Windows 7 - First Impressions

Well, shit - This is atually pretty good.

This phrase sums up my first impressions of Windows 7, the next edition of windows after the crap-tacular Vista.

The UI was a bit clunky at first and I had some issues with transpareny, but it was due to the fact that the NVIDIA Drivers weren't installed. Speaking of Drivers, I was really impressed when I opened up Windows Update to see that it had already downloaded the driver for my printer. After changing the 'Automatially download all updates and install them' to 'let me choose when to download and install', I was shocked to see that there, in the update list waiting for me was:

• My Graphics driver
• My LAN driver (both of them, I have 2 LAN ports)
• My Screen Diver (Viewsonic VX922)

This is a really nice touch - along the lines of Mac OSX Leopard which will automatically search for printer drivers on the DVD or online when you plug it in.

The new taskbar is the most notable feature since vista - it works quite well, but it's trick to see if a window is open - I suppose it just needs getting used to.

Windows Media Center is a Tv remote-based interface to your media Library - it looks nice, but it doesn't work with my 3 stereo jack 5.1 surround sound - hopefully I can resolve this. I'm also yet to import my Movies/Music from XP so I'll report on that when I've done that.

I can't seem to access my old XP hard-drive from inside 7 - I'm not sure whether this is a security feature or whether my XP Partition has been... damaged. I am yet to test XP again - I'm still drawn to 7.

I tried hard to like Internet Explorer 8 - the web accelerators are a nice touch and it integrates well to the operating system, but it's still not a very good browser. Gmail completely screwed itself, and only worked on compatibility mode - and even then there were some UI issues. I've installed Google Chrome, which is pretty good and looks better with the Aero interface compared to XP.

I'm yet to test out the media functions of Windows 7 - this is something that looks really promising, but I just need to get all my music across to the windows 7 partition and hope that WMP will let me play mp4s. But as for now, I'd recommend giving the beta a whirl, as long as you know what you're doing. If you are unsure about anyhing, make sure you've backed up!

More Soon!