Well, I’ve had Windows 7 for a week now, so I think that its time for an update.
I’ve been using Windows 7 daily, pretty much all day every day.
For me, Windows 7 has been very stable, and good to me. I’ve been putting it through its paces as any normal IT admin would. I’ve got the basics installed Firefox, Office, Trend, SQL 2005, SQL 2008, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, Cisco VPN, and Blackberry Desktop Manager.
I’ve got a couple of other things installed Picasa 3, Carbonite, Google Earth, and VMware Workstation.
I had a couple of issues when installing everything which would be the biggest issues that I’ve had.
The first time I installed SQL 2005 it said that it failed, but all the components succeeded. The engine started, and worked fine, but to be on the safe side I uninstalled and reinstalled without issue.
The VMware Workstation msi crashed. Windows 7 detected the crash and instantly presented a fix to delete a registry key. I deleted the key and reran the installer and the install went through without issue. I attached my four VMs that I had already created and they all fired up first try. (The key was HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftSQMClientWindowsDisabledSessions to be specific.)
The issues with the Cisco VPN software I already talked about, so I won’t bore you with them. You can check out the old post if you are interested.
I also had an issue installing SQL Server 2008 which was very strange. The SQL 2008 installer takes a while to run, so I fired up Solitare on my other monitor and started playing it. Two of the modules crashed while I was playing Solitare. I closed Solitare and no more modules crashed. I reinstalled those parts without issue, this time with Solitare closed.
Some things like I like about Windows 7.
The start menu has had a few things changed. When an application makes its way to the first screen of the start menu if there are recent files which were opened by the application you’ll get a pop out menu with the recent files list.
I decided that I like the new task bar as well. I keep a lot of different applications open, and this makes it easier to find the correct application that I’m looking for.
The machine at home with Windows 7 on it is a two year old laptop with an Intel Centrino Duo 1.86 Ghz (32bit) with 4 Gigs of RAM. The first thing I noticed is that Windows 7 picked up and it using all 4 Gigs of RAM, where Windows Vista (which came preinstalled) only saw 3 of the 4 Gigs (it came with 2 Gigs installed). So that was a plus right there, especially for when I run several virtual machines with 256-512 Megs of RAM each.
The speed of Windows 7 has been great. Windows 7 has been running much faster than Windows Vista ever did on the machine, including the first day I had the machine. I hope that the speed improvements that are in the OS remain in the RTM version of the OS.
Check out what others are talking about on Twitter. Many people are tagging comments about Windows 7 with the #win7 tag.
This weekend I’ll be presenting at the SoCal Code Camp with Windows 7, so I’ll see how that goes with the various projectors at Cal State Fullerton.
Denny
One Response
Currently installing sql2005 and hopefully get sql2008 installed afterwards. Really liking windows 7 so far, as you said much faster than vista and certainly doesnt seem as sluggish. Anyhoo cheers for the post 🙂