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Windows 7 and its upcoming greatness

Well as some of you know I had, up until a couple weeks ago, ceased being an early adopter of operating systems.

As part of a better beta program from Microsoft I had been running Vista for a very long time, and other than a few frustrations, found it to be superior to XP in almost every way.  (Interface!)  Some of the third party driver support sucked, but that is due to the vendor and NOT Microsoft.  After all, Apple has a very specific hardware base to support, so no comments from the Apple zombies.  I hear they are all liberals, anyway.

Please take into account this article was written at least two weeks after the installation.

Updated:  You can get a copy of the release candidate for free from Microsoft that will work until next June.  So that is a free year.

BTW:  Why buy a macbook just to install windows on?  Seems stupid to me.  (Yes, I have a Mac also.)

So when finally “presented” with a few keys for the RC, I decided why not.  I had been reading good things from Paul Thurrot and others about Windows 7 for some time, my Vista install was stale, and I had some issues with moving some data, so…

Windows 7 Ultimate RC in 64 bit glory found it’s way onto my desktop, Skadi.  Immediately after getting updates, anti-virus, etc. all installed the first thing I was entranced with was the newly remodeled, very versatile and usable taskbar.  It’s far more “dock-like” than it has been in the past, and programs that are, I guess, Windows 7 aware seem to add context menu options right to the bar.  Nifty.

Next, after the usual, in my opinion, crap drivers from Creative for my Sound Blaster X-Fi, and a few other very minor issues that were more curiosity than anything, I spent hours installing my usual metric ton of applications.  I was worried about Nero 9, but since Aheads website stated “Support for Windows 7” I didn’t stress.  Besides, I had a fully working Vista system image on the network anyway.

Applications installed fine.  In fact, Adobe Creative Suite 4 installed quicker than usual.  I had read that hard disk speed was improved because of better drivers, this COULD in fact be the case.

Dig the interface.  A lot.  I think this will give OS X’s usability a good run.  So far everything I use is working just fine.

• Blackberry Curve 8320
• Logitech G15 Keyboard
• Various USB Headsets
• Logitech Webcam
• Various External Hard Drives

Now, I did run into one problem that I solved fairly easily.  My explorer right click menu, you know, the context one?  When I would right click ANYTHING, it would take five minutes to finally appear.

I uninstalled Office 2007’s Groove Monitor program, and also removed Adobe CS4’s Drive thing.  Rebooted, fixed.  Should have actually been a little more “one at a time” on them to actually figure out which one it was.  Ah well.