Windows 7 Beta, a couple of weeks in.
I’ve now been using windows 7 beta on my spare machine for a couple of weeks, and it pains me to say, I’m impressed. It’s rock solid, and not fallen over once.
The machine I’m running it on is a Dell Vostro 220 that I bought toward the end of last year.
The Spec is as follows
2Ghz Core 2 Duo
2Gb Ram
2 x 150Gb Sata Hard Drives
ATI 3450 256Mb Dedicated Graphics
Onboard sound
All driver I’m using are in inbuilt Windows drivers, apart from the ATI drivers which are beta.
I’m currently running, Tversity, Utorrent, MKV2VOB, Imgburn, Epson CDprint. Now granted I’m not really pushing it, well apart from the Vob encoding, and the Tversity encoding, but it’s worked flawlessly since I installed it on the 21st Jan 2009.
Taking the above into consideration, I decided to ghost my hard drive on my main gaming PC, and install it on the main drive, big mistake !
Now I will be honest, my machine isn’t the best example of a standard machine, as I’ve had a number of issues with it. There is nothing phyically wrong with it, hardware wise, it’s just have had some (Microsoft hates ATI, and ATI can’t write drivers for toffee issues)
The spec is as follows
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core CPU
4GB DDR2 5400 OCZ Memory
Asus M2R32-MVP SB600 chipset Motherboard
1 x Pioneer 212 DVD-Multi Drive
1 x WD 500Gb 7200 Hard Drive
2 x WB 250GB 7200 Hard Drive
ATI 2900HD 1Gb Video Card
Now the initial problems I had were with the installation, As I have a SATA DVD drive the AHCI doesn’t like working, however I was able to crowbar the operating system on, this worked ok, however the system paused every couple of seconds, and the hard drive light lit up like a Christmas tree.
So based on this, I put the hard drives into IDE Native mode, and reinstalled, and this fixed the pausing problem.
Driver support….well apart from ATI, NONE ! I know the software is in beta stages, but Geeez, didn’t manufacturers learn thier lesson from the Vista release, I remember waiting for months for Soundblaster to release stable drivers, I ended up taking my XFI card out and using the onboard card instead.
The ATI drivers were Video only, so I have no motherboard drivers, which mean much slowness. I attempted to use the Vista drivers, nope, forget it, just hung. I found that any vista drivers I tried, just made the system hang (fair enough, they ain’t for Windows 7)
I tried to run a few games with the current machine, and they run bad. If they would run at all, they were slow and choppy.
Now I do understand, that the majority of the issues are driver related, so I’ll keep an eye on these and retest at a later date.
As an operating system, I actually can’t wait for it to come out, it’s what Vista should have, and hopefully everybody will forget Vista even happened (kinda like Windows ME).
I like the way the Widgets are no longer on the windows sidebar, I love the preview Window when you scroll over the bottom bar, like the management of the taskbar menu.
Will update when more drivers are available, but at the moment a 2 thumbs up