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Central » On Windows 7
I upgraded computer #1 of 5 with Windows 7 (my Toshiba Tecra M7). Thoughts: Nice. Faster. Smarter. Pain-in-the-ass.
Nice: Well, lets start with the interface. Clean, easy to manage, and all the other piles of words that the major reviewing sites have given. By far, it's just as simple as what Apple's OS X system is, but with standard items that Microsoft has made standard in Windows operating systems (since Win95).
Faster: Okay, this might change later. A clean install, new registry and all that will, undoubtedly, be faster than the previous.
Smarter: On my laptop, it KNOWS my battery is almost completely worthless (after a couple years of only having it on the power cord, and not roaming around with it as much). On install, other than my graphics card (nVidia Quadro), it found all of my drivers.
Pain-in-the-ass: You've heard this one: No upgrade path for Windows XP to Windows 7. All my programs, documents, pictures, music, etc, etc, etc... All of that got dumped into the Windows.old folder. Manual move for all of my files, plus the few programs that I know don't need registry entries (WoW being one). Of course, this is why I made a full backup of my drive before installing.
Three to One, and it's a winner so far!
Overall, I think Windows 7 is better - it did find all the drivers on my box and my monitor (!) from the get-to (a pleasant thing). Also, if you click-and-drag your window to either the left or right corners of your desktop such that the cursor comes in contact with those corners, the window will resize to fit to half of your screen upon mouse release. Click-and-drag your window to almost anywhere on the top border of your desktop, the window maximizes. Such a small thing, but so useful when I'm coding. My other favorite (you probably already know it) - press Win+T to move the focus to the taskbar. Once there, use the arrow keys to select a particular window or group and then hit Enter to launch or activate it. Other tips: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx
As for not having an upgrade path from XP to 7, yeah that's a sore spot for many, given the frustrations with Vista. I'm one of those who will do a clean install whenever upgrading on a major OS version - it gives me a chance to clean out all the extraneous cruft and programs I don't use. If I could make the complete process more simple, I'd probably do it once a year.
Posted by Crystie Lopez, 03/11/2009 10:09am (2 years ago)
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