Andrew Jackson

Windows 7

This weekend I finally got annoyed with how slow my laptop was being and decided that it was time to format. Despite not being out in shops yet, I have been able to get Windows 7 Professional through the MSDN Academic Alliance with my university for about a month so after a long download on my 2 Mb connection, I have it running now.

I have only been using it for 4 days now but there is a definite improvement over Vista. I never had any major problems with Vista and have been using it for the past 2 years, both Home Premium on my laptop and Business on my desktop PC. Despite this, I thought I should try out Windows 7.

I never looked at any of the beta or release candidate versions of Windows 7 in much detail so this was really my first time with the operating system. At first I didn’t know if I liked the new task bar but after a few days of using it I have grown to like it. It has integrated the quick launch bar and the task bar into one and it works well. The task bar is a lot less cluttered even with a lot of windows open. This is the only major, visible change that I have come across. There are a few others but nothing significant enough to be worth noting.

I see that there are libraries now, collections of multiple different folders. The defaults are for documents, pictures, music and videos. They are both the users folder and public folder. I don’t really have much use for these since I only have a single user system and don’t use the public folders at all. I can see that libraries would be useful to a lot of users though, especially those on multi-user system. It does make the process of working with shared files easier. I store my photos on a network drive, I tried to add this to the picture’s library but it said that I couldn’t as the directory was not indexed. I looked into this and it seems that I would have to make it available offline. I don’t really want to have to do that so that was out.

I have also seen something called Home Group, I haven’t really looked into what this is but it seems to be a simpler way of sharing resources on a network. I have no use for this so haven’t really looked into it.

None of my day-to-day applications refused to work so no problems there. The day after getting everything set up though, I was having one problem where explorer would crash every time I right-clicked. It would recognise this and automatically restart but it was quite annoying. I found online that 7-zip caused this problem so I un-installed it and all was well. I have since re-installed it and there is still no problems so I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not.

From a performance point of view it is not much faster on my laptop, there is a speed improvement but then that was from a 2-year-old Vista install that was long overdue some maintenance so I don’t really know how fair of a comparison that is. I opted for the 32-bit version of Windows 7, I was reading online about it and found that the general consensus seemed to be that if you have 4GB of RAM, or might do in the future, then get 64-bit. Those, like me, with only 2GB then get 32-bit. I thought about buying more RAM but it would be about £70 for me to buy 4GB of laptop memory and it doesn’t seem worth it. Once I go back to England next year I will have my desktop PC again. I wouldn’t bother upgrading my laptop anyway, it is over 2 years old and doesn’t seem worth spending money on. Especially since new laptops are so much cheaper.

Windows 7 has integrated perfectly with Windows Home Server. The connector software is working without any problems and the backups are working so no problems there. I have seen that Power Pack 3 will include better support for Windows 7 but I am not having any problems running on Power Pack 2. It has not been waking up my laptop to run backups at night as it should, but this morning, I noticed that Wake On LAN was disabled in the network adapter’s drivers yesterday so I thought that might be something to do with it. I enabled the option but it still didn’t wake up last night to run the backup so I don’t know what to do now. I need to look around a bit for the problem but maybe it is something that Power Pack 3 will fix.

Overall it does seem to be a perfectly good operating system. Maybe people will now finally upgrade from the 9-year-old Windows XP. We will have to wait and see if tomorrow’s release goes better than Vista’s release date, but from my few days of using I can see no reason why not.

Tags: WHS, Windows 7