so, i’ve been running win 7 beta on my main machine for a little while now and thought i should share my thoughts, since, you know, that’s kind of the whole point of this beta thing…
boot time
bootup time is significantly faster than vista and xp. i’m actually pretty surprised at how quickly it’s able to load all my crazy startup apps since it was always a good 5-10 minutes before vista was usable after loading the desktop. i could do without the light-of-god startup wallpaper, though. i was hoping it was just an installer wallpaper, but, no, it’s there every time i boot. however…
uptime stability
it seems pretty stable when it’s up. i’ve only had to reboot it a couple of times in the last week or two i’ve been running windows 7, and i leave it on all the time. one of those reboots was after the install. one of them was a hard reboot after the install when i must’ve tried to open too many windows before it was ready and it locked up hard. since then, i’ve been a bit more generous and let it finish its thing before trying to start up anything.
installation
horrible, horrible, awful, worst thing ever. like cutting my fingertips with a lemon-soaked razor blade and force feeding them to myself with some vinegar while being tarred and feathered. right now, you can only upgrade from vista. fine. so i start up the installer. the installer says there might be a problem with some RAID controller i don’t care about because i’m not using a RAID array. it asks, do you want to upgrade to the most recent version of the software? sure, i say. it is a beta version, after all. so it does the update and says the installer can’t continue without a reboot. so i reboot, and assume that i can boot off the cd and continue the install. negatory, good buddy. i wait the requisite (?!) 20 minutes or so for it to finally get to a screen where i can actually do anything at all when the installer tells me, “i’m sorry, you need to be running Windows to be able to update it.” now, having used microsoft for, oh, i don’t know, ever, being required to have windows running… in order to install windows… aaaah…. does. not. compute–
so, i reboot again, and start the install over. this time, i skip the update — natch — and plow ahead to the install. it says i may have a problem with some RAID controller i don’t care about only now skype might not work. crap. i actually use skype for communicating with customers, so if that were a miss, i’d be s.o.l. i quickly google “win 7 skype” and find two relevant links, one of which is a pc computing site reviewing the beta who also got the message, but said skype worked fine, and one was a somewhat aggressively dumb-sounding blogger who lamented over the fact that skype wasn’t working, so he had to resort to using the “butt-ugly” skype 4 beta — so my worst case scenario is i have to use an “ugly” beta skype. whatever. after that the install went without a hitch and skype did work, but i had to tell windows that i understand there may be problems with the performance and yeah, i do this at my own risk, yadda yadda yadda.
user experience
so far, in using win 7, i’m a big fan. i agree that the new taskbar is awesome, especially the preview windows and being able to cycle through them, although i’m a little lost when it comes to the reason for hiding all the windows and showing the desktop but with the outlines of your open windows — i.e., when would i need this? i don’t agree that the new taskbar beats the osx dock — it still seems too clunky to me, but it works in addition to the dock and thank god stardock’s objectdock still works in win 7.
overall performance seems a lot faster than vista. i haven’t done any real benchmarking but it feels faster, and since that’s one of the main improvements microsoft was working on, i’m trusting that it actually is faster, especially since win 7 beats vista on netbooks. (yes, this is a gizmodo farm, but it’s been my primary source of news and information regarding windows 7, and was the inspiration for me to make the upgrade, so i figure it’s justified.)
most of the rest of the user experience just repeats what vista started, and i actually liked the gui in vista, so i’m not complaining.
i’m not a fan of when a security warning window pops up (like when you need to unblock an app that is trying to access the internet), it blacks out your whole screen until you respond to the security pop-up. windows 7 also did some crazy shiznat with my gamma after installing, and i had to run through the display wizard to make it not suck. additionally, ie8 is a pile of poo, and displayed arcanepalette.com in completely new and excitingly bad ways as compared not only to other browsers, but additionally to ie7 and its’ own “compatibility mode.” as a web designer, this is insanely frustrating — how am i expected to design for browser compatibility when even the browser isn’t compatible with other versions of itself? (arcane palette looks fine in ie7 now)
hibernation is broken
as has previously also been mentioned on giz, hibernation is broken. i just got a taste of it tonight as i came to my computer and found it mysteriously off. this often happened in vista, too, when there was a power hitch, and the pc switched over to the backup battery — vista would run for the hills and go into hibernation even when i modified the power options to not do that unless it’s running on the battery for 5 minutes. unsuprising, then, that win 7 seems to have done the same thing, only this time trying to resume left me staring at a black screen for several minutes until i cold booted. unlike some other reports, though, that, and saying screw the resume, just boot me up when prompted was all that was needed to get me going again.
overall
my overall reaction is, wow, come july, when this thing actually ships, and subsequently august when it’s going to brick my computer, i may actually spend the cash to buy this os outright. seriously. i mean, this is an operating system i’d pay money for, much like osx (although, i maintain that if you’re upgrading the current os, it should be free, or a discounted upgrade, rather than dropping 150 bucks every time you move the decimal up a notch…i’m looking at you, apple). i honestly haven’t been this excited about windows since ’98, and subsequent releases when i often said “yeah, windows 98 may have a couple bugs here and there, but i know my way around them, and at least it’s not windows ME…“
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