I downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Beta. It took about 2 hours to install, but my input was only needed for less than 5 minutes at the beginning of the process. It rebooted and continued on its own 5 times or so. Drivers downloaded automatically for all of my hardware. Against my better judgment I did an upgrade install, mostly because of a bug whereby the install wouldn't recognize my SATA drives, only my SATA RAID bootable drive. It turned out later that the installer had turned all 4 channels of my SATA controller onto RAID mode in the BIOS, most likely to fix the problem where RAID drives weren't detected in Vista. Channels 3 and 4 held non-RAID SATA drives, so they weren't detected properly. Eventually I got that fixed. It was my only problem with the beta.
No UAC issues. I still needed to run the DDO TurbineRegisterGDF executable in the DDO directory to get it to run properly alongside LotRO, but I beleieve that is a Turbine issue. Otherwise, both ran flawlessly and as well or better than under Vista.
Overall, it looks good, boots faster, and runs great. I liked Vista. I like Windows 7 better. The new themes are pretty. I like that running programs show up in the taskbar. Apps you have pinned to the taskbar also show up there, but the running apps have a highlighted box around them. Too subtle for some, based on the rancor of a few beta testers.
More details when I have time to play with it.
Ariande Bard 20 • Nightfall Ranger 19
The Avatars, Argonessen Server
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Windows 7 RC1 Changes
Looks like MS made some really nice enhancements to the UI based on user feedback from the beta. I really like Windows 7 and will be switching to it right away at release... in my case from the build 7000 beta version.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14434
I'm fishing around for
I'm fishing around for release candidate 1 to see if the screws have been tightened.
A Few Warts
A couple new items came up with Windows 7 build 7000.
Libraries
You can now create virtual folders called libraries, which essentially bring together the contents of multiple other folders on your system. Instead of (or in addition to) using the 'My Documents' folder as the repository of all your personal data, you can make libraries of various document types (i.e. web sites, artwork, pictures, et. al.) and include folders with that type of content in a specific library. It will sow all the content, by default grouped according to the folder it is in, in one search-able, sortable, window. All your libraries are accessible by clicking on your user name at the top right of the Start menu. Very slick.
In addition, I can now add tags to files in my libraries and the Library windows allow sorting and searching on those tags. Much like GMail allows with e-mail, this makes finding things in my immense character image library MUCH easier.
voice
Since I have had my hand full lately in the office I have been spending some quality time with the voice control system in windows 7. In short it rocks. Is it far from perfect, of course (first annoyance was I could not customize phrase commands to get it's attention if sleeping). But if you spend just a little bit of time to train it and let it train you of course, then it works very well for os control and for dictation. I can't type a lot faster then I can talk so I never really got the supper high demand for dictation but when it works really well I can start to see a bit of the attraction. one of the areas that seems to be very smooth is being to identify between system commands and dictation with natural language flow and no special mode switch prompt or phrase. Fun stuff, way better then past versions that I have tried. Ironically of course I'm typing this on my Mac so as to not to wake up the baby :).
Desktop
I like the ability to cycle my desktop backgrounds. I ditched my Soundblaster card in favor of USB sound some time ago, and am much happier for it.
Yeah
It's not bad, over all I like it. I have slightly earlier build on it's own parttion. I had a devil of a time with sound blaster drivers (which are not included) but eventualy got them to work. Most games seem to work, though some are loading a little oddly. Ddo had to be reinstaaled but that is just turbines crappy packaging. It corectly could see my raid parttions without a manual driver load.