Home › Forum › Recreation level › Q'Roy's bar

Windows 7

Jim Kynes
Commander
Jim Kynes
Executive Officer, Starbase 49
800 posts
Posted on Sat, 07/04/2368 - 21:15 by jakynes

Just downloaded and installed Windows 7 Release Candidate, got it to try until March, so let's see what it can do. Thinking of getting a new Media Centre Desktop towards the end of the year, and want to see if I would want Windows 7 on it, grudgingly stick with Vista, or keep the copy of XP MCE 2005 that's on my old one now. Of course, the Linux search is far from over, so I may stick with one of them, but if Windows 7 is the saviour of Microsoft that the press claim it to be, I may just use that free upgrade voucher.

Anyone else using it, and anyone who used the Beta, what do you think of it? Prepare to hear rants or raves from me here. Smile

Initial reaction is good, took about an hour to completely install excluding the re-partitioning of my hard drive, need to wait until I install some of my bigger apps installed to see how it goes, but I'm optimistic. Just run Windows Update and got 13 updates, half of them test updates, so fingers crossed that my system restarts okay...

Visual Differences.

Windows Vista:

Windows 7:

I tried the Windows Classic theme. It just looked wrong in W7. Smile

Speaking of Classic, Here's from a good 10 or so years ago. Smile

__________________

First Officer
Starbase 49

‹ Welcome to 2010 Getting kinda quiet ›
Jim Kynes
Commander
Jim Kynes
Executive Officer, Starbase 49
798 posts
Posted on Sun, 07/05/2368 - 00:57 by jakynes

Pros and Cons after a few hours.

Pros:

  1. Taskbar separates items from the same program with a small gap.
  2. Move your mouse cursor to the bottom right of the screen to show the desktop. Remove it and open apps return. Good if you use sidebar apps gadgets. Pretty useless if you don't.
  3. Hover your mouse over the popup of a window on the taskbar to hide everything but that window.
  4. Control Panel seems to have loads of lovelly settings to change.
  5. Notification area a lot tidier by default. All other icons accessible by clicking on the small arrow.
  6. The search box actually works.
  7. Lots more Windows Key shortcuts. <Win>+1, <Win>+2, etc. works for open windows like Firefox's <Ctrl>+1, etc. works for tabs. <Win>+G brings all the gadgets to the front.

Cons:

  1. No Quicklink Bar by default, but it's easy to create one. Shortcuts can't be automatically created in it though. The quicklink and taskbar features have been merged. Active taskbar icons have text and a box around them. Inactive / unloaded program icons appear on the taskbar inbetween the open programs. Looks messy.
  2. Default Notification Area icons are black and white. Colour would be nice.
__________________

First Officer
Starbase 49

Jim Kynes
Commander
Jim Kynes
Executive Officer, Starbase 49
798 posts
Posted on Fri, 07/10/2368 - 22:49 by jakynes

Like the Calculator.

So far any drivers I need to install that don't have a Windows 7 version, the Vista version appears to work fine. More than can be said for Vista with some XP or Win 2K drivers.

Like the Devices and Printers menu. Once I remember that things like game pads are hidden in here, it makes things easier to get to.

Software compatibility mode works great. No problems with anything old that I've tried to run yet.

Media Centre is more like XP:MCE than the poorer (IMO) version included with Vista Home Premium.

Firefox runs on it fine. Not tried Office 2003 yet, but should work fine. I would use Open Office, but the presentation part isn't completely compatible with MS Powerpoint. If the newest version is, I may consider using it - only when my version of Office will no longer run on my OS.

Have I bored you all yet? Smile Anyone else looking to upgrade?

__________________

First Officer
Starbase 49

Roy Veldman
Commodore
Roy Veldman
Chief Fleet Construction Officer, Acacia Fleet
714 posts
Posted on Sun, 07/12/2368 - 14:51 by Roy

I tried the beta and RC (both 64bit versions) on my MacBook and it works really well. I don't really use windows on my Macs that often, but I did have Vista on my previous notebook. Never really had any issues with Vista, but I must say Microsoft really fixed the small things that were wrong in Vista and cleaned things up a lot. I hope the computers at the office will get an upgrade so I can use Windows 7 more often...

__________________

Commodore Roy Veldman

Zachary Turner
Lieutenant
Zachary Turner
Assistant Chief Strategic Operations Officer, Starbase 49
1196 posts
Posted on Tue, 07/21/2368 - 11:26 by darkzoa

Im looking forward to messing around with it after deployment. Hopefully ill be more active here too. I miss this place alot.

But from what James says. Its a keeper. And I really have had no problems with vista. It works better then XP in my opinion that or my old computer was really crappy.

Jim Kynes
Commander
Jim Kynes
Executive Officer, Starbase 49
798 posts
Posted on Wed, 07/22/2368 - 18:59 by jakynes

The only fault I have yet to find with it is a tendency for Explorer to crash when I have a lot of programs running (Using a good whack of the 2GB of RAM). Instead of explorer crashing and restarting, and only being a bit useless under earlier versions of Windows, icons won't load when double clicked, drives won't open, in fact the only way to open programs is by typing their full path in the run box (And by restarting the system). Moderately annoying.

__________________

First Officer
Starbase 49

Zachary Turner
Lieutenant
Zachary Turner
Assistant Chief Strategic Operations Officer, Starbase 49
1196 posts
Posted on Wed, 07/22/2368 - 20:16 by darkzoa

I hope they fix that. That would be very bad for me, I get highy annoyed with stuff like that.

Ariyen Dynal
Rear Admiral
Ariyen Dynal
Commanding Officer, Acacia Fleet
15 posts
Posted on Mon, 12/21/2368 - 05:06 by Lyra

I run windows 7 on my laptop. I haven't had any real problems out of it that I could complain about. I will say that I do like it pretty well. I like the transparency and the pop-up views of some programs that XP didn't have that I do believe is a benefit.