Windows 7

I’ve been using Windows 7 since the public beta and I’ve been very impressed.  I’ve got it dual-booting with Vista on my laptop and running as my primary OS on my home machine.  It runs very nicely, although these are both pretty new machines (Core 2 Duos). From what I’ve heard it will run on lesser hardware, but it still needs to be current gen hardware.  One example is it runs quite happily on Atom based Netbooks, where Vista would struggle.

Unfortunately the public beta has now finished, however I’m sure readers of this blog will either have already got it, or know certain means to lay their hands on it.  Also, if you’ve got TechNet, it’s still there for the taking.

I did run into a problem with it on my desktop yesterday where a RAR set made in the old 00x style wouldn’t open.  However, trying the same RAR set on Vista produced the same problem.  Luckily 7zip came to the rescue and happily opened the set for me.

One other problem which I’m hoping will be addressed by a driver update is some sort of conflict with my video card on the desktop.  It’s a ATi 2400 Pro and I had the same problem for a while on Vista.  The driver crashes and Vista would usually recover, however Win7 seems get stuck in a loop which eventually crashes the system.  I’m still running the MS driver installed for the card when I installed the OS, so I’m hoping getting the ATi driver will resolve the issue.

All in all Win7 is a polished version of Vista and I’m a Vista fan.  However, I think Win7 will also win over some Vista haters – it’s certainly a lot more OS X like which will to be some people’s taste.