Ok, so I downloaded the beta of Windows 7 from The Anti-Christ earlier today. Burned it to DVD. And realizing that I have two physical hard drives in my computer, I gave it a try. From the time I put the DVD in the drive to desktop was between 30 minutes and an hour (to be honest I wasn’t really keeping time). From previous experiences (with WinME and WinXP) here are the major differences:
- Everything is now done from a gui. Even when you boot off the DVD, you’re greeted by a GUI, which should be a Godsend to the computer-illiterate masses who don’t know how to do anything from a command line. The Anti-Christ must be borrowing a page from all the major Linux distributions, most (if not all) of whom have had gui based installers for years (Mandriva and SuSE immediately come to mind).
- Compared to WinXP installation, if you choose install from within windows, all of the major decisions (like which drive/partition to install it to) are made from within windows. Whereas in previous versions it would just copy the files over, then it would reboot, and you have to navigate through the DOS-like interface, which could be a little bit intimidating if you don’t know what you’re doing… A little more work on this, and my very much computer illiterate mother would be able to do it.
- Once you get through the installation, it’s very much like Windows Vista. The hardware requirements are pretty much the same, so if you’re current box can run Vista, you can run windows 7 with little or no problem.
And the drawbacks:
- It is still beta software (and that means that it’s not stable). Of course, the obvious warning not to use this on mission critical computers.
- Since it’s a beta, not all manufacturers have released hardware drivers yet. Like my TV card. And IIRC, there were several components on my computer that they didn’t have drivers for.
- I’m not all that thrilled with the Aero interface yet. I may upgrade to Windows 7 when it’s finally released, and learn to love it then. But then again, I just found the port for the Royal Noir theme (the one that XP Media Center has), and that’s enough eye candy for me.
And my one tidbit of wisdom if you’re dual-booting with 7 and XP, and you just want to go back to XP:
- log into XP.
- Go to ‘my computer’ and format the drive/partition that 7 was installed on.
- If you followed my advice here, then reboot your computer and choose the ‘recovery console’ option.
- If, for example, your XP installation is on your C: drive, then at the command prompt, type ‘fixboot C:’.
- Reboot again, and you should be back at XP again.
Your mileage my vary…
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