Windows 7 Beta Early Impressions
Submitted by D15AV0W3D on Tue, 01/13/2009 - 10:41pm.
It's been a pleasant experience, so far. I'm using the 64bit version, and all of my hardware has been detected, and all the drivers that work w/ Vista, seem to work w/ Win7. Speaking of Vista, Win7 looks identical to Vista. The Aero look is still there. It is still in Beta stage, but it's been running pretty stable for me. Hasn't crashed at all.
I've got it running on my gaming PC. Same hardware as my XP machine, just swapped out the hard drive and put Win7 Ultimate 64bit on the new one.
IE8: also in beta testing right now. Surprisingly enough, IE8 renders pages faster than Chrome or Firefox did on my XP machine. Same hardware, same ISP, same browsing habits, faster page loading.
Windows Experience Index: something I haven't used much, since the only machine running Vista in my home right now is my wife's laptop. I scored at least a 5.9 in everything, save for the HDD test, which gave me a 2.9. WEI is by no means a precise method, but it gives a general idea. I'm a little puzzled as to why that is, seeing as the hard drive is a fairly good one (Seagate 160GB 7200rpm w/ 8MB cache, newly formatted). I haven't run any disk checks on it, but I had Open Suse loaded on it before, and that worked fine. WEI concerns aside, Win7 loads and runs very fast, so the WEI might just be a load of crap, w/ a little bit of hype thrown in.
Windows Media Center: I like the layout. It recognizes my TV tuner card (Hauppauge HVR-1600), but doesn't find any channels, so I can't watch Live TV through Media Center. Later this week, I'll try the Hauppauge software for Vista, and see how it works on Win7. This is a bit of a disappointment, but it's still a beta, after all. XP paired w/ Hauppauge's driver and software recognizes digital and analog OTA channels just fine.
Gaming: I've been playing Halo2 PC on it, and it runs about as well as I could ask for. I'm midway through the campaign, and no issues at all. Win7 automatically recognized my wired 360 controller as soon as I plugged it in. Speaking of graphics, instead of having to manually install the latest Catalyst drivers for my video card (ATI Radeon HD3870), Win7 automatically downloaded and installed it. No user intervention needed on my part. That's about as easy as it gets. And WEI gave my graphics card a score of 7.9 (on a scale from 1 to 7.9).
It still has the annoying User Access Control that Vista has. So far, it seems like an updated, snappier version of Vista. I have a 3GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM. So, I'm sure Vista would run pretty fast on my system, too. I think the main problem w/ Vista, and it's lack of acceptance, is that people expected, or were somehow led to believe, that it would run just fine on a single-core (or slow dual-core) PC w/ only 1GB of RAM. People were buying PCs and laptops that really should have come w/ XP, but I guess Micro$oft decided to shove Vista down our throats, in any way possible, and pre-installing it on PCs w/ sub-par specs was one way to do it. However, it seems to have backfired. I'm guessing, w/ sufficient system specs, and some kinks worked out, Win7 will run very well, and be more accepted in the PC community.
*EDIT* It seems, like all other versions of Windows, no matter what you try, updated drivers, install software, run device manager diagnostics, run through setup dialogs, kick and punch your machine, yell and cuss at your monitor... sometimes a simple reboot will work wonders. Media Center now plays and records Live TV from my Hauppauge card just fine. It just wouldn't be the same if things were easy!
Regarding your last paragraph: maybe Vista was ahead of its time?
Windows 7 is gaining acceptance amongst the majority of people that try it, it seems, and the good favor it's receiving is good for Microsoft. Hopefully Windows 7 will help catapult Microsoft out of the dredges of fanboy bashing, at least for a few minutes.
Yes, I think Vista was ahead of it's time. And I think Microsoft knew that, but refused to accept it. Maybe they thought users wouldn't care about the slowness, or maybe they thought most people would just bite the bullet and upgrade their hardware. But, I think by the time Win7 is in it's full release, most PCs will be able to run it properly. I don't think it's any more resource hungry than Vista. But a few years makes a big difference when it comes to PC specs. As you know, memory is dirt cheap right now, good graphics cards are affordable, and pre-built machines are more powerful, but not more expensive.
I'm running Win7 64-bit with a 3.0GHz CPU, 8800 GTX, and 8 GB of RAM. My scores are:
CPU: 6.4
RAM: 6.4
Graphics: 7.9
Gaming graphics: 5.9
HDD: 5.9 (this is a 150GB 10K RPM WD Raptor hdd)
What the heck is a "gaming graphics" rating? I mean, I get what it is. I'm betting the gaming hardware industry "encouraged" MS to include this rating so that it will cause gamers and hardware enthusiasts to go out and spend $ on new hardware.
I had only one issue with the install. I had to disconnect and reconnect my Microsoft Razer Habu mouse for it to be recognized by Win7. It did not automatically detect it.
IE8.0.7 Beta crashes on almost every session. It is getting very annoying. I'm going to try to install the IE8 Beta standalone.
I dig the idea of "accelerators" being built into IE8. I think this is going to be a hit.
I am impressed with the new task bar (super bar?) at the bottom of the screen. I think MS has something here and that it will be a major hit.
Nice. As much as I prefer Macs, I know I'll be eventually purchasing(more likely building) a PC for gaming and 3D Modeling/Animation. Windows 7 being good is encouraging to hear.
Really digging the Win7 UI. Not digging IE8 and Chrome giving a lot of errors. I've turned on error reporting so the errors are automatically sent to MS. This has helped a lot.
Probably going to revert to Win7 32-bit to see if it is more stable and rock Vista 64 has my stable OS.
Are there any problem with drivers using the Win7 beta?
None for me so far. In fact, anything it doesn't natively support, it automatically dwnlds and installs the appropriate driver. This includes my WinMobile phone, Hauppauge TV Tuner card, graphics card, wired 360 controller, and 360 Media extender. I haven't had to manually download ANY drivers yet.
I uninstalled Win7 64-bit and am running a new Vista 64-bit build. Don't know what it was, buy the software I was running didn't like Win7 natively. The hardware ran fine. Like Disavowed said, Windows went out and got the latest drivers for all my hardware. But Google Chrome, IE8 Beta, and Trillian weren't working well.
Vista 64-bit is running fast and I've got most of my apps re-installed.
Most of my early impressions of Win7 have worn off. It's no longer "oohs" and "aahs". I'm used to it now. I'm accustomed to having Media Center (DVR) capabilities. I'm accustomed to the layout, and user interface (how different can it be from other Win O/S's?). It's become more or less an afterthought. And the really surprising thing? I cannot tell that it's a beta. If the beta version never expired, I would probably never feel the need to upgrade to the full release.
Some interesting news that speaks to the resource-hungriness of Vista, and whether or not Win7 has improved on that, or just followed in it's foot steps: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=672
Win7 on 512MB of RAM?
So what's your final call, Disavowed? Buy it?
Yeah, I'm going to buy it when they release the full version. There's also rumors that MS will allow a free upgrade to Win7 for any Vista buyers who purchase one of the many flavors of Vista w/in a certain time-frame before Win7 rolls out. Don't know what date they'll determine as a threshold, or if it's even true, but it would be a good move on their part.
I'm just really surprised that Win7 has the ability to run so well on a PC w/ only 512MB of RAM. Sounds like they (and we) should have just skipped Vista altogether...
I skipped Vista altogether. Will get Win7 though.
I'm going to upgrade to Win7 ASAP. Will throw it on our laptops as well.
On the other hand, I'm having no problems at all with Vista x64. Wish I ran it years ago.
Yeah, we haven't had any problems w/ Vista Home Premium, SP1 on our laptop. But, it shipped w/ SP1. And it came w/ 2GB RAM and a 2.1GHz dual-core. It had the specs that many PCs/laptops didn't. All those pre-SP1 desktops and laptops w/ sub-par hardware just ended up frustrating end users, rather than showing off Vista's capabilities (which it DOES have some great features). Win7 doesn't really improve on the feature set of Vista all that much, and it isn't really more powerful. They just changed the code to be significantly less resource-hungry, added a few features, and called it Win7. I think Vista was necessary, in that the change from XP to Vista was huge. It brought about MANY changes and improvements in features, but that went hand in hand w/ a whole new basket of problems and issues w/ stability. By way of this approach, I think it's going to allow MS to take as much of the positive and leave behind as much of the negative as possible, and make a better, more stable (as stable as Windows can be) O/S, w/ the same or better features, which is (I'm hoping) Win7.
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