Windows 7

Windows 7 Beta 1 came out not long after CES earlier this month. I was one of the many who attempted to get it the moment it came out. If you didn't follow the story, the servers all crashed and many fans were left waiting many hours to get a copy of the beta. The beta was originally intended for the first 2 million users, which is one of the reasons for the high traffic early in the day. The next day they, Microsoft, re-released the beta and security keys. It had been a long 30 hrs of waiting and re-freshing, but a sense of accomplishment came along with the first full boot.

Side note: I have been using Windows Vista on my personal computer for nearly 1.5 years. I haven't had many troubles with it. The only real trouble I could talk about is that I had problems running Age of Empires 2: Conquers Expansion. This should have been expected. This game was released on the Win98 platform and therefore isn't quite as compatible with current day systems.

The computer I am using for the Win7B1 is a media center that I built for our apartment's main room. It is a 2.4 Ghz P4 with 1.5 gb of ram and 1 Tb hdd. It was running Windows XP 2005 Media Center edition before I re-sized the drive into two partitions. The W7B1 has been working out for our apartment so far quite well.

Desktop gadgets: I'm a big fan of gadgets as I have gotten use to having them in Vista. I've got a few weather gadgets and an Xbox Live friends gadget too. These are nearly flawless.

General Use: The computer has a Windows Media Center remote control hooked up to it too. In WinXP05MC, the remote would wake the computer up from screen saver. In the Beta, the remote is fairly useless in waking the computer up. It is actually sometimes a chore, hopefully this gets some special touches before release later this year. As for now, the computer is now set to never sleep.

Media Center: Overall, this is a clear upgrade from XPMC. The UI is more useful and easy to use. The UI now incorporates many web-based applications, sports, music, videos - nearly seamless. The guide can now be color coded to indicate the type of programming on each channel. As well as a boat load of other features.

My impression so far is that it will be a great new experience. I'm glad that I'm part of the beta, as it has been not much trouble so far. I look forward to seeing the other improvements as them come through the pipeline.

In my last post, Week In Review, you can read the Windows 7 opinion article. I can see where the author of the post is coming from. Windows Vista really wasn't that bad. It would be nice though to see a reduced price for people that had to "suffer" through the new features Vista added. Coming from a Vista user for 1.5 years, take that comment with a grain of salt.

-JBiber