W7 first impressions.
At this stage, W7 is still very new, and after vista, most people are cautious about jumping in, in case w7 turns into another lame duck.
So, here is what i have found, both good and bad, but without getting into details that many people don’t care about.
First of all, the bad:
- Despite what MS says, w7 really is vista 2.0. Now that sounds worse than you might think. Towards the end of its life, vista was much better than when it was first released.
- If you don’t like the vista “look and feel” then you won’t like w7.
- It still pushes the vista “start menu”, with the annoying system of “wipe out the current set of start menu choices with whatever sub-menu you happen to pause over”. Its annoying with a scroll-mouse, and just plain crap with any pointing device without a scroll wheel.
- My biggest gripe about w7 and vista is the senseless naming system. In particular, i find the control panel change from “add / remove programs” under xp, to “programs and features” just makes managing the pc more difficult for the average, non-technical user. I have seen many people not know how to un-install software… And this has now gotten much worse with vista / w7
The good:
- W7 64 bit is impressively fast. As long as you have enough RAM (at least 4 Gb), then everything seems to respond faster. And W7 64 bit has virtually none of the incompatibilities that xp-64 had.
- The UAC popups are much less intrusive, compared to vista.
- Connecting devices (eg printers) is usually flawless, particularly if you have an internet connection.
- If you just use your computer for email, web browsing, some instant messaging, and a writing a few documents and spreadsheets, then you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between xp, vista, w7, mac, and linux anyway.
Overall, w7 doesn’t have the same “stay away at all costs” feel that vista had, as long as you can get used to the slightly less friendly user interface.
I just bought a laptop with W7 just to use as a sort of back-up to my MAC and because of one or two programs that have no MAC equivalent. And I must say I hate that things have been re-named makes difficult to find stuff – I’ve been using MS pc’s for 20 years (before that IBM) and you do get set in your ways I admit but the control made more sense before. I never saw Vista so I can’t compare. I bought my laptop from Dell and it has a dock, which is the same as the task bar, near as I can tell, so I like that becau I am used to the dock on my MAC – at any rate, I have had the new laptop about a month now and have turned it on 3 times – still configuring it – VIVA Apple and MAC…
Just installed W7 on my laptop. All seemed darned easy to do, and currently working well, apart from can’t find a driver for my laptop graphics card, though I haven’t tried overly hard so far.
Agree, they seem to have changed stuff just for the sake of making it different. And I like the explored less than before, which I liked less than… gosh, I can’t remember what it was called, anyway, the explored on W3.1 was just fine.
Showing my age here.
Overall, seems to be aimed at people who don’t know so much, to try and make it easier I guess.
Mmm, well after a bit more fiddling the only thing that I am having trouble with is my ATI driver. My laptop was 1280×800 resolution, but I can’t seem to make it go back to that, despite downloading the ATI updated driver.
Ah well, I’ll keep trying. Everything else seems to be fairly hunky dory.
I like W7 a lot. One thing I learned today was the data migration of ‘My Documents’ folder from XP to Windows 7 is different than XP to Vista.
With Vista, I could copy the contents of ‘My Documents from XP to an external drive. I could then attach that external drive to the Vista PC, open the Vista Documents folder, copy the entire folder structure, and the ‘My Music’ and ‘My Pictures’ folder would magically find their way to the new Pictures and Music folder under the Users folder hive.
With Windows 7, when I moved the entire contents of ‘My Documents’ from XP, the ‘My Music’, My Videos’ and ‘My Pictures’ folder were left behind.
So I decided to drag these folders from the backup drive to the ‘user’ root folder. Well, this made another unexpected mess. I wound up with 2 (yes 2) each ‘My Music’, My Videos’ and ‘My Pictures’ folders — My major peeve about this is the fact that these folders don’t show their real names, Explorer is reading the DESKTOP.INI file to display a folder name to the user. SO I had to open the folders side-by-side to move the users data to the folders that Explorer expects to place the respective media types (GRRR)