Well, I decided last night to take a chance on a relatively unproven platform (considering the release date).
I actually have a legit Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit RTM release (through Microsoft's TechNet program. Released August 6, 2009). So, on with the installation and observations!
First, my system specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (~2.6GHz)
4GB DDR2 RAM
512MB nVidia GeForce 9600GT
2x 500GB Western Digital Caviar (7200RPM) / SATA
I was originally running Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit), so, I decided to move all my data to one 500GB, and just clean the second 500GB and use that as my Windows 7 installation, that way if something did go terrible wrong, I could just boot back into Vista without much trouble.
So, the installation was a breeze. On a free 500GB drive, I completed the installation in about 30 minutes (but I wasn't timing it). Once completed, I was greeted with something pretty nice: Windows 7 had recognized all my hardware and manufacturers and model, and found all the drivers for it, instantly. Everything worked immediately. It even found the latest nVidia drivers for my 9600GT. So, I was pretty impressed at this point. Everything seems to be going well. But, with anything, something has to go wrong somewhere, I mean, in the end, Windows is still written by humans, and no one is perfect.
So, my first test was to see how my TV tuner was working in Windows Media Center, so, I launched that, and everything was a breeze, up until I tried to actually watch anything. As soon as I went to watch it, two seconds into the stream from my tuner card (which is rock solid on Vista) the computer blue screened. So, I took this time to think perhaps the latest driver didn't get installed, so upon rebooting, believe it or not, another driver was available, so I gave it a shot. I never had a blue screen again...from that particular area anyways.
To not go too deep into everything, I'll give you the summary and my own nitpicks about the OS itself. These are only my opinions and could entirely be issues with my own hardware, so please, do don't Apple kool-aid all over the journal if you can control it (put your tinfoil hats on).
I had several more times where blue screens occured, which were:
-Plugging in my iPod to use on iTunes
-Running heavy load of various browsers and tabs (4 browsers; ~40 tabs between all).
-TV Tuner blue screen
- ~3 other times where I have not isolated the blue screen to a specific event or action.
My nitpicks include:
-I think the taskbar is ugly (personally)
-There is no quicklaunch anymore (I realize the taskbar concept negates that, though)
-Creating a taskbar more than 1 row deep looks awful, as well as any Toolbars user created look bad too, as the icons don't fit that well.
-I myself have seen Windows Aero animation stutter on opening/closing, minimizing windows. This has been noted by a lot of people as well, and there is even YouTube videos of this. However, this is not saying everyone has this issue, my lab PC at work doesn't have this problem.
-Login screen is homely (again, personal thing)
Some glitches i've come across:
-Creating new icons sometimes doesn't show up right away, and clicking "Refresh" to the screen makes them appear.
-Disabling desktop icon label drop shadows sometimes doesn't take effect immediately, or until the next reboot.
Again, these are just my personal takes on the OS so far. I am going to do a modified journal of this if I can find some time, and update my experiences with Windows 7 (RTM) as the days go on and I get some more testing in. I'll date these and you can follow along if you wish. I'll basically be going through glitches and problems i've had.
This journal is not a bash of the OS. I actually find Windows 7 quite good. So, give it a try. I am just going through my issues so that others may learn or know what to expect possible on their own side. If you have used RC1 then you already know most of this, and this may not apply to you. Most of my own errors are caused by my hardware, so, it's up to me to figure things out!
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