Ben H Blog - Keep it Simple, Then Refactor.

I took the plunge last weekend and loaded the latest Windows 7 Beta on my laptop.  I decided to just go for it.  I had already loaded it on a spare laptop from work, but until you use something on a day to day basis you don’t really get a good feel for it.  Overall the experience has exceeded my expectations.  Here is a list of things I like:

• The most impressive thing was the easy of installation and driver support.  I have an AMD Turion 64 X2 laptop.  The laptop was loaded with Vista 32 bit.  I decided to go all in and load the 64 bit version of the Beta.  Install was clean and the first time I logged in my screen resolution was really low.  However, after the first login Windows Update ran automatically.  Once that was done and I restarted the machine and was happy to find that my video and audio where back to normal.  I’ve been running for 5 – 6 days now smoothly and without a crash.
• Another thing I have been happy with is the power management.  I have three kids under the age of 6.  So, I like to move around with my laptop while I keep one eye on them.  The power on my laptop seems to last longer without sacrificing connectivity or performance.
• Next, The new task bar is really useful.  Instead of having multiple entries in the task bar for every window, Windows 7 groups them by application.  This is big.  For example when I’m using Outlook I frequently have multiple messages along with calendar entries, contacts etc open at once.  Windows 7 shows one icon on the task bar.
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• Then when I hover on that icon it expands and shows all the windows opened related to Outlook.
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• Very Cool!

A couple things I don’t like so far.

• Support for multiple monitors is a bit difficult.  Maybe I just need some time to get used to it, but it took some extra clicks to get my second monitor configured.  I also had to save my settings multiple times to get it to work.  Not a big deal, but kind of annoying.
• I also was disappointed that there is not support for mounting ISO files built into the OS.  Also MagicDisk, which is the one I used on Vista, did not work.  I found tons of blogs on this and finally loaded PowerISO.  PowerISO worked fine, but the fact that this took so long bothered me.

I will post any other things as I come across them, so far I’m running without a hitch.  The bottom line is that if you are thinking about trying it I would recommend it.  It is beta software so buyer beware, but so far this buyer is very satisfied.