Windows 7 Experiences

I've been running windows 7 for about a month, due to being part of MS technet, developers got the full release of windows 7 early.  I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on an older laptop :

• Dell E1705
• 4 gigs ram (3.25 addressable)
• Intel Core 2, 1.73GHZ
• Windows rating experience : 3.7

I did a fresh install since my Vista install was a good 2 years old 32bit and I wanted to "clean out", I'll be upgrading my desktop soon that runs Vista 64 ultimate.

So far there is not a single piece of software I've been unable to run, from Visual Studio 2008, Adobe Flex 3 & 4, Directory Opus, Photoshop CS4, Adobe Flash, Filezilla, Charles, Enterprise Architect to name a few.

The only thing I could not get to work was the new sprint Franklin card that does the 3g/4g, however my business partner Paul has clear 4g card working under Windows 7 with a bit of driver version switching (not running the latest drivers).

In use, Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, its fast, responsive, I'd say at least 30% faster on lesser hardware than Vista, All the new features like live preview of application windows by rolling over the application in the start bar are nice, but truly the fact it just works, its fast and it doesn't hang like vista did is what makes it better for me.  I am especially happy with the drive upgrades/installation and how seamless it is and I don't seem to have to go downloading a driver very often, windows finds it, so their integration with vendors driver libraries has been much better.

I would highly recommend switching to Windows 7, if you're currently on the fence.

Comments

[Chris Tilley]

Thanks for the review. Still waiting on Gateway to send me my free upgrade.

I am considering a dual boot on a partitioned drive. Is that just as good as a clean install? I want to be sure that I can continue working if I run into any issues.

Chris

[Grant Davies]

Hey Chris,

To be honest, considering how cheap drives are, I'd use something like Acronis true image to clone your current drive to the new drive, and then upgrade to windows 7. this way you can see if the upgrade from vista to windows 7 is seamless, and if not you can flip back to your old drive. I use acronis true image 10, which clones the drive with all the software, you can then restore this "clone" to any drive and that drive is then bootable and like you never left. I've used this many times with 100% success.

[TJ Downes]

I'd have to say my experience thus far hasnt been quite as good.

An in-place upgrade from Vista Business x64 to W7 Pro x64 failed and had to to do a hard reinstall.

Performance has been lackluster compared to my experience with Vista x64. I'm guessing much of this is due to poor driver performance for higher-end hardware, such as soundcards and graphics cards.

I'm not a fan of some of the UI changes, either. It seems MS is trying to imitate OS X in some areas, without the quality of design that Apple puts out. (I'm not Apple fanboi, I do not even own an Apple device).

IMHO, MS is going to need to do something better to compete with Apple. The W7 release has made me seriously consider OS X as a viable alternative.

[Grant Davies]

Update 11/22/09

I actually upgraded my desktop from vista ultimate 64 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 and it went very smooth. Took about 2 hours, so I worked on my laptop while the upgrade was in process. I had to un-install a couple of pieces of software and re-install my graphics card utility program, but otherwise the upgrade was painless.

Original post :

Thats good info to have, I was planning on doing exactly this with my desktop which is a much more powerful machine (i7 based quad core). I'll be doing an image of the drive before upgrading so I can go back if necessary, but you experience does lower my expectations for the upgrade.

I personally like the UI, I do own a mac and osx and there are things I don't like about OSX and things I don't like about windows 7. I really do like the preview feature for application windows via the start bar, and I like how hardware eject is handled. I don't like how you have to dig to get to the device manager, and I'm not crazy about the changes to mydocuments/my pictures etc.