Living with Windows 7 as my primary computing platform reveals that even the beta version offers significant improvements compared with Vista. But many Windows XP diehards still won't like it.
I resisted moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista for more than a year, but I ditched Vista for Windows 7 as soon as the first public beta was released. I put it on my primary home machine, the one I had used to write in detail about Vista, and frankly, even in beta, Windows 7 already is better than Vista in just about every way I can think of. But Windows 7 still feels like Vista, and that's likely to bother many people.
As I wrote in a column earlier this year, I had no regrets about making Vista the OS on my new primary home computer. But clearly, the love wasn't strong enough to stop me from spending a weekend downloading its successor, reformatting my hard drive, and installing the new OS from scratch.
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I guess the combination of glowing initial reports (especially in contrast to the scorn heaped on Vista), the free download, the excuse to wipe the machine clean, and -- yes -- a bit of lingering unhappiness with Vista was enough to get me going. Oh, and of course the need for bMighty editors to remain on the cutting edge of technology that will affect small and midsize companies.
Making The Switch
The process was fairly straightforward, once I managed to figure out what product keys I needed and when in the installation process I needed them. It took a couple hours for the OS to fully install itself on my HP Pavilion laptop, but there were no warning bells or problems along the way. And once the process was complete, most everything worked fine, including printers, networking, external hard drives and cards, and so on.
But not absolutely everything. While the beta OS had no trouble recognizing and dealing with my external monitor, it had no idea what to do with the laptop's built-in screen. It came up with an old-school 1024x768 resolution that looked decidedly strange on the 1280x800 wide-screen display. Fortunately, a quick Google search turned up a "Mobile PC Display" driver that works just fine.
At that point, I thought everything was perfect on the hardware front, until the hour got late and I tried to plug in a pair of headphones so I could keep working -- and listening -- without disturbing the other residents of my house. Well, I wasn't disturbing them, but I wasn't hearing anything myself, either. The headphone output was dead. Once again, a visit to Google turned up a new sound-card driver that allowed me to use headphones and external speakers.
Oh, and the laptop's built-in Webcam that Vista never knew existed? Windows 7's new device manager knows it's there, which seems like an improvement, but I still haven't been able to actually get it to work. (Again, please let me know if anyone out there has any suggestions! HP hasn't been too helpful about that, nor about the machine's new inability -- in Vista and Windows 7 -- to recognize its Ethernet connection. Fortunately, the wireless connections work fine.)
Just like with Vista, I haven't seen any software compatibility issues with Windows 7. Every program I've tried -- both brand new and very old -- has worked just fine.
All in all, not a particularly bumpy ride for installing a new operating system still in beta stage -- and a snap for even an inexperienced IT staffer. The process would still be enough to stump a casual, nontechy user, though. Microsoft has plenty of time to fix stuff like this before the next beta release, much less the final version. Let's hope it does.
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