Windows 7
Posted on January 16, 2009
Filed Under Music, Wall Street | Comments Off
So I decided to put the new Window 7 beta on my laptop and see what this new OS has in store, while visually it’s not much different than Vista they took out all the crap that wasn’t working right and replaced it with things that work much better.
You can’t change the start button, however if you do it right you’ll never need the start button anyway. There’s also no more quick launch however you can *pin* items to the taskbar, which means the icon will always be there and expand only when you use them. The windows explorer default looks ugly as fuck, all the things you’d want to click on first are at the bottom and you no longer can tell where the files are when you’re looking at them, you have to make an educated guess as to where and hope you’re right. Instead of having a “my documents” folder you’re given a folder with your username on it. This folder is easily found through the C drive though it feels a little insulting that they wouldn’t want to tell you this folder in on your hard drive, though I haven’t looked through the options to see if it’s changeable I shouldn’t have to.
So enough bitching about little things because there’s been some huge changes in the way Windows 7 operates. For instance when I use the “power” button to either turn off or on the computer it does an amazing thing, it turns off or on the computer in a reasonable amount of time. Not since Windows 2000 has a Windows felt this smooth and loaded and unloaded so quickly. It was also really nice that it figured out a way to use my wireless without installing the right drivers, giving me then the option to go download the right drivers to make the cool buttons on my laptop work. It was very seamless, quick and so easy my grandma could do it.
My experience with Vista has been riddled with blue screens of death, random hangs and randomly toying with my network settings making it so I have to reset everything to make my laptop talk with my desktop. Windows 7 attempts to add “homegroup”, a new way to network with a password where if you have that password you can have pretty much free reign on the other machine if you set it that way. Being that I only have it on my desktop and surely I’m the only one at work with it I’ve yet to try this “homegroup” feature but Windows gets very upset if I try to turn it off. Seeing as how horrible Vista is I’d rather try to run an OS on stone tablets so I’m thinking in the next 2-3 weeks I’m going to reformat the Beast and install this beta.
Overall if you have the opportunity to install this beta (give me a DVD or something) do it. Hands down it’s the most stable Windows beta ever, sure there’s a few little bugs here and there but none so big as to subtract a pleasurable experience from it. I think many programs still need to change their programs for it so if you depend on certain programs for day to day life it’s probably best you consult the googles before installing, World of Warcraft works far better on Windows 7 (the idea that closing and opening programs should be fast finally hit Microsoft) so I don’t see myself going backwards anytime soon.
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