Windows 7

I decided to test the new Windows 7 RC the other day to see how it stacks up against Vista. Vista always performed well for me on this machine and so far I haven't found a huge difference in performance. It does seem to be more responsive when opening applications but then Vista was no slouch either.


Firstly my hardware specs:


AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+
4GB DDR2 800 SDRAM
Gigabyte GA-M52S-S3P Motherboard
Nvidia 9600GT video card
2 x 80 GB, 1 x 320GB, 1 x 640GB hard drives
Leadtek DTV1000T PCI TV tuner card
Netgear WG311V3 Wireless PCI card
Logitech USB Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
22" Asus VW224 and 17" Benq FP71G+S monitors
HP Laserjet 4000TN network printer


The installation managed to find drivers for all of these through Windows Update, although I encountered some minor issues. Nividia has updated drivers on its site and I installed these over the ones supplied through Windows Update.

The Netgear card refuses to work, and from the brief googling that I've done it seems to be a common problem with the 7100 build. This particular card gave me grief with both XP and Vista so this is no surprise. Hopefully this will be fixed with some updated drivers in the final release. I replaced the card with a Netcomm NP545 USB dongle which was detected instantly and had no issues with the included Windows drivers. As the computer uses Ethernet to connect to my router having no wifi was not a big issue for me, but it's useful to have for when I occasionally setup an ad-hoc network.

The HP printer was correctly detected but I'm not able to print multiple pages per sheet like I did with Vista. Whenever I choose this setting, they just come out blank. Considering I'm using the same version of Foxit reader, this seems like a problem with included HP printer driver. Again I'm hoping this willl be fixed with updated drivers.

The biggest surprise is that my TV tuner card works perfectly with Media Centre, which I find better to use than the Winfast PVR software I was using in Vista.

The software I've installed is below, none had any major issues installing but I'm yet to do much functionality testing.

Matlab 2007b - needed Vista compatability mode and install as admin
Foxit 3.0 Build 1506
CutePDF
Acronis TrueImage Home 11
Whisper32
Avast
Daemon Tools Lite 4.30.4
DVD Decrypter
DVD Shrink
EndNote X2
ImgBurn
Eaton/Powerware LanSafe 6
Logitech Setpoint 4.72.40
Maxthon 2.5.1.4751
Mihov Image Resizer
Spybot 1.62
SSH Secure Shell
TortoiseSVN
VMWare Workstation 6.52 - NAT doesn't work, changed to bridge mode networking
Winamp
WinRAR
RipIt4Me
LTSpice
Utorrent
Microsoft Office 2007

Things I like:
Taskbar buttons can now be moved around on the taskbar.
Homegroup looks promising but I have no other Win 7 computers to test.
Initial install is great, specially using Windows Update straight up to search for drivers.

So far I'm pretty happy overall and I'll definitely be switching when it's finally released.