Lucky 7

Plenty of new things here at the Digital Dad house but today I wanted to post up some thoughts on my recent Windows 7 experience.

I moved three machines onto 7 – my work notebook, a Dell m1330, my kitchen PC – the Dell XPS One, and a Sony desktop that I bought a few years ago.

Net net it has been a very solid experience – hard to believe this is a beta – but I did encounter a few quirks to be aware of.

• Dell m1330 – I’ve had this unit for about a year and a half and it’s always been a high performer. However with Windows 7 I decided to do a clean install of the x64 version. Going from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit 7 is not exactly “Apples to Apples’ pun intended but the performance is now fantastic. I had to download the Fingerprint Reader driver from Dell, otherwise it has worked just fine. This install was done over the Microsoft network using the F12 boot option. For MS employees reading this – yes it recognized my GemPlus smartcard reader and i can RAS in just fine.
• Sony PC – this is a liquid cooled unit from 2005 that I use in my downstairs office. It’s multi-monitor and has a cable tuner in it and has 1 Gb of RAM. I downloaded the beta ISO from the Windows 7 site and gave it a go. Installed clean, found the multi-mon (haven’t tested the tuner) and so far the performance is so much better.
• Dell XPS One – this is my Kitchen PC that we use for general computing, TV and music playback. It has a cable tuner, funky soft keys, all kinds of good stuff. At first I used the beta ISO for an upgrade but I found I couldn’t print. i was also getting some IE8 instability. A couple of days into it I decided to do a ground up clean install and it has made a big difference. I needed to download the Aver TV tuner driver and the Dell 948 printer driver from the Dell website, but other than that it has been very very stable and fast. Family reaction has been very positive although some of my kids think the taskbar is too big. However, they love the themes!

Next up I will go for updating an older notebook. It currently runs XP with 1GB of RAM and I will be installing the beta off of a USB stick – stay tuned.

If you have a PC and about an hour, I strongly suggest you give it a go. My recommendation is the clean install (remember it will wipe all of your data so get it on an external drive first!).

For a deeper look under the hood for tips and tricks check out Tim Sneath’s write-up here.

Enjoy!