of workgroups, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet. I will when I install Win7 on my laptop. There are a couple others, but I didn’t really bother to look too deeply into them. The “Network and Sharing Center” got a face lift which I like. It will even display a graphical “network map” which is kind of cool.

 

One important thing I have to point out is the ease of connecting and disconnecting to different networks. Along with an important addition to VPN connections. You now have the ability to specify a totally different set of network settings for when you are connected to VPNs! This helps immensely with more advanced networks like where I work. Thanks M$!

 

There is a new item into the system tray, oops sorry … “Notification Area” (That is the name of the control panel that modifies the tray). Its called the Action Center. Its just annoying. It was annoying at the start because it kept telling me to update! update! and Anti-Virus! Anti-Virus! In retrospect, once you calm it down, its nice to have system messages grouped into one place. The Action Center is divided into two sections: Security and Maintenance. Security contains updates, firewall, spyware, and anti-virus messages while Maintenence has backup, troubleshooting, and updates again.

 

There is not much more detail to go into other than give you a list of software that installed without any problems whatsoever:7-Zip,AC3 Filter, BitTorrent, Foobar2000, Magic Disk, Office 2007, SQL Server 2008 (needed an immediate service pack), and nVidia drivers. There is probably more, but you get the idea.

 

Overall, my experience has been beyond my expectations. I would recommend anyone who is knowledgeable enough to deal with pre-release software to try it out. 

My Experience With Windows 7 RC1 – Part 1: UI

I have been without my desktop for a while due to a bad graphics card and my laziness in getting it RMA’d (thanks EVGA). So I got the card today, and decided to just go for it and install Win7 RC1. So after I meticulously put my machine back together I booted up, but only to make sure the card worked. On to the Win7 setup.

 

The install process was very similar to that of vista. In fact, it looks like they just slapped some new graphics onto the vista install process. I have no problem with that, Vista never gave me any problems installing. When I got to the point to specify the hard drive to install too, I made a snap decision. I formatted the drive. Poof … gone. I just hoped that didn’t bite me in the ass.

 

The total install time took a little longer than I remember with Vista. (Totally subjective and from memory.) It only restarted once, before I got a desktop. Awesome. The Aero interface looks as cool as ever. Now to try different things out. The following is in not particular order, except for the first.

 

The first and foremost thing everyone will notice is the taskbar. It has been totally revamped, and heavily borrowed from the Mac OS Dock. The bar now has icons that will both launch applications and serve as the task icon that we are used too. Adding (pinning) applications is a simple drag-and-drop. Also, the window preview that we first saw in Vista has matured. Hovering over an icon will show you the preview like normal, but if you have more than one window open in that application, it will show you all of them. Here’s a cool one, It even shows all the tabs that you have open in IE! When you pause the mouse over one of the previews long enough, all other windows are temporarily minimized to show you that window alone. Awesome. Love it.

 

The system tray is still around, which seems superfluous. The taskbar now does most of the functions that tray icons do. I think that the only reason that its still there is for backwards compatibility. Oh well. It has one addition: A much easier interface to configure the tray icons’ visibility and notification. It actually has its own control panel now. Alright whatever.

 

Next on the list is “Libraries”. Windows has always had a list of special folders that would show up by default in most file dialogs. “Documents And Settings”, “My Music”, “My Pictures”, etc. Win7 renames these special folders Libraries. The cool bit is that you can define your own libraries at will! Call it whatever you want, and assign it to the directory of your choice. You can also set which Libraries show up in the navigation pane of explorer. Although, they conspicuously are missing the option to specify your own icon. The second icon from the left in the image above opens explorer up to the list of libraries, so they are the starting point of your filing system. Nice.

 

Some other small things. Themes are sill around. Desktop backgrounds now cycle through a list of pictures automatically. (You don’t need the power toy to do it like XP and Vista) “Show Desktop” is now just a region to the right of the clock, and it can be activated temporarily by a simple mouse-over. (This would be cool if desktop gadgets weren’t such a joke.)

 

Overall, I think that its a huge improvement over both Vista and XP. The Win7 interface is what Vista’s should have been.