Archive for the ‘Windows 7’ Category

Windows 7 is pretty good

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

The blue screen of death is no longer an issue after I caught up with all the system update patches. So far I really enjoyed my experience with Win 7, comparing to the Win XP it replaced and the Snow Leopard upgrade I still regretted. Maybe some of these new features are in Vista also, but I completely skipped the Vista experience like a bad TV show:

  • The calculator is much improved. Whoever programmed it finally realized that you don’t have to imitate the real-world calculator just for the sake of it. The designer/engineer at Apple still think that way – and did good job at it I might add;
  • The task bar is great, much better than XP, Vista, or even better than OS X Snow Leopard.
  • Overall feels pretty fast and stable, even though I’m running it on a 2-year-old laptop (2.2Ghz Core 2, 800MHz FSB, 2GB RAM).
  • Nice little touch like the fast switching themes, short-cut key to choose projector connection options.
  • 900 other features I haven’t discovered yet.

Small issues:

  • Outlook system fonts became smaller than in XP and there’s no way to completely change it. Changing font size globally is still a visually poor experience.

Windows 7 Ultimate

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

I just got my Windows 7 Ultimate as a holiday gift. Installed on a two-year-old notebook PC yesterday. The installation went very smoothly as I have a clean install. The PC had WinXP and Ubuntu dual-boot. I used GParted to easily removed and resized the Linux partitions. Then I instructed Windows 7 to take over the unpartitioned space.

Win7 rewrote the Linux boot manager (grub) with its own. It boots slightly slower than WinXP even though it is a new install while my WinXP had 2 year worth of junk on it. Win7 named its boot partition C Drive and the first partition D Drive. So if I like it, I can just use the WinXP partition as the data partition for Win7.

All the important drivers such as sound, video, printer, network and wireless worked out of the box. Office suite installed easily. So does Firefox and a few other essentials. Win7 networking worked well. I was able to join my office domain and setup exchange server connections fairly easily.

Today is a rude awakening when I got the first blue screen of death when it booted up in the morning. Still investigating…but I think I’ll be dual-booting WinXP Win7 for a while.