Well, after all of the waiting it's finally here. I went onto the Windows 7 website and saw that they would be releasing it soon, then that they would be releasing it on the afternoon of the 9th. The time came and went and I went to bed, got up the next morning and found that they had pulled the release due to 'unprecedented demand'. You don't say?
Much speculation ensued as to whether or not ANYONE had managed to download it at all. Anyway, I checked back at 0630 GMT (I'm at work, I need to be up early and I work 7 days a week) on the Sunday and the download was up and running. Signed in to MSN Live no problems and away she went. This could have something to do with it being the small hours over in the US, though I doubt this would keep committed geeks away. Maybe they had Windows 7 Beta release slumber parties, who knows. They were probably sleeping soundly knowing that they used Ubuntu.
The installation took about 3 hours as I did an upgrade. It was the easier option for me and I'd backed everything up beforehand anyway.
So how is it? Well, I'll be buying a Mac! No really! I quite fancied one anyway...
Actually it's OK. It's a LOT faster than Vista was starting up and shutting down. My TX2500 took 3 or 4 minutes to be useable under Vista and W7 takes just over 1. The interface is snappier too. I went for the 32 bit version as I only have 3GB of memory, so going 64 bit wouldn't really give me any advantage. I could go for 4GB and have the memory dual channel, but it's not worth the expense for the small performance gain given that it runs NWN2 fast enough for me anyway.
Enough about the HP, what about W7? Well I don't hate it. Not as much as I hated Vista when I first used it and definitely not as much as I hated XP when it first came out. That was what got me into Linux on PCs and had me defecting to Macs in the first place. I don't think I used XP again until SP1 and TweakUI for XP were around.
The gadgets are cool but pointless. I didn't use Widgets in OSX and I'm not going to start now in W7. The original start menu has disappered so you are stuck with the Luna style monstrosity. I've hacked around and can live with it, although it is definitely more of a hinderance than a help to be honest. Same with the whole interface. It's simper to use IF you don't know what you are doing but slower if you do. Why can't it be as flexible as Ubuntu?
I'll get there in the end with it. I downloaded Windows Live essentials. Which is basically a back door way of flogging Windows Live just so you can have the Photo Gallery that was part of Vista anyway. Apparently it would be more 'fun' if I signed into Windows Live when I used my Photo Gallery. Not that you actually have to in order to use it. So I didn't. Think of all the fun I'm missing?
In some ways it is getting like OSX. Some features are hidden until you need them. Though inexperienced users may never even suspect that they are there. Which could be a good thing. There is a drive to having everything centred around your pictures, videos and music and you are definitely steered away from the filesystem and into your 'Library' at every opportunity.
I disabled the home network thing straight away so I can't comment on it. I am ultra paranoid over security so there is no filesharing on my network and I disabled all of the remote access services also (Terminal Services etc.). I used FXVisor to get rid of the shortcut arrows and tweaked the registry to get rid of the 'Submit Feedback' button:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ FeedbackToolEnabled set to 0.
I also downloaded a little file to remove the watermark at the bottom left of the desktop as I am aware that it is a beta test version already!
So in summary I would say it's faster, snappier and is worth upgrading to from Vista for that very reason. The changes I can live with and I'll get used to everything being changed for changes sake soon enough.
Though to be perfectly honest if it wasn't for the fact that it such a pain in the arse to set up the touchscreen and fingerprint reader on my HP TX2500 I'd be using Ubuntu 24/7. If you have a PC with no quirky hardware, that's the way to go. Go get an X-Box if you wanna play games. Oh, hang on, that's Microsoft too! Doh!
But then I did write one of the worst C64 games of all time, which says it all really.
