Paul's Blog

With the release of Windows 7, and the fact that I can get it free from MSDNAA, I decided to leave Vista behind and upgrade. I also decided to move to the 64 bit version.

The only problem I’ve had so far seems to be a rather strange configuration issue in Apache, but I’ve managed to work around that until I find out what’s going wrong. Everything else I’ve tried to install has worked just fine.

All of the hardware that I’ve connected so far has worked without a problem, although I did have to dig around a bit for Memory Card Reader drivers as Acer don’t seem to provide 64-bit drivers for my model.

I quite like some of the new features in 7, for example, the way you can use a slideshow for the desktop background and the new aero features when you hover over a window thumbnail or show desktop. It’s a shame Firefox doesn’t yet have support for giving thumbnails for each tab.

Jump lists are also quite useful, providing quick and easy access to recently used or favourite files. I’ve pinned a few folders that I use frequently to the Explorer jump list on my taskbar.

The new version of Virtual PC for Windows 7 is also a great improvement over the previous version. It seems to run well and allows you to run applications on the guest machines as though they were installed in the host, which is quite useful for testing web sites in IE6. Ubuntu seems to work in it as long as “i8042.noloop” is added as a boot option to make the mouse work, although I can’t seem to get the Virtual Machine Additions to work. Maybe I should try SuSE (which is actually supported with the VMAs).

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the Windows 7 experience and am glad that I've updated from Vista. I’m sure other features will come to my attention as I continue to use it…

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 12:10 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.