a roll of the dice

I hate the abomination that is Windows Vista as much as anyone. When I got my current laptop, I went through the painful and annoying process of muddling together an unofficial collection of drivers to get Windows XP working on it (god damn it, Dell, why couldn’t you just support it?). It immediately improved out of sight in terms of performance and usability, in the sense that it actually worked.  I have since spent considerable time helping others to find their way from the darkness back into the light of 2001’s finest operating system.

Anyway, after reading some interesting reports, with some trepidation I decided to sacrifice all of my fiddling around and fine tuning XP and give Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 a spin. Microsoft are currently offering it free for a year’s use, after which time it will die and users will have to either buy the retail Windows 7 or switch back to something else.

First impressions:

• Installation was terrifyingly easy.  You literally select a language and region, where you want to install it, and about 20 minutes later Windows is installed.  The installer also included actual information about what your options are and looked decent, both of which are novel for Microsoft.  I would go so far as to say this is the easiest installer I’ve used, including Linux and all previous versions of Windows.
• The installer was smart enough to fire up wireless networking and join my local network during the install process, which was impressive.
• Setting up user accounts was similarly streamlined - username, password, done.
• Out of the box, Windows 7 managed the feat of detecting and installing drivers for all of the weird gizmos in my laptop save 3 (the fingerprint reader and two media card readers).  Given that Dell uses an ungodly collection of random technology in their laptops this was pretty amazing.  Even more amazing, when I ran Windows update it managed to correctly identify those outstanding items, plus the latest drivers for my video card, and install them all in one go.  Result: after one reboot, Windows had every single driver it needed working correctly.  If you’ve ever installed any previous version of Windows you will know that this is basically a miracle.
• Initial impressions of using it are that it looks good; boots up and runs about as quickly as Windows XP (or maybe even a tad more quickly, although that might just be the shiny-ness); has some nice themes and wallpapers included (although the people at Microsoft are clearly on acid, some of the wallpapers are… interesting.  Like, crazed giant animals lumbering around with weird manga-style backgrounds behind them).
• More goodness is that HDMI and a second screen (my TV) seem to work well without much configuration at all, although sound over HDMI is not working for me at the moment.
• Windows Media Centre seems really nice - this is an integrated media playback program designed to run on your TV.  It is also the first time I have ever been able to actually use the mini-remote control that came with my Dell laptop.  Basically you just tell it where your media is and it sorts through it then displays it in nice big menus that are designed to be navigated with a remote.  It also has the capacity to get information about your media from the Internet (album covers, movie synopses, reviews etc) and integrate it much like MythTV would.  It also includes a few really sensible tools like sample videos designed to let you calibrate your television properly (uncalibrated TVs being a hidden epidemic in our society… turn your brightness down, damn it).
• Interestingly, the OS seems capable of playing xvid and divx videos without the installation of any special drivers.
• “My Documents” and indeed “My” anything appears to be dead!  Huzzahs.  You now have a document ‘library’ (why can’t it just be “Documents”?).
• The dreaded User Account Control from Vista still exists, but so far I have had to enter my password twice, and both times it was appropriate that Windows check whether I actually wanted to do the thing that was about to happen.

Of course, it’s not all happy psychadelic animals and flowers:

• Microsoft continues on their crusade to not actually let you know what’s happening on your computer.  In other words - the file system is hidden from you as much as possible, just as it was in Vista.  You can find it if you want to, but Windows assumes you’d rather use their abstraction of the “document library”.
• Many of the system options are still hidden away in a series of confusing nested menus.  For example, to turn off System Restore was an exercise in digging about 5 menus deep in a variety of places which might have been the right one.  The fact that many of the system configuration menus seem to appear in more than one place actually makes things more confusing, not more convenient.
• At the moment I can’t figure out how to get a network icon to show me when there’s activity on the network, although I assume/hope this is possible.
• The Start Menu is, to my eye, a jumbled mess of crap with no real order or logic to it.

None of that really conveys “the vibe” of this thing though, which is good.  Very good, so far.  Nothing happened which made no sense, or was pointlessly annoying, or just weird.  Unlike Vista it didn’t sit there grinding its gears for no apparent reason for minutes on end, nor did the screen randomly go black while I entered my password 20 times to prove I am who I say I am.  Unlike XP, it actually looks like it was written since the invention of electricity, and has drivers and integration for modern devices and media.

Of course the only real point to computers is games.  I haven’t tried any yet, but so far signs are good that Windows 7 is slick and streamlined enough to be a decent gaming OS.  More on that if I can be bothered later.

Finally, another important lesson I learnt during this process: deleting your girlfriend’s documents in your haste to install a new operating system is a health hazard.

(Apologies for the geeky post.  I like computers.)