Windows 7 First Impressions
Not good initially. I deleted my boot hackintosh partitions, leaving one HPFS+ partition intact with all my data on. I booted the Windows install dvd and installed Windows 7 on the primary partition.
Install progressed smoothly if a little slowly. After about an hour everything appeared to be running smoothly. On closer inspection, I found that the pc was crashing randomly within half an hour of bootup.
"To hell with this..." said I and proceeded to wipe the installation and try openSUSE 11.2 RC1. Much to my dismay, openSUSE couldn't read the partition table to reformat the drives without erasing my data partition (HPFS) which I wanted to keep.
So, reluctantly, back to the crashing W7. I got desperate and checked Intel's website to see what Bios updates were out that could help. Amazed to find that the board had numerous updates in 2009 fixing several stability issues. Mine was about 5 or 6 versions out of date. Considering that the Bios was only about 14 months old, I was amazed at the amount of updates done to it. What bugged me is that this board had previously worked fine on Ubuntu 9.04, openSUSE 11.2, Windows XP and OSX. Why did W7 have such problems?
At any rate, I did the bios update and believe it or not, the crashing has stopped. I can't believe it was such a simple fix, but it was. So, I have since started installing apps, Chrome, Pidgin, Songbird, etc. All seems well.
My general feeling about it is that it feels like XP+. The usability is just as poor with the taskbar / dock-like bar being cumbersome and the system tray is same old same old. Control panel is confusing as hell to after 6 months of the Mac's Preferences view and even Gnome Control Center is better, YAST on openSUSE, even more so.
I do prefer the integrated control panel a la YAST or Mandriva's Utility, etc, to the Ubuntu style, but that's just me.
I'm most enthusiastic about the future of KDE4 and I reckon it's evolving into my dream desktop with the best combination of ease of use and power.
I'll be running Windows for a while I hope. Once I migrate the HPFS partition to EXT3 or NTFS, I *WILL* be installing openSUSE 11.2 final or Kubuntu 9.10.
Bottom line.
I prefer Win7 to XP. This will be a good one for MS. It was such a frustrating experience to work on a Vista machine, but I am finding W7 to be a decent improvement. Don't get me wrong, its easy to see the XP or earlier underpinnings.
What blows me away is that you still have to reboot after joining a workgroup. I guess one day MS will fix this and everybody will rave about how wonderful it is. I can't stand all the reboots due to installing a cd burner, antivirus or doing updates.
Are we really having do to this in 2009? Come on...
Install progressed smoothly if a little slowly. After about an hour everything appeared to be running smoothly. On closer inspection, I found that the pc was crashing randomly within half an hour of bootup.
"To hell with this..." said I and proceeded to wipe the installation and try openSUSE 11.2 RC1. Much to my dismay, openSUSE couldn't read the partition table to reformat the drives without erasing my data partition (HPFS) which I wanted to keep.
So, reluctantly, back to the crashing W7. I got desperate and checked Intel's website to see what Bios updates were out that could help. Amazed to find that the board had numerous updates in 2009 fixing several stability issues. Mine was about 5 or 6 versions out of date. Considering that the Bios was only about 14 months old, I was amazed at the amount of updates done to it. What bugged me is that this board had previously worked fine on Ubuntu 9.04, openSUSE 11.2, Windows XP and OSX. Why did W7 have such problems?
At any rate, I did the bios update and believe it or not, the crashing has stopped. I can't believe it was such a simple fix, but it was. So, I have since started installing apps, Chrome, Pidgin, Songbird, etc. All seems well.
My general feeling about it is that it feels like XP+. The usability is just as poor with the taskbar / dock-like bar being cumbersome and the system tray is same old same old. Control panel is confusing as hell to after 6 months of the Mac's Preferences view and even Gnome Control Center is better, YAST on openSUSE, even more so.
I do prefer the integrated control panel a la YAST or Mandriva's Utility, etc, to the Ubuntu style, but that's just me.
I'm most enthusiastic about the future of KDE4 and I reckon it's evolving into my dream desktop with the best combination of ease of use and power.
I'll be running Windows for a while I hope. Once I migrate the HPFS partition to EXT3 or NTFS, I *WILL* be installing openSUSE 11.2 final or Kubuntu 9.10.
Bottom line.
I prefer Win7 to XP. This will be a good one for MS. It was such a frustrating experience to work on a Vista machine, but I am finding W7 to be a decent improvement. Don't get me wrong, its easy to see the XP or earlier underpinnings.
What blows me away is that you still have to reboot after joining a workgroup. I guess one day MS will fix this and everybody will rave about how wonderful it is. I can't stand all the reboots due to installing a cd burner, antivirus or doing updates.
Are we really having do to this in 2009? Come on...
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