I spent this Sunday morning installing and playing with Windows 7. Though in its Beta stage, I had been hearing numerous accounts of its stability and had been eager to try it out on my Dell XPS M1530.
The install experience was painless, almost everything including networking and sound just worked out of the box. I had to additionally install the Nvidia graphics drivers and the fingerprint-reader drivers from the Dell support site.
Wireless configuration is now a lot easier !
I have two wireless networks at home and frequently switch between them. With Vista, everytime I had to switch to the other AP, I had to right click the network icon in the notification tray, select 'Connect to network'; On the new form that opened up, I chose the network I wished to connect to.
With Windows 7, its all there just 1 click away. Information like available networks in range with their signal strength is displayed on this interface. Clicking on any network name gives the option of connecting to it.
Hovering over a taskbar icon shows all associated windows in the preview. In case of IE, you will also be able to see all tabs as seperate previews. Hovering over any preview window, brings up a full screen preview... Pretty cool stuff !
Update (Thanks to BhavaniS) :
This is by virtue of IE8 having a seperate process for each tab. The preview-on-hover functionality simply displays each process's window's preview.
Another new feature found its way in the power options. Windows 7 allows you to dim the display brightness after some time of inactivity. This is a nice compromise between the screen turning off completely and running at normal brightness level !
Hibernate / Suspend works as expected, I have tried it several times since installation, no glitches so far.
Update (Jan 14th 2009):
On my Dell XPS M1530 with 4GB RAM, it takes about 25 seconds to hibernate. That is almost half the time it used to take on Vista SP1.
I'll update the post as I discover more features, however, Whatever little I have played with it so far, I have come to love it !
Download the Windows 7 (Beta) here .
Whats new at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/whats-new.aspx
Ok, so win7 bugchecked on me.
ReplyDeleteAll I had to do was to insert the Pro Duo stick into the SD/MMC/What-have-you reader integrated into the laptop, and play around with it. A number of surprise insertions/removals later, the machine crashed. Pretty bad, right?
And just as I was ready to load the crash dump into the debugger, I thought of updating the drivers for the card reader. Updating? I remembered, I had never actually installed the Ricoh drivers in the first place ! 5 minutes and a breezy driver installation later, I have everything working as expected, no crashes/bugchecks.
Important lesson learnt : Install the latest drivers before jumping to send feedback and/or trying to debug the issue.
Nice review, man! I feel totaaly inspired to checkout Win7 even though I'm not a Microsoft enthusiast.
ReplyDelete