So, there must be a few of us now with Win7 installed, mines a little different as it’s also full of beta VS2008 and Office2010beta.
In general terms though, what are your experiences of Windows7. I’ve direct links to MS and I’ve been asked for feedback on my experiences of the new OS.
I have to admit, ever since RC2, I’ve been impressed, I’ve not yet had a complete OS hang (blue screen). I had a few issues with putting it on my laptop, but that was Dell not supporting the E5400 with Windows7 64bit, however the E6400 does support it and all the drivers for that model worked with my E5400.
My only gripe with the system that is annoying me a fair amount, is the shutdown when it’s waiting for a response from an app, for instance an unsaved notepad etc etc. I think it could have been done better, with a bit of a less scary screen than the “waiting for X to shutdown”.
XP virtual mode, and virtual applications is excellent. If only this approach had been taken in the past, it would have saved developers a nightmare known as DLL hell and .net version conflicts.
I really hate the new start menu. It’s so much slower to reach things you want. I’ve taken to pinning the most common used apps, but for less frequent used apps, the new navigation is horribly slow. I don’t see any logical reason to remove the “classic” style which is simply nicer to navigate when the menu gets bigger.
As a minor note, I noticed the status bar doesn’t report the current folder size like it used to. I’ve not looked too deeply into settings to see if there’s something I’ve overlooked, but I do miss that.
Finally, I know it’s being smart, but let’s say I move a folder of jpegs to the hard disk. Even though I tried to fiddle with settings, it seems to default to showing thumbnails. Similar annoyance with mp3 folders showing various artist and album info. Regardless of the folder content, I just want to default to the classic “detailed” view of filename, path, size and modification date.
If I could get one wish, I’d like a single button I can press that makes Win7 look and feel more like Win2k or XP pre-SP2. Simple, clean, FAST.
last week, after the first couple of days using the new menu, I would have agreed, but being on the machine 10+ hours a day I’m finding it a lot swifter than XP. I simply type the name of the app, arrow to get the one I want and hit enter. I wish the pinned icons on the taskbar could be changed in size, they are too big in my opinion and I’ve not found that option yet. I like the ‘windowskey+number’ that opens the Nth item that is pinned. I’ve set my notification bar to not hide anything, I found myself losing apps that minimise to tray, like Outlook!
The context sensitive view of explorer is quite frustrating, I also like my in pure details view, especially when developing as I need to know compile times of binaries to make sure some of the legacy stuff compiles to where I think it has. I’m also quite confused that the ‘documents’ in explorer isn’t “My Documents”, but “Public\Libraries\Documents”, and those are ‘Homegroup’ shared. I hadn’t realised and my expenses were on the network for all to see :eek:
I actually think that VS2008 loads faster on Win7 compared to XP, and I think various others do as well, including Dreamweaver which is known for being a memory hog in the version I have (DW8).
In terms of application programming, the new forms do look so much better, I think that WPF and XAML are still early technology and are as such quite hard to work with. I get the logic though and can’t wait until more methods are visible in the DevEnv. Ooops, I got a little bit geeky then :lol:
I’ve also had a few issues with SUBST, whether or not to run the command as admin or not. I use it a lot as paths in VS projects to the default location are a nightmare to navigate to.
I’ve not tried typing the name in the start menu before, so that could be a workaround. Still, I’ve grown to like a few clicks max to reach what I want without having to reach for the keyboard too.
I agree don’t like the Start menu - do find the typing the app name useful but still don’t like the start menu
Erm yes shut down - its a bit daft it seems to always want to power up my HDD’s before shutdown even if not used I have had to resort to turning off the power management and have them permantly powered up just so the machine can do a swift shutdown.
Got it running on 2 X 80 GB Intel X25-M G2s in raid and a clean install gets me to the desktop in 15 seconds now 20 since over fiddling and shut down very swift hence my annoyance at the above issue.
Only had one blue screen of death
Still don’t like the office 2010 beta style per the office 2007 style I’m more old school 100% menu driven geek.
Still don’t like the 20GB footprint for what seems like nothing more than a style update.
But I’m not grumbling it seems to have the performance of XP and is working nicely within a 2GB footprint.
Admittedly I nuked most of the styling so its looking more XP like
I’m a right mix of keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements. For the start menu, I’m used to using the mouse, occasionally if I’m on a notebook without mouse then ctrl-escape and cursors to navigate.
Part of the problem might be that I don’t know all the new shortcuts or features, like the win-number mentioned above. In fact, I don’t know any of the win-any shortcuts as I grew up in DOS era and didn’t pick up ones after that. I do chuckle slightly that if you single click in the top-left of a window, you still get the old style menu even if the icon isn’t shown there any more.
In general i’m please with how win7 is working for me. My pc has a “child” account and family safty, time controls and restrictions seem to work very well.
My problems revolve around sharing, more that sharing across from win7 to vista is a bit of an animal. Slowly getting it working how i want, the settings being a little buried below the homegroup stuff but i’ve still not managed to share the printer.
I like the library thing, added my films to a film library that spans various external media and that brings it all together nicely. ATI drivers working on win7 much better than they ever did for me in vista, spanning or cloneing to my TV without problems now.
Been using Windows 7 on my netbook since it became available RC1 I think it was, it replaced XP and I really liked it from the off, not had any problems with blue screens, drivers or software, only thing that does annoy is UAC but I’m lazy and haven’t looked into turning it off or find out if there are other options, I don’t use the start menu much, I’m running RocketDock so if I use a program regularly I add it to the dock, I have a copy of Windows 7 pro still in it’s box that I’m going to install not sure if I should install it on one of my other comps and get home premium for the netbook, I need the remote desktop connection option, is this in the Home Premium edition?
Been using RC1 for months , liked it so much that I bought Home Premium - a bit ticked off last night when my main (Vista) rig died - I found that my version of HP comes without an email program , downloading installing and configuring Thunderbird at midnight for a two minute note was a bit irritating .
[QUOTE=Mortlake;446930]I found that my version of HP comes without an email program , downloading installing and configuring Thunderbird at midnight for a two minute note was a bit irritating .[/QUOTE] Thats the EU for ya… or is that just IE…at least you know how to install setup an email client there must be loads of peeps who use the MS live mail (is that what it’s called?) as it’s probably the easier option for them.
Things worth pointing out, that I only recently discovered in Win7.
To organise your icons down by the clock, drag and drop them, put them in the jump list, take tem out, re-order them, easy.
Use Win+Tab, it looks flashy and is actualy easier than any other metho I have found, how many times have you used alt-tab and ended up on the wrong window?
windows key + type name of program you want, soooo easy, even if it’s just a middle bit, it’ll find it.
Windows key + anything, it’ll search through your documents and If your using a compatable mail app it can even search that!
DT, smaller taskbar icons, righ click the task bar, properties, tick ‘use small icons’
cheers Damski, I just can’t quite get it how I would like it, maybe I should tinker with a custom toolbar.
I like a double height taskbar, widescreen in my opinion makes this very usable. In the traditional quick launch of XP, that meant two rows of icons for quickstarts. In Win7, that doesn’t appear possible. I know it would confuse the WinKey+Nth shortcut, but what’s wrong with a combo winkey+shift+nth? I’d like to then have the nice way it organises open items, but that’s me shifting back I suppose, having used XP today.
As the local PC guru you’re probably very used to friends and family asking for help with their computer problems, yet having no idea how to clearly describe what’s going on. It’s frustrating, but Microsoft feels your pain, and Windows 7 will include an excellent new solution in the Problem Steps Recorder.
When any app starts misbehaving under Windows 7 then all your friends need do is click Start, type PSR and press Enter, then click Start Record. If they then work through whatever they’re doing then the Problem Steps Recorder will record every click and keypress, take screen grabs, and package everything up into a single zipped MHTML file when they’re finished, ready for emailing to you. It’s quick, easy and effective, and will save you hours of troubleshooting time.
Customise UAC
Windows Vista’s User Account Control was a good idea in practice, but poor implementation put many people off - it raised far too many alerts. Fortunately Windows 7 displays less warnings by default, and lets you further fine-tune UAC to suit your preferred balance between security and a pop-up free life (Start > Control Panel > Change User Account Control Settings).
Keyboard shortcuts
Windows 7 supports several useful new keyboard shortcuts.
Alt+P - Display/ hide the Explorer preview pane
Windows Logo+G - Display gadgets in front of other windows
Windows Logo++ (plus key) - Zoom in, where appropriate
Windows Logo± (minus key) - Zoom out, where appropriate
Windows Logo+Up - Maximise the current window
Windows Logo+Down - Minimise the current window
Windows Logo+Left - Snap to the left hand side of the screen
Windows Logo+Right - Snap to the right hand side of the screen
Windows Logo+Home - Minimise/ restore everything except the current window
Load IE faster
Some Internet Explorer add-ons can take a while to start, dragging down the browser’s performance, but at least IE8 can now point a finger at the worst resource hogs. Click Tools > Manage Add-ons, check the Load Time in the right-hand column, and you’ll immediately see which browser extensions are slowing you down.
My bluetooth headset battery ran out, and Win7 now thinks this was caused by a failure of the bluetooth adapter and has now disable it completely with a code43 that I can’t reset. When I’ve finished work I’ll try a sys-restore. I’m not the only one either with a quick google Fortunately, I’ve a USB plugin bluetooth adapter that is working fine for the moment.
I forgot one: animated visual effects. I can turn off about 95% of them, but I’ve not managed to find a way to stop what appears to be a variation of smooth scroll from happening when browsing some file lists. It doesn’t seem tied into any of the performance preferences. This also affected Vista, but not XP.
first ugly is fixed, it would an uninstall of drivers, then an install of same chipset bluetooth device (flukey) on an external USB means that on next reboot with said external plugged in, the Dell 370 bluetooth minicard starts working again nicely.
No need for that system restore after all
DT.
(Spotifying with Bluetooth = able to get to fridge without missing tunes and/or waking up house)
it seems to always want to power up my HDD’s before shutdown even if not used I have had to resort to turning off the power management and have them permantly powered up just so the machine can do a swift shutdown.