Christian’s Blog

My Windows 7 Beta Install

January 9th, 2009 | Tags: Reviews, Windows 7 Beta

The Set Up

2006 era Dell Inspiron 1501

AMD Turion 64 2.00 Ghz

2 Gigs of RAM

Machine was purchased in February of 2006. Its battery is effectively worthless – W7 in fact tells me my battery is bad. The laptop wears the “Vista Capable” badge.

It was delivered with Windows XP Home and upgraded to Vista Basic 32 bit. I downloaded and acquired a key for Windows 7 64 bit so it was unable to install from the OS. I had to boot from the DVD.

The Windows 7 .ISO, once burned to a DVD, will boot and run a clean install. There were some rumors that you could only upgrade to Windows 7 beta – these are false. Anytime you try to run a newer version OS install from within the OS and not from a boot disc it will upgrade. Regardless, upgrade is *not * mandatory. So I wiped and reformatted the HD – this was going to be a perfectly clean install. The install was *fast* remarkably fast. From accepting the EULA to entering the key was about 18 minutes.

Initial Performance

So how does it run? Awesome. The first thing it did was look for hardware updates, it found three; one of which was the video driver. This was nice because at install I only had 1024×768. I now run at 1280×800. This laptop ran Vista, but not well. Windows 7 runs very very smooth – a *very* noticeable difference..

Here is a shot of the first desktop shot. with IE8 starting to run:

The Enhanced Toolbar

The first thing you notice is the new Taskbar. I think this is the biggest interaction improvement from XP or Vista. If you used Vista you will be familiar with many of the features. If you come from XP you will need to learn alot.

Paul Thurrott does not like this new “Enhanced Taskbar” but having used it for the past few hours I think it is going to be hard to go back to Vista’s Win95 based bar. Don’t get me wrong either, I like Paul’s opinions a lot, I just think he is a bit harsh on this feature. To describe it simply, it combines “alt-tab”, the original task bar, and the interactive application based features of the system tray. So to manage windows you can use just the taskbar. “Is it an app or is it a shortcut?” Does it matter? no, you click the icon for what you want and interact with that.

The most obvious new function is being able to sort through explorer tabs from the Taskbar. So when you have multiple tabs open, you can shuffle through thumbnail previews of the open web pages as you want. One cool feature is when you hover over the thumbnail the window maximizes in the background – when you move your mouse that window minimizes. The next cool feature in the new Enhanced Toolbar is monitoring downloads in the task bar:

In the above screenshot you see that the IE icon is partially filled with an odd green color – this indicated how much of my download is complete. when the icon is filled, the download is complete. With 6 meg download speeds this wont be used much except for only the largest of downloads.

I have had multiple applications open since I installed and I have not used alt-tab – my old friend – once. I frequently have multiple browser windows open at work so when/if my employer rolls this out it will be a very welcome addition.

There is some sexiness too. When you scroll your mouse over the series of icons the animation transition is pretty sweet. The video card in this laptop blows so I am eager to see it on a real machine (see Win Experience Score below).

What about UAC

I found that with Vista UAC got better as time went on, don’t know why, don’t care. I just had patience with the thing. In Win7 you have more control from the outset over UAC functionality.

Other Features

The Control panel got a slight face lift. The “advanced” control panel menu is the default. This is not as irritating as it was in Vista because the interactive features have been updated. Most notably when you select a Control Panel feature the activity appears in the same window and the blue vertical bar on the left expands to display specific options. Its subtle and effective.

Libraries are the evolution of My Documents and User Folders. My guess is that it organizes all files by file type, regardless of where located on the hard drive. The implementation looks very nice. I have not yet even thought of the Folder tree. In XP and earlier systems the first thing I would do is customize certain folder locations. I did this because I would have limited disc space on partitions and because I hated the My Documents system. When I install Windows 7 on my main tower I will route all my special (photos, videos, etc.) folders to an external drive for storage. Regardless, the way the folders are laid out has enough to not make me miss the folder tree. Network connections are way, the Downloads folder is right there. Apart from that … what do you need?

I have not messed with Homegroup yet because I don’t have any other machine with Windows 7 on it.

For those that were wondering … Zune runs very well in Windows 7.

So in sum this has been a fun few hours. I am trying to grab a 32bit download, but it looks like even at 2 am PST Microsoft servers still don’t want to cooperate. As for this install it runs better than Vista did on this hardware and *far* better than XP did even with a 3.0 score: