Windows 7

I upgraded to Windows 7 last night. As part of the Microsoft BizSpark program we get the upgrade for free. Linus had done an installation on a clean machine and liked it. So I gave it a shot. Overall, so far so good.

First of all, I must point out that I didn’t hate Vista like most folks. I think Vista got an overly bad rap because User Access Control is so annoying. I turned off User Access Control. Once you do that, Vista is a good operating system.

I started to run the Windows 7 upgrade and it immediately warned me about some software that either wouldn’t run well, or should be uninstalled and then reinstalled afterwards.

I was warned to deauthorize my computer in iTunes and uninstall it. I understand the deauthorize part, since the iTunes computer signature includes the O/S. The surprising warning was for SQL Server 2008. Here too, I was advised to uninstall and reinstall after the upgrade. Seemed odd, but I Googled a bit and found some postings of people having problems with SQL Server after the upgrade so I took the cautious route.

I was also warned about Skype. I haven’t used that in ages so I just removed it. And I was warned about a utility that burns .iso files to DVD. That’s pretty low level so I wasn’t surprised about the warning. I just uninstalled it.

Having done that, the upgrade was completely smooth. It took four hours, but I didn’t have to do anything for those four hours. Reinstalling SQL Server was actually more of a pain. Reinstalling iTunes was cake, everything just automatically returned.

So was everything hunky dory? Well, I did encounter a funky issue with fuzzy lines in the display. I found some similar complaints online relating to my Dell version and one posted said it was related to the Aero themes. Sure enough, going with the classic Windows 7 theme resolved that.

Trillian also didn’t seem to react well. First my settings reverted to default settings. Then it started having problems connecting for no apparent reason. Trillian is supposed to be fine with Windows 7 so I don’t have a good explanation for this. I could have spent time figuring it out, but it gave me an excuse to give Digsby a test run.

How much better is it than Vista? Well, again, I didn’t hate Vista. I have left User Access Control on and it hasn’t annoyed me yet (well, maybe a little). I like the new taskbar. I like the concept of libraries in Windows Explorer. There are a few other nice touches. If the Start Menu is showing a recently used program that also has recently used files, there’s a quick link to the file. I used it to return to this draft. Nice.

So I like Windows 7. I’m not blown away, but so far I like it.