Windows 7 Impressions

Image by F687/s via FlickrLike a lot of people, I'm taking the Windows 7 Public Beta for a spin. I downloaded both the 32- and 64-bit versions, but since I have an old Pentium 4 Dell collecting dust, I figured that'd be a good test since everyone says that it works a lot better on older machines than Vista.

The test machine:

• Dell Dimension 4500 (circa 2002)
• Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 200GB IDE hard drive
• 32MB ATI Rage 128 (AGP)
• Netgear WG311 v3 802.11g (PCI)
• NEC CD+RW & Lite-On DVD+RW drives (IDE)

Yep, ancient. Considering that it's about 5-6 years old, I wouldn't have been surprised if everything didn't work under Win7.

After burning the ISO to DVD, the OS was really easy to install. The first change is that the installation begins from a Windows GUI, not the DOS-like pre-installation environment that Windows installs have always begun with. It took literally less than 10 seconds to choose whether I wanted to upgrade or start fresh, followed by a quick format. All of the confusing crap about partitions and so forth are hidden behind an "Advanced" setting.

The installation as a whole took maybe 22 minutes, including reboots. The end result was an ancient machine starting up from cold boot to a usable desktop in under two minutes. I don't think a clean install of XP Home booted up faster. Conspicuously absent was the many minutes of hard drive grinding during startup. Impressive!

The most major hitch after installation was that it wasn't able to find drivers for the audio chipset and the Ethernet and 802.11g cards. Having no network adapters is a bit of a problem, so I went over to Netgear's site and downloaded the Vista drivers for the wireless card and sneaker-netted them over to the Win7 box via a USB thumb drive. Fortunately, the drivers installed and worked without a hitch. Can't say the same about the Ethernet drivers...none of the ones on the Dell site (nothing post-XP, some even mentioned Window ME!) worked.

I was pleasantly surprised that once the driver was installed, Win7 was able to detect and connect to my WPA2-secured wireless network with only the security key. No fiddling with settings or having to specify the SSID. It literally took a hour for me to get the damn thing working under XP and only after using Netgear's management program--versus less than a minute with the built-in connection wizard in Win7.

After the wireless was up, I was able to activate the beta copy of Windows, download and install the driver for the sound chipset, install AVG Free for anti-virus, Flash, Firefox, OpenOffice, the KMPlayer, Irfanview, and so forth. No issues, other than a possible bug where trying to Win-Tab during the Firefox installation caused the installer to hang.

My six-year old Dell isn't going to win any races with it's lofty 1.0 (on a scale from 1.0-7.9) Windows Experience benchmark--thanks to the obsolete ATI graphics. There are some uncomfortable pauses from time to time too...perhaps disk related or due to unoptimized code. But it does seem much more responsive in handling multiple apps at once.

I'm also happy to report that the beta seems to hibernate/resume and still manage to restore the wireless network connection. That's something that was practically impossible in my experience with a laptop on Vista before tweaking and/or the Service Pack. The copy and strange networking behaviors seem to be less obvious. In other words, we're probably back to where we were with XP SP2.

Overall, Win7 is obviously very much like a refined copy of Vista. I've been running Vista for nearly two years and aside from the performance gap, XP is getting worn around the edges. The Vista/7 UI is much more visually appealing, but it's really the changes under the hood that will make the difference--after all, if you can get the bells & whistles of Vista with the speed of XP, why would you stick with an OS that is going on seven years old? It's really too bad that Microsoft wasn't able to bring this new build as its Vista product, since it seems to address the performance and usability (*cough*UAC*cough) concerns that drove people to stick to XP.

It's such an improvement that I'm going to hold off on buying a new PC until there's a free upgrade offer bundled with Vista (probably later this summer). I don't know whether I'd be willing to pay for an upgrade from Vista to Win7, especially since most of the changes are cosmetic (like the new Taskbar, which I can get used to) or tweaks that should have been there from Day 1. But certainly, based on what I've seen so far in this beta build, it should put the nail in XP's coffin.

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I'm back, hopefully

In the very rare case that anyone found this blog, they'd probably conclude this is yet another one that was started and then abandoned. Actually, I had a long illness in the family, and updating a blog wasn't my top priority. But I'm back now, and we'll see how long I can keep it up!