Today, I installed the windows 7 on my office computer - a few first impressions:

  • Installation Process
    GOOD
    • Overall, good. Installation was reasonably quick. Disk partitioner was easy to use, although as an advanced user I would have prefered a little more information. NTFS now defaults to quick format, and in the age of SMART hard drives, this is obviously the way to go. I believe the machine only rebooted 3 times before I was in the operating system (and complete). Bonus: picked up the correct display settings reasonably early in the process. The one downside of note was the lack of verbose output, particularly post copy system files, while the installer is extracting what it copied.
  • Driver Installation
    VERY GOOD
    • All of my drivers were in the base installation, except for a network printer/copier. As the copier is a major brand, used only in business, this was neither surprising nor a hassle. The downloaded vista driver installed quickly and works perfectly. My monitor was also detected correctly, and the proper resolution of 1440x900 was chosen for me. I did have to manually increase the refresh rate from 60 to 75. Bonus: I have an onboard extremely off brand wireless nic. Although I rarely use it in lieu of the wired connection at my desk, it was detected and works flawlessly without effort. Including WPA encryption.
  • Dual Boot Configuration
    POOR
    • Naturally, windows overwrote the MBR during install. While fixing this only required dropping my ubuntu install CD back into the drive, I did have to find the install CD. After that, no further configuration was necessary (the machine used to dual boot XP)
  • Ease of software installation / Default Software
    FAIR
    • Default software includes the usual suspects from windows - Internet Explorer, Write, Paint, etc. Installation of Firefox, Openoffice, The Gimp, Avast, and Thunderbird went rather painlessly. Note however that by default, windows warns you of each program that wants to change the system. While I understand the logic of this choice by the developers, my fear is that it is one more information box for the end user to get to used to and click past without reading or thinking - effectively rendering any of it's protection useless. This behavior can be turned off, I choose not to at this time - once I have my basic software installed, I'd like to be notified if anything unusual is going on. Of the programs listed, I have not noted any incompatibilities at this time.
  • UI and eye candy
    GOOD
    • Make no mistake about it, aero is pretty. Also included in this release is the ability to slide show your desktop background. While I see this being used for awful, awful things by some end users, I do have a few different large format wallpapers I like, and I added them all. Default slide show time is 30 minutes (configurable)
  • Memory / CPU usage
    VERY GOOD
    • Yes, very good, within reason. There is a *lot* of eye candy. My machine is running with only 512MB of RAM, and while windows is not as speedy as ubuntu with the same configuration, it is still perfectly usable even with openoffice, thunderbird, and firefox+flash video running concurrently. Once I get AutoCAD installed, I'll report back on this again. On my machine, RAM usuage was consistently around 80% with all these open, CPU usuage around 25%. Quite decent. Bonus: there is a new task manager. It breaks things down from the old processes tab into user executables and services. Very spiffy.

Overall, I am quite pleased with what I've seen so far. I'll try and add some screenshots tommorow to go with this article. I'm not sure that windows 7 is ready for prime-time yet, but I think it's going to blow vista out of the water easily on release.