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Ok, more like Day-4, but time runs away.

So far, so good.  If they manage to not screw the pooch between now and Oct 22nd, Microsoft may have almost come close to trying to redeem themselves.

I’m running Win7 on two computers now.  My laptop, which at work I’ve mostly rendered into a terminal server by implementing a very limited VDI infrastructure (different post entirely) but it gives me a chance to play.

It’s fairly quick, suspends/resumes on demand without too much belching.

I’m still annoyed that it doesn’t use all 4G of my laptops memory, but the way I understand it that’s a limitation in the hardware/chipset more than anything.  (I’m not too saavy on Intel-based limitations, so this is a guess)

Most importantly, and where Win7 excels opposed to Vista, is even in Beta, all of my usual software runs.  Right out of the box, no patches/updates needed.  I’m impressed.

Even Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 loads, complete with the ISO mounter that I’ve come to depend on.

On my desktop it screams.  My desktop is a Dual-Core 2.8G box with 4G of ram.  (Still hit the 3200Meg limit though

It discovered the quad-head setup with only minor tweaking and hasn’t lost the layout once the way Vista usually does.  (About once a week I was having to remind Vista where each monitor is in relation to the other one.  Graphics are blazingly fast but I’ve yet to test it with Call of Duty 4 or something that really exercizes the Dual 2-port 1GB PCI-e Video cards this thing runs.

The TV tuner works out of the box, and media center has some nice tweaks, including (finally) the ability to record/DVR directly to a share.  (Given that my DVR area is a Terabyte of Celerra NAS, that’s a meaningful accomplishment for me)   Using Vista I was having to script a copy from the internal drive to the share, and MediaCenter was not able to read the details once they were moved, they just became random videos.  (Despite the fact that the .dvr-ms filetype contains the metadata structures to keep the program information handy)

So all in all, not too bad.

And what’s the deal with the black&white icons in the system tray?  I would expect these as “place holders” in the early beta versions while the new icons can be developed.. but this:

Simply doesn’t make any sense.

Anyone else playing with Win7?  What are your thoughts?

Ok – it doesn’t suck yet.

I’m sure I’m going to have my membership to the all-geek club revoked for that statement but saying anything else wouldn’t be totally honest.

I installed Win7, RC1 (I think – Build 7100) yesterday on the spare harddrive on my laptop just for grins.

First off I was amazed at the size of the download, almost a full gig smaller than Vista, must have been all that debug code they pulled out of it.

Second point was the install went smoothly and with minimal customer interaction.  When I look at a product and say “this is probably something i could hand my son (who, sob, is not technically inclined beyond how to load a game into the PS3) and tell him to run with, and expect that he’ll only ask a dozen or so questions.

The third things I noticed were the UI.  Surprisingly intuitive.  The “Windows Sidebar” has been replaced by an active desktop that actually works, you can drop gadgets anywhere on the desktop, which makes for the abiltiy to more logically place things based on your needs.

The old windows task bar has been replaced by something, not surprisingly, more mac-like.  Each application has a button, multiple windows within an application get grouped with the app.  Mousing over the application gives you a preview of all windows associated with the app, and mousing over the preview brings each window to the forfront in succession.  (It makes finding what you’re looking for in a desktop full of app windows much easier, since Win7 *STILL* doesn’t come with multiple desktops)

So far, so good.  I’ll follow up tomorrow after I start installing applications and see which ones don’t work.  (always the big fear, right?)

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Just Sayin……