I’m a few hours into my first exploration of Windows 7. So far, it’s actually not that bad. It installed relatively cleanly, downloaded a surprisingly small set of drivers, and is generally operable.

A few installation notables:

1. Windows Media Player can’t be installed without participating in Microsoft’s "Help us Improve our User Interface, and we promise not to do anything with your data unless someone forces us or pays us to" program. So… no WMP for now.
2. There are no native Creative (Soundblaster) drivers. This is remedied by downloading the latest set from Creative, and running it in Compatibility mode, but even then, 5.1 Surround Sound doesn’t work for any program I could find, except for the Audio setup utility.
3. Daemon tools doesn’t work, and, thus far, I have not found a Virtual ISO mounter.
4. I installed Windows 7 on a test partition as a clean installation. All good, but it wiped out my BCD (Boot Configuration Data), and for awhile there, my Vista 64 O/S entry was nowhere to be seen. OOPS. I fixed this with VistaBootPro, and things are back to normal.

I really like the new taskbar approach. I’m not going to bore you with the details here, but it seems really intuitive, and took me about 10 seconds to get used to.

I do not like the new Program Manager launching mechanism. There’s probably a setting for this somewhere, but as it stands, you have to explicitly click on folders to open them instead of just hovering. I’ll keep playing with this.

I used IE for all of 30 seconds (to install Firefox), but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing new here. It’s IE7, as opposed to IE8.

Even the dreaded UAC seems to have been dramatically improved. Rather than turn it off completely, as was my initial impulse, I decided to mess around with the settings. It looks like you can tune it to your preferences (warn me on THESE actions, but not THOSE) and also seems to be much less intrusive and needy than the Vista version. If you decide to turn it off completely, you don’t have to live with a permanent reminder of Microsoft’s disapproval (yes, I know you can turn it off, but you HAVE to turn it off).

Speaking of which, notifications and reminders are now handled via a nice little facility called "Actions". If Windows wants to talk to you, it puts a reminder there and leaves you alone otherwise. No more flashing red "Danger, Will Robinson" shield. I’m not going to miss it.

More as I feel like it.

As if I should have expected something else??

I have to admit to being a Vista (64) user on my main PC. I’ve gotten over many of the hurdles associated with Vista (UI, drivers, &^%DJH’ing useless UAC), and it allows me to run all the stuff I want with as much memory as I want. So when I saw that MS was going to be offering an Open Beta of Windows 7 (aka Vista SP2), I figured I’d give it a whirl.

It was supposed to have been downloadable on January 9th to a limited number of users. However, Microsoft’s release and the subsquent downloading didn’t go all that well for most users. If this is a publicity stunt by MS, it’s a bad one, and if not, it’s just plain stupid. Or, as some people think, Microsoft has been so bashed over Vista that they themselves didn’t think anyone would be interested. Anyway, the experience was SO bad that Microsoft had to issue an apology, fix their servers, and offer it for publid downloading again.

Fast forward to this morning. The site is up, and I can log in. I can select the version I want, and get a product key generated. The only thing I CAN’T DO is download the frickin’ software. In Firefox, it does –nothing–, in IE 64, it bombs out (I even tried installing Silverlight… but nooooo…), and in IE 32, I have to install an ActiveX control.  Even after doing so, and trying to download, it was going painfully slow.

As an aside, one good byproduct of this process is that every time you load a new version of the download page, it generates a new key. So, now I have a bunch of ‘em. Email me if you want one. There are 5 keys. For everyone. Hrm… could it be that the Key Generation process was so complex that that’s what was causing the servers to bomb? Must be a .net process!

The Answer? BitTorrent. I’m happily downloading at a great speed right now. I can see how Microsoft would be reluctant to use BitTorrent for standard users, and expose them to the "free warez" underside of the web, but everyone with a technical bent knows about it and uses it on occasion.

TTFN! I’ll probably post about my experience with installation.

Microsoft gave a few tidbits about Windows 7. It’s scheduled to be released in 2009, and it’s based largely on the Vista kernel, which they’re not modifying. The biggest change is… ready?… multi-touch. Wonderful. Take something that someone else mastered, for an entirely different purpose, and hack it into your OS that only your apps will probably be able to use.

But don’t give up hope… there will likely be some new games included.. multi-touch Pinball? Oooh… maybe Mahjongg that you can ONLY play with 2 fingers because that’s the way Microsoft has decided it should be, of course – screw "legacy interfaces".

My guess is it’ll cost $300 for the entry package, and there’ll still be 5+ versions ranging from "stupidly crippled version that’s bundled with low-end PCs" to "wickedly overhyped with a techy color-scheme".

/sigh