My first day with Windows 7

Today was my first day using Windows 7 as my primary OS.  I took the time this afternoon to install Windows 7 and start getting everything set back up.

So far I’m pretty happy with the OS.  Everything is pretty much where I expect it to be.  I did have an issue when Windows turned off my Monitors when I left my desk (I have 4) and the default monitor wouldn’t come back on.  I was able to get the Monitor selector in the control panel up, and moved to another monitor.  A quick resizing of the problem monitor and it was fixed.  I went ahead and simply disabled the power saving (which I was going to do anyway) and I haven’t had that problem since.

I’ve found that the RDP client is kind of a pain.  It’s back in the Windows 2003 days where it would get you to the logon on the remote machine and then you have to logon.  You still have the option to save your credentials, but you have to click the options button to expose the check box to “Allow me to save credentials”.  I find this annoying as I RDP into dozens of servers, but once they are all setup, I guess it isn’t really a big deal.

The new calculator is nice.  Well done guys.  It looks good, and I think you’ve added some good functionality to our old pal the Windows Calculator.

Everyone rags on the Windows 7 fish (its the default background after you install), but I kind of like him.

My big issue at the moment isn’t a Microsoft issue.  I’m trying to get the Cisco VPN working on a VM before I install on my laptop since I need to be able to VPN into the office with my laptop.  A Cisco VAR told me that the beta version 5.0.05.0280 would work fine, but it’s not working so good.  I found a thread which looks promising so I’ll be trying that next on the release version which is 5.0.04.0300.  Unfortunately the second install of the beta version didn’t go very well and I have to rebuild the VM.  I’ll be doing that at home tonight.

I’m digging the new task bar.  I’m finding that it’s working better for me than the old one did.  I usually have a ton of stuff open (especially with the four monitors) so this makes it a lot easier to find stuff.  The ability to dock applications to the size of the monitor is cool, but I’m not sure just how useful I see that being.

The widgets are nothing exciting yet.  They appear to be basically the same widgets that we got when Windows Vista was released.  The weather one is nice, helps keep track of how miserably hot it is at home.

So far I’ve for Firefox, SQL Server 2008 (Management Tools only), Office 2007, Pidgin, TweetDeck, Source Forge (source control), Blackberry Desktop Manager, and Trend Micro (corporate edition) installed and I’ve had “knock on wood” no issues.  For the most part that’s about all I need to work.

I’m sure as time goes on I’ll find all sorts of new things to install and see what happens.

I’ll keep you posted.

Denny

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