Differences

The hardware I am using had been bought when Windows XP was still the latest operating system. When I loaded and tested the Release Candidate for Windows Vista I met quite a few problems. Apart from some software not running the main problem was with the hardware. I needed new device drivers for the hardware and some manufactures wouldn’t or couldn’t provide these. Some insisted I bought new hardware. Also, Vista seemed buggy and from reports which surfaced after the launch of Vista, some of these problems still remained. Hence we never bought and installed Vista in any of it’s guises. We still use XP which is stable and works fine for us. Reading reports, there are still a lot of people, including companies, who still use XP and will not touch Vista.

Onto testing of Windows7 Beta. What a difference an operating system makes. This installed very quickly without any problems. It sure loads up very quick compared to out XP system. The user interface is a bit different, and I read is much better than Vista’s. One of the things that has impressed me is the fact that all the software I have loaded on it , installs and runs perfectly. Remember, all my hardware is still what it was when XP was the king. Windows7 finds all the hardware, including the router and wireless card and just works. Our Creative Zen mp3 players were found and just works. One thing I thought might not work was my HP IPAQ PDA. Windows7 found it but did not know how to use it. So, guess what it did? It went on the internet and found whatever it needed and installed it, without any intervention for me. It then knew it was a mobile device and loaded Microsoft software to deal with it. It read the data on the PDA as well, no problem.

Impressed? you bet your sweet bippy I am impressed. I cannot wait for April 10th when the first and only release candidate for windows7 appears, RC1. I just wonder what extra bits and tweaks it has. There is only one area that disappoints me about Windows7. Microsoft says it will allow Internet Explorer 8 to be disabled in Windows7. All well and good, but I have found that if one uses Mozilla’s Firefox, although one can surf anywhere, if one wants to get Windows Updates from www.windowsupdates.com using Firefox, Microsoft tells you you have to use IE 5 or later. Now that is a bummer, I will have to wait and see what is in RC1 to see if this has been corrected.

I shall try and get some good pictures of Windows7 screens later and put on this blog. These I hope will give you a better understanding of what Windows7 offers.

David