Windows 7

[jcatt]

I recently acquired a copy of Windows 7 Build 7000, and i must say i am extremely impressed. I installed it on my HP TX2000 tablet, which originally came pre-installed with Vista.

[Off Topic]
From the moment i first booted the laptop from the factory it ran slowly. Even after i uninstalled all the "junk-wear" that came pre-installed it still ran relatively slowly, and would often lock-up for minuets or just freeze completely. I had many BSOD's all with different causes, which made troubleshooting impossible. The boot up was slow, sometimes it would be 10 minutes before i could use it. I tried to improve performance by turning off most of the visual features and tweaked it as much as i could, but to little improvement.


So out of frustration I emailed HP and requested the XP drivers for the laptop, I explained that vista was not performing how i wanted it to and that I had purchased a copy of XP Tablet 2005 and wished to install it instead. And within 1/2 a day I received a reply with a link to the ftp site for the laptop which contained all the xp drivers. So i proceed to partition my hard drive to maintain the vista OS and installed XP on the new partition. After i had installed all the drivers and such it ran very well. Xp booted in seconds not minutes and i rarely had lookups. However as i used it more i kept having issues with the drivers from HP. Even though they were correct and up-to-date, i kept getting reoccurring BSOD's all driver related. But i took it with the territory and put up with them.
[/Off Topic]

So when i got the chance to install the alpha release of Windows 7, i installed it over my old vista partition. What amazed me the most during the install was how fast it was. From the start of the installer to to its finish took around 10 minuets, not accounting for time spent traversing through the dialog boxes. Further still was that during the installation the installer popped up asking which wireless network to connect to, so that it could retrieve the latest updates from Microsoft, without asking me for the wi-fi driver before hand. Something i had only seen in Linux installations. After the installation completed i only needed to install the video driver, the tablet driver, and the finger print reader software, to get full functionality, better still was that all the drivers were just the vista drivers already available from HP's site.

After i had everything set up my overall impression is that Windows 7 huge step up from vista and light years ahead of XP. Its amazing, i retained all of the vista features and visuals yet maintain better performance than XP. While the boot is still a little slower than XP, once its booted everything runs so well. Programs start much faster, with more reliability. Not to mention that i have been running it straight for 4 days now without a single hang-up, freeze, or error message, even after i installed Inventor 09 and Adobe CS4, ect. I really looking forward to the release of Windows 7, and without a doubt this will be the best Windows yet.