Anyway the other day my dad's old PC took a shower when it rained with the windows open, so needless to say, water plus computer = disaster. After getting some major hardware revision and shelling out $$, its time to install a OS. Though i have a original Vista, but to hell with it, lets go experimental! I'm even gonna go 64bits on a pc primarily used to surf net and office apps.
I've used win XP since... I was running it on a PentiumIII with 256mb ram. Talked about long in the tooth, the only thing thats keeping it around is its pretty much its compatibility and how fast it runs on modern hardware. Then again my PC, based on a Athlon XP, its pretty much prehistoric by now. Wanted to upgrade to Vista last time, but didnt like it after using it a while in (old) office last time plus it got pretty rubbish reviews. Vista looked pretty but was slow and crappy. Function over form for me.
But alas the long awaited OS to replace XP ish here~!
The speed of XP, plus the eye candy of Vista, win win!
Some say... that its not a true sequel, and that its version number is 6.1... but all we know is... it's called...
Ok time to make my dad's PC the guinea pig. I actually wanted to go with Ubuntu for this setup since all he needs is internet plus office but in the end, I really curious abt win7, soooooo....anyway, burnt a x64 disc, and proceeded to boot up from DVD. System loaded the initial setup files rather quickly, moved to the setup name/region section, and finally to the copying and installing section. Then theres where everything hit the fan. After 30mins, setup was still at 1%. Ok must be something wrong, went to google, found out that for some reason, win7 takes a long time to install from DVD for some people, esp at this copy/expanding stage. Saw many posts that said the install time to take 2-6hrs, got 1 even say leave it to install overnight! WTH? Some solution said to burn the disc at lowest speed so that reduces reading problem. Ok, so i went to burn a disc at 2x, tried again. Still takes 15mins to read 1%, after that installer complained cannot read from disc. Ok went to forums again, found methods to install without DVDrom using a thumbdrive install, esp good for Netbooks. Though the actual steps suggest to make the thumbdrive bootable, i actually just set it to active partion, and then copied the entire dvd into a 4gig drive. I used the dvd to boot into the initial setup phase, took out the DVD and plug in the thumbdrive. When the installer tried to find the dvd but cant, clicking retry and it proceeded to copy from the thumbdrive! Yay, like that also can!
And here's the best part: running from the thumbdrive, the whole win7 install time only took 15mins! After a few reboots, I was in the win7 desktop at no more than 20mins! (ok i didnt time exactly but its somewhere there) Used to take 30-60mins for win2k and XP, now thats progress.
Say hello to aero, yeah!
Windows Experience Index '2.0' niah haha! After reach the desktop,was expecting to have driver problems and i prepared a lot of vista x64 drivers to troubleshoot, but when i checked, every device already had been installed and almost fully functional! Even the TP-Link wireless card!
Ran the loader to "activate" win 7 and wah la! Fully functional RTM win7 Ultimate!
Upon first net connection, win7 proceeded to install updated drivers for the GMA950 and that was it, no manual installation of drivers at all!
So I played around with the system, and found some notable improvements and eye candy:
Alt-Tab now allows us to tab to desktop, without having to minimise windows!When scrolling tru the tabs, the other windows become just a transparent outline, leaving just the tabbed one in view - very handy!
Also Windows arrangement can also be undone after arranging them.
The cute little preview panes for windows display the preview in real time, showing video thumbnails as opposed to just static ones. like how OSX did it years ago but hey, better late than never!
If u use x64 system before, u know they create a folder for x86 software and x64 software, so some program dun have full x64 support (like u photoshop! $@#$$@) and it installs itself in BOTH folders. meaning 2 copies of the nearly the same software in 2 folders, just becos some of CS4 plugin is not 64bit enabled even though the main program is. What a messy solution that carried over since the Win XP x64 days. Sheesh.
I also thot i would hate the new task bar interface but I got used to it surprisingly quickly without have the urge to change to XP style. I also think I like the old XP start menu more, but its not something I cannot live with. I havent got the chance to go try out the virtual XP mode for 7, but I dont think that PC's gonna use it anytime soon(or at all for that matter).
Anyway to sum it up, really smooth interface on even a stupid integrated graphics, generally nice eye candy, really nice driver update system interface, fast boot up time! The extra widgets like the clock and calender looked rather gimmicky in vista but worked quite well here, the accessories like calc and mspaint also got updated (finally...)
The only downside was that after I installed antivirus, it slowed down the system and bootup quite a noticeable bit, and oh yeah, win7 creates a compulsory 100mb partition to store system files that u cannot edit at all. weird la. Other than that, its time to start moving everything onto the 7th platform liao.
So long, windows XP... its been nice living with ya!
Note: This post ended up waaaaay longer than I intended it to be: which is a few pics and a couple of sentences. Lol
I also thot i would hate the new task bar interface but I got used to it surprisingly quickly without have the urge to change to XP style. I also think I like the old XP start menu more, but its not something I cannot live with. I havent got the chance to go try out the virtual XP mode for 7, but I dont think that PC's gonna use it anytime soon(or at all for that matter).
Anyway to sum it up, really smooth interface on even a stupid integrated graphics, generally nice eye candy, really nice driver update system interface, fast boot up time! The extra widgets like the clock and calender looked rather gimmicky in vista but worked quite well here, the accessories like calc and mspaint also got updated (finally...)
The only downside was that after I installed antivirus, it slowed down the system and bootup quite a noticeable bit, and oh yeah, win7 creates a compulsory 100mb partition to store system files that u cannot edit at all. weird la. Other than that, its time to start moving everything onto the 7th platform liao.
So long, windows XP... its been nice living with ya!
Note: This post ended up waaaaay longer than I intended it to be: which is a few pics and a couple of sentences. Lol
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