My Impressions of Windows 7 (mini review)

Most of this is in the ***Windows 7 Discussion*** thread, but because of the sheer size of the thread won't be read or commented on. So I'm posting again.

I've had a good experience so far. Only thing that doesn't work is still my SD reader. Wi-fi is good. Sleep works fine and is faster than in Vista.

Programs installed successfully:
Photoshop CS3
Lightroom 1
CuteFTP
MS Office Ultimate 7007
iTunes
Roxio Dell Edition
Dell Webcam Central
Limewire
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D

No installations have failed, and the installed video card driver was newer than the one that I downloaded from Intel before.

Some screenshots:

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd246/SpeedyMods/Win7/win7timeremaining.jpg
File transfer. Look at the taskbar, with the taskbar button acting as a progress indicator.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd246/SpeedyMods/Win7/win7screenshot.jpg
Fresh install RAM usage.

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd246/SpeedyMods/Win7/win7screenshot2.jpg
Windows from the same application are grouped in the taskbar, with seperate applications being seperated by about 5 pixels or so. The taskbar button glow follows the mouse, and the window previews include open tabs from both seperate open windows.
Note how I got quick launch back.

I get a small "pop" in my speakers when I shutdown, restart, or sleep. I did not install the audio driver from Dell, I'm leaving the default one, which recognizes everything properly and works great.

One of the biggest differences for me seems to web browsing. It is much, much faster in 7 for me than in Vista, even using the IE8 beta in Vista.

I would have preferred that they left the favourites toolbar out, but that's just me. I don't think that I like the color grouping of tabs which were opened from clicking on a link, but that's easy to turn off and for some people would be useful.

I also like how the WLAN icon now displays the signal quality. As well as the new connection "Window" that you get when you click on the WLAN icon.

So far it seems that battery life on my E6400 is improved when doing low-load things such as web browsing or word processing.

Copying small files is sped up drastically. When I transferred by web development files from my computer to my external eSATA hard drive under Vista, it look over an hour. In 7, this took less than 10 minutes when copying back to the hard drive.

The jumplist menu on the taskbar is a minor annoyance, but I'll get used to it. Right clicking on a taskbar button to close the window is different than in previous versions of windows. There is now a glass border around this jumplist while it used to be a simple context menu. It's a very small change, but I'm used to right clicking, moving my mouse up fractionally, and clicking again to close the windows. I didn't even have to look and I knew what I was doing. I have to look and make sure that I'm clicking on "Close Window", since it is now about 10pixels higher than it used to be.

I like the new start menu with it's jumplists. I think it will prove to be more useful than the recently opened documents menu in older versions of Windows by a wide margin. My favourite feature of the start menu is most definitely that it now searches the control panel. I rarely open the control panel now, since searching so so much faster.

Window previews are proving to be useful now, rather than just eye candy as it was in Vista. Say you have 10 IE tabs open, in multiple windows. The close the ones that you didn't need before would have required opening each window, and closing each individual tab of each window that you wanted closed. With the live thumbnails now, you just hover over the taskbar icon, and all your tabs are there. If you hover over one of the thumbnails, you get a full screen preview, and an X button for each tab. Simple, but awesome.

The WLAN icon now shows the signal strength, and connecting to and viewing available wireless networks is much simpler than in Vista, being only one click away.

As far as applications go, Roxio DE works fine, but the update manager cannot install updates, citing that it does not have permission to copy to a certain directory. In M3 I got the same error when trying to install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I didn't install the manager this time, just the driver, but I expect that the situation is the same.

Battery life on my E6400 (specs in signature) has been greatly improved under 7 when doing simple tasks such as browsing or word processing. I'm looking at an hour and a half difference here. From just under 4 hours to 5 and a half. Wow. This estimate does change a lot, because it doesn't take much to spike the CPU usage. Typing this post is showing 3hr 50m remaining (64%). That's awesome.

I have noticed (for a while I kept the task manager open to look at) that in 7, the processor does not have spikes in usage like in Vista. If the computer is idle, then the processor likes to stay close to 1% CPU usage, never going above 10. In Vista it was all over the place. With all of my applications installed and running I'm seeing 35%ish memory usage (fresh boot) and 55 processes. Fresh install is about 25% memory usage and 35 processes.

Boot times are improved under Vista, probably by about 20-30 seconds. I'm now looking at boot times of roughly 45 seconds, with shutdown being about 10 seconds now. I do not have an antivirus installed.

7 has less processes running than Vista, even on a fresh install. I'm seeing a difference of 15 or so (would be 20, but under Vista I had AVG running)

UAC is much less obtrusive than before, only popping up when I install an application, and even then, it isn't everytime.

If I think of anything else I'll post.

Nevermind, card reader works fine, the SD card was faulty.

Greg

 

Nice one mate. I'll do one tomorrow for my U6 with my apps. CS4 Master, Office 2007, CREATIVE *hehehe**, etc .

 

Your screenshot links are incorrectly truncated.

 

Thanks Budding. It's fixed now.

 

Looks like you're having a great experience with Win7.

Thanks for sharing!

 

This is an excellent review, Speedy. You make very specific points about what has been improved so far in the beta stages. Good work!

 

I admit to being surprised by Windows 7 (Build 7000) myself, having just installed it this morning. I chose to put it on my ancient Compaq V5000 notebook, the very same one which was home to the beta builds of Vista and Home Basic SP1.

The install went smoothly, with all hardware being detected with the exception of the AC-Link audio (but the latest Vista driver worked).

Windows 7 & Aero appears to be running smoothly on this laptop, which was a little jittery even under Vista's SP1. There is also no longer an intermittent crackling in the audio which was always present in Vista, even though I'm using a Vista driver on this new os. Go figure.....

The WEI score has dropped to 2.0 from the 2.4 of Vista, but overall general performance seems to be improved. I've yet to notice any appreciable amount of hard drive thrashing that Vista is natively known for, and AVG 8.0 appears to be playing nice with Windows 7.

Considering that this old laptop was designed for & sold with Windows XP and was always a bit clunky under Vista, I'm frankly amazed that Windows 7 runs so well on it.

Later I'm going to install GTA: San Andreas on it and see how it goes.....




Mike

 

Speedy! This was an awesome, thorough review!

Kudos!


Cin

 

Excellent Review. Very detailed! Thanks!

Ricky

 

Thanks everyone.

Honestly, this feels more polished now, in Beta form, than Vista does in SP1.

I like Vista, but 7 is superior in every way. I wouldn't hesitate running it on a primary computer.

Greg

 

If it were not for lack of some driver support on my system I would agree.

Currently not working (and I have installed Vista drivers):

Quick Launch buttons
Fingerprint Reader (no software)
Volume and Tone Control On Screen Display

Minor I know, but incomplete nonetheless.

 

Funny how in Vista we always compared to XP at launch, but we are comparing 7 to Vista now.

To be fair, much of Vista was growing pains. Many of the changes were necessary, and even if it was 7 released then and not Vista, these issues would have still existed.

Greg

 

Of course we compare it to Vista. Vista is the culprit, not XP .

 

Note the italic "now". Changes the meaning.

We tried to defend Vista (as it's compatibility, reliability and performance were inferior to XP) by saying that XP's launch was even worse, but with 7, it's better in beta form than Vista is in post-release SP1.

Greg

 

I'm amazed at how polished 7 is.

I don't think I'll be booting into Vista a whole lot Having a TB external to install everything I need to on it will makes things easier too.

 

VERY impressed by W7. This is what Vista should have been. Microsoft clearly rushed Vista out the door to cash in.

As much as I would love to run W7, I refuse to buy it, after buying Vista.

 

Very nice review; I'm going to have to install this at some point on the extra hard drives in my desktop. I like the taskbar progress indicators a lot - very useful. Also, it's good to see the RAM usage was decreased. I'm sitting here on Vista32 right now, 1.238GB/3.068GB used up with Firefox (one tab), foobar2000, and Steam open.

 

I found a hidden program.

It isn't in the start menu, but if you click "Open with..." on an ISO file, you have the option to open "Burn Disc Image", which is built into Windows 7. It even has an option for verifying the disc when finished.

Greg

 

Nice! That would remove the need for me to have Nero... I've had a bit of trouble with burning DVD's under Vista which is why I have Nero. Hopefully Windows 7 has a much better burning software than Vista and XP have (which I think is Roxio under the covers).

 

Yup, in earlier builds (build 6801) they had it in the Start Menu I believe, I'm not sure why they removed it from Beta 1..

Either way, I always forget to mention this to others, so good job pointing it out.

I actually did use it in build 6801 a couple months ago and it worked great.

 

Thanks for the review. I agree with everything you've said. I love the file transfer speeds compared to Vista (day and night diff) and I've also noticed the speed difference of sleep in/out.

I've had 7 now installed on my Macbook Pro and it's running great. Just to add a few things that I've tested and have no issues with 7:

Nero 8
DVDFav 5
RoboForm 6.9.92
Foxitreader 3
Live Messenger 2009
Word 2007
WinRAR 3.80
Canon MF4270 network printer (connected through LAN to D-Link wireless router)

I haven't had any luck connecting a BT mouse yet. But to my amazement, everything on my MBP works, such as camera, mic, sound, two-finger trackpad gestures (scrolling and right-click), Light Sensor for keyboard lighting, special keys (volume, screen brightness, keyboard lighting).

I think MSFT has hit this one right out of the park.

 

@ATC: Is your MBP of the new unibody variety? Or is it from the 2007 generation? I have problems with my install, where I can't install the Boot Camp drivers from the Leopard disc.

 

No, mine is from early 2008 (non-Penryn, it has the T7500 CPU) and the trackpad supports 1-2 finger gestures but not multi-touch (those came with the Penryn refresh).

You can PM me with your issue and I'll see if I can help (no promises though). I can give you the step-by-step that I did and it was smooth.

 

My Logitech LX7 wireless mouse works fine (not BT, I don't have anything to test BT with as of now)

I've also noticed, and this is probably linked to the lower CPU usage, but my fan runs a lot less now than with Vista. I also did a BIOS update, but I did not read that this BIOS update affected fan operation.

Still working on getting my card reader to work, but this may be an anomoly, since another user of a Latitude E6400 reports that his card reader works fine. Nevermind, card reader works fine, the SD card was faulty.

Greg

 

I'm running an HP Bluetooth mouse with no trouble.

Now that you mention it, I too notice my fan is less active.

 

Turns out that my SD card reader is working just fine. Finally, I decided to try a different SD card, and it worked just fine. Hmm, I'll have to try formatting that card (it is a number of years old). So now I need to correct all of these posts that say that my card reader is broken.

Lol, so all of my hardware is there. I do have a "Broadcom USH" in the device manager without a driver, but it was the same in Vista. It's related to the security hardware, which I'm not interested in. I don't even use a password, so trying to get the security hardware installed is just risking for more bad drivers for devices that I will never use.

Greg

 

Been running Win7 all weekend. Have not done any real work on it yet other than, like most of you, installing drivers and apps and seeing what does and does not work.

Aside from the obvious features over and above Vista, I find that Win7 clearly runs smoother and faster.

One thing that always bothered me in Vista - when I would increase display font size or zoom in on a web page, scrolling would hesitate and then overshoot. This now seems very smooth in 7, I can see to read again!

I also notice running 7 that IE8 64bit is faster at loading and popping up web pages than is 32bit. Note that both versions are available in Win7 x64 - it was not obvious to me at first which was which,nor do I understand why I would need a 32bit browser on a 64bit OS.

Though I had no other real problems with Vista 64, Win7 is proving to be a better overall experience.

My system lacks Win7 driver and software support for quick launch buttons, audio volume and tone buttons, and the fingerprint reader - none of my associated Vista drivers/software seem to be compatible - give me that and I think I would be comfortable loading Win7 as my primary OS.

I have office 2007 loaded and seems to be running fine (I would hope so!). I really don't expect to find any mainstreem application problems.

 

Compatibility. When Vista was released, IE7 X64 was incompatible with many web applications, such as flash. I don't know how it is right now.

 

Here's a question no one else on earth but me would ask, I'm pretty sure:

In Windows7, can you have the Taskbar at the top of the screen with no issues whatsoever?

 

I just dragged it to the top and checked, live thumbnails still works fine. I don't see why it wouldn't.

Greg

 

Thanks, Greg. I'm on XP and using the bar at the top and there are some minor issues. I hope to move onto 7 soon. Can't wait to get my XPS 1640 and try it with 7. My biggest concern is if 7 will recognize the ATI 3670 graphics card with no problems.

 

I have to admit that I have been disappointed in Win7 so far.

I have been running Vista for almost two years and it has been rock solid since SP1. In fact, I had been thinking lately that I couldn't imagine on OS being more responsive or more dependable. With all of the talk of Win7, I figured that it would be better than Vista.

Since I have installed Win7, I have had these problems:
1. WMP crashes every three or four songs
2. have to reset wireless router to get my laptop the connect every time I shutdown, restart, or resume
3. lower battery life
4. longer wake up from sleep times
5. longer resume from hibernate times
6. less responsive window transitions

And these are just the OS and driver related issues that I've had. In addition to these, I've had issues with foobar, irfanview, and MS word, MS Excel, Vuze, Chrome. In other words, every application that I have installed has crashed at least once.

This is exactly what I would expect out of a beta. But, there is no way that win7 beta is better, faster, and stronger than Vista sp1.

 

Wow, I'd like to know what is going on with your installation, since everything else I have heard has been overwhelmingly positive.

Greg

 

I feel like the install is fine, I regularly reinstall my OS and I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing.

Win7 Beta has been fine as a beta, but I guess I was expecting something that was faster and more reliable than my Vista SP1 install and it isn't.

Like I said, my Vista SP1 install had become flawless lately - super fast, super responsive, super stable.

 

I realize that, what I'm saying is that most people are saying exactly the opposite. For many, including myself, 7 in beta form has been proving to be faster and more reliable than Vista SP1.

Greg

 

I hear ya. I think that I may have been lucky enough that all of the hardware on my system had drivers that were really optimized for Vista, and that explains why I was getting such good performance. I really can't imagine Win 7 (or any OS) giving me better performance than what I had in Vista SP1.

There are some new features in Win7 that I am beginning to like already. Hopefully the performance will catch up soon.

 

One complaint: You still can't add the Downloads folder as a link on the Start menu. You couldn't with Vista either, and I just don't know why. It's probably my most accessed folder (since I usually open all the other files from within applications themselves), and it's a PITA to have to first open Computer and then click Downloads on the side.

 

uhm never needed nero for that. just use iso recorder. free and tiny, and fits exactly your need.

 

Is the network connection menu any more streamlined?

 

I've been having some of the same problems. I can't install pretty much any software I've tried. Safari, Office Enterprise 2007, Chrome, and DyKnow have all failed, even in compatibility mode. I'm beginning to wonder if something is wrong with my install.

 

Much. To connect, there isn't even a window. You just click on the network icon in the system tray and all of the available networks are in a small box resembling a context menu. Just click on the network you want to connect to, and it expands to allow you to type in the network key. No popups at all.

Greg

 

Turn ofo Animate maximize and minimize Windows.

Makes 7 run MUCH snappier. In fact, I encourage everyone to disable that feature.

 

Thanks a bunch for your reply! I'm excited to hear that....kinda sad that it's exciting, but that always annoyed me in Vista. The network menu was definitely a step down from XP. Glad to hear Win 7 remedies it.

 

More reliable than Vista? Not sure about that. Vista has never crashed on me unless I was jacking with it (so called tweaking).

7 does seem faster at the moment but I don't have the compatibility to load all of my system drivers yet - it may slown down a bit with everything I need installed and running.

7 seems promising though. I do like some of the new taskbar/desktop features. If it proves quicker with everything loaded I will probably switch.

As with Vista, I suspect we will see complaints from people trying to run it like XP, or with older software. Until full driver support is available it is gonna be difficult to give a full appraisel of 7.

 

Hmm. I always found XP's networking abilities enfuriating. Vista, and now 7 seem far ahead in that department to me. Turn them on and your connected. My XP nodes are still a problem - even to each other.

 

My review so far...

System: check the sig .

OS : W7 x64 Ultimate
Installed apps (so far):

1. Office 2007--->works like on Vista
2. Adobe CS4 Master --->works like on Vista but I get a very nasty SySWow64 error due to Adobe framework usage. I guess W7 is not very polished in that area. The error appears everytime I use important W7 features such as Control Panel, Device Manager, WEI, etc. It goes away after the report is sent to MS.
3. Creative X-Fi, fully working, install was easy, W7 sees it as Vista for some reason. No i did no put Vista compatibility on the installer and it updated on its own the latest driver.
4. Network Sharing Center is not as complete as on Vista. You cannot rename connections. Well, I could not find how to.
5. Norton Gaming 2009 installs fast, works perfect, like on Vista.
6. All my Asus apps work fine except Asus Log-on with the fingerprint reader. For some reason when I put it up the first time it worked but afterwards it did not. At log in, the finger print reader does not work. As soon as I am logged in, the finger print reader works if I swipe my hand.
7. I had problems with Sata Storage because of a stupid write protection error. Problem solved with Vista Compatibility mode.
8. Synaptics were a beep to install. It failed on mine several times even with Vista compatibility mode. Eventually it worked. Don't ask me why.
9. Asus Power4Gear had a weird behaviour in the beginning. The os could not decide between the XP animation and fancy Vista animations. Eventually it used the Vista one.
10. Battery life is improved on W7.



(to be continued )

 

Interesting.

1. Me too.

2. Adobe Flash player is a problem for me, as is reading pdf files off the web.

6. I too am having fingerprint reader trouble due to lack of software support. Driver is listed as installed though.

7. I loaded Intel matrix storage driver by pointing Update Driver at my Vista swsetup folder

8. Synaptics updated by itself for me.


Comment: Accessing control panel and system controls seems much faster than in vista with less UAC interuption.

 

Just an update; In addition to the previous applications that seem to work fine in 7, I can now add AVG 8 Anti-Virus (free edition) to the list (Windows 7 32bit - 64bit not tested).

Interestingly, I have a OneCare subscription but I got an error when I tried to install OneCare (Unsupported OS error). So AVG works fine, but MSFT's own OneCare is not compatible.

 

ATC, that's because by the time 7 is out, Microsoft will have replaced Onecare with Morro. No reason to try to keep compatibility.

Oddly, all of my drivers and programs installed fine once you exclude the SD card reader (which actually did work, I had a bad SD card).

The only app that doesn't work properly is the update manager for Roxio DE.

Greg

 

One thing that I am impressed with is the massive improvement to the wireless range i get with my desktop (yep, my desktop has a wifi card on it). With Vista, I was getting 2 bars of signal quality. With W7? Full bars.