TrueColor Technical

Windows 7

I recently downloaded the public trial version of Windows 7 RC1. All in all I had a much better experience with it them most other "RC" releases in the past. The install was a snap, very simple and actully about 10 - 15 minutes faster then the Vista install (only about 5 minutes faster than XP).

I was really impressed by the fact that I did not have to isntall ANY drivers to have full functionality. No video driver required my 5.1 sound card was detected imiediatly without further configuration needed. (Read More for the rest).

My desktop resolutions were set to reasonable settings upon reboot of the initial start up. Boot times are easily a full minute faster then Vista (on a clean install I have yet to fully weigh it down with all my regular applications). I am very impressed with the new navigation setup. Instead of having a normal task bar there are some programs that just naturally reside as an icon on the "taskbar", hovering over these icons will show related open windows for each application currently running. This makes item groupings much more usable and intuitive.

All of the applications I installed ran nearly perfectly without any tweaking. MS Office 2007, WoW, and Adobe CS4 installed and ran perfectly without a hitch. Hung programs are now much more easily dealt with. I am not entirely sure on the details but it aloso appears that each explorer window is now its own process as I could kill one of the forks without the whole my whole task bar or other windows closing.

All and all I was really impressed with how well a Release Candidate worked. My only big concern is it seems Microsoft is using the RC as a way to test there update process. There are several updates that appeared in the "important updates" list that were labeled "Test Update for Windows 7".Every time I installed any of them the computer would reboot after the install and come back up as "Preparing to Configure Updates". I wait for a good 25 - 40 minutes on this screen before I decided to reboot and see if I could fix it. I tried to remove the installed updates but it would not let me remove the test updates in safe mode. I ended up having to throw the windows CD in and do a system restore.

Again I would say this release looks a lot more promising then vista did a few years back. I have only had about 4 or 5 days with it and I am pretty impressed.