Reviews January 16, 2009 posted by Nigel

Windows 7 beta – hmm….not bad at first glance

win7 small Windows 7 beta hmm....not bad at first glance

Hmm…I’ve been playing with the new beta of Windows 7 on an aging Toshiba Tecra I’ve got lying around and so far…quite impressed. It’s certainly as snappy, perhaps…gasp…even snappier than XP was on the same machine.

Plus the interface looks to be much simplified, it doesn’t seem to come with the same level of security paranoia bloat as Vista, and gosh it hasn’t crashed yet. The install was pretty painless, with just one glitch post install when an auto update reset the video driver to 800×600 and had to be returned to 1024×768.

A couple of quick comments:

1. Internet Explorer 8. Could they have made it any more like Google Chrome? I don’t think so. Loads v fast though, so they’re trying hard!

2. Installed a USR WiFi card into the PC Card slot on the Tosh and it installed the driver and got it working straight out of the box. Very nice.

3. Sleep/hibernate restore seems to work like a charm. Maybe they’ve sorted out the Vista bug?? Fingers crossed.

It’s early days yet however (apparently Vista had a reasonably good beta stage too, and look how that turned out), I’ll do more testing and report more later if there’s anything interesting to say.

By the way don’t forget that you can still download it yourself and play around (I deffo do not recommend you install it on any important machines, know what I mean? it’s beta, OK?). You can get it from here.

Tags: windows+7, vista, microsoft, operating+systems

About the Author:

Nigel is the managing editor of the Red Ferret, as well as a freelance columnist for the Sunday Times newspaper in London. Loves tech and fancies himself as a bit of a futurist, but then don't we all?

Nigel – who has written 5159 posts on The Red Ferret Journal.

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http://intensedebate.com/people/sirron sirron

Lipstick on the Vista pig. Macs rule. Oh! BTW Macs run all OSs including this little piggy.
Mark

IE8 was released before Chrome
Deft

@Sirron

ur just a f**king idiot…. "Macs run all OSs….." indeed, really?

fool

my PC triple boots into Vista, 7 and OSx… they use the same architecture. so given the right drivers all PCs run all OSs…

fucking idiot, god, ill never use a Mac again just so im not mistakenly mistaken as one of u complet C**ts blah blah blah
Golux

@Deft

Your computer religiosity is showing and is sounding equivalent to the more rabid Mac Fanboi. Macs run all OS's, Linux runs all OS's, Windows runs all OS's. Its known as virtualization. I've used it on all three major Operating Systems. So, technically, you just validated Sirron's statement. Claiming your PC runs OSx just means that you got a hacked version up and running native, not through either VMware or VirtualPC or in his case, Parallels or whatever he's using. I do agree with you that his statement is quite lame; however, you just added more of the same.

@Nigel

And Nigel, I'm glad to hear that Windows 7 seems to treat you a lot better. I've held off the personal Vista upgrade because I've had to serve as unpaid tech support on it for people who have had difficulties. I'd rather not be an "Early Adopter", it got old after XP, and I needed my computers to run.

That whole "Vista Ready" thing we were sold was a crock. Nothing was ready for Vista including Vista. Service Pack 1 cleared up a lot of problems for people, but it still had issues. Most of the people I know who are running Vista Service Pack 1 on brand new computers with brand new peripherals using drivers properly developed for Vista are reasonably happy, especially if they did not have to go through owning a pre SP1 system.

Now, to knock together a system that will run it. Sounds like a project for next week. ;^)
Bob

It's very hard not to stand on the sidelines and just shout LIARS! at MS.
And why is it that the language degenerates as thinking stops