So it’s that time again, the new Windows 7 public preview as been made available. I’ve been following it’s progressed by installing the leaked betas on aVM to test them out but that’s always slow and doesn’t make you take your feet of familiar ground (my tuned XP desktop) to really get to know the OS, so i felt it was time to jump in on the public beta and try and use it as a main OS for a month.
One thing I think needs to be clear, Windows 7 is Windows Vista plus polish, Vista had a difficult birth, suffering from numerous issues and that showed in the final product, vista was released as a ghost of what was “promised” and riddled with performance issues and driver issues from the get go, at it’s core it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t what I and allot of people were expecting, as such I gave it a pass and stayed with XP. But stay in the “past” forever isn’t usualy a good idea so I had to see if Windows 7 was ready for me.
First hurdle was the install, Windows 7 comes on a DVD, not having any kind of optical drive in my computer for a few years now (with a fast Internet connection and a big enough hdd it becomes pointless) I had to figure out how to install it without one, odds would have it Microsoft as made it very easy to make a Windows 7 install USB pen/HDD. So following some instructions I proceeded to install it without no issues on a side partition I save for alternative OS’s, score one for Windows 7.
But eventually it came time to setup my screen cloning and that’s were things went bad for Windows 7, or maybe should I say nvidia. It seems that the nvidia drivers available no longer support cloning with screen spanning, as such I’m unable to have cloning and native resolution on my main screen since it limits it to the maximum resolution both monitors can support. I tried installing Vista drivers, using UltraMon but Vista drivers didn’t have a working control panel and UltraMon didn’t even manage to start, so as far as trying out Windows 7 Beta that was it for me, just not willing to give up the convenience of my screen clone setup for Windows 7, hopefully drivers will get better as Windows 7 aproaches final and I’ll try it again.
From the few minutes I used it some I liked, the aditions to windows managing and the show desktop corner button seem great ideas even if it seems it will take some getting used to, the new taskbar however asn’t fully convinced me yeat but without everyday use I can’t really say for sure, some of my friends with simpler setups are trying it out as well so at least I’ll get to know all the kinks of it anyways for round 2…
Update: Got UltraMon to work by folowing some instructions in the forums, although mirrowing worked it proved very cpu intencive (40% cpu usage) and as such unviable.