Up and running with Windows 7

by Roger Pence

 

I skipped Windows Vista entirely—I was a Windows XP refugee to the very end. For me, the end came about three weeks ago.

Except for leaning over the occasional Vista user’s shoulder, I have nearly zero time logged using Vista and literally zero time logged installing it. But faced with a PC in dire need of a repaving (the registry had so many rotten entries it was actually starting to emit an odor), and the pleasant surprise of the availability of a RTM (released to manufacturing) version of Windows 7 (it’s available now to MS business partners and MSDN subscribers), I decided to be an early adopter of Windows 7. (Windows 7 will be generally available on October 22nd.)

I haven’t looked forward to a Windows upgrade with this much excitement since Windows 95. Lot of water under the bridge since then!  After copious backups, I slapped the Windows 7 media into my laptop and a few clicks later the installation was underway. I opted for a clean install and expected to get (and was prepared for) a reformatted hard drive out of the deal. After about a surprisingly brisk 75 minutes, Windows 7 was installed and ready to use. My first surprise was that despite the fresh install of Windows 7, my hard drive had not been reformatted. My old Windows folder was still available having been renamed Windows.Old and my old file structure and its contents were intact. My Program Files folder did get cleared out as did my registry. What I got was what I considered to be the best of both worlds—a fresh Windows install with all of my old data intact. Granted, I did need to reinstall a slew of software, but saving the old file structure saved me some pain.

Windows 7’s UAC pokes occasionally

I’ve not had any trouble with any of my old software under Windows 7—all of the installations, and usage thereafter, have gone very smoothly. I have experienced a little grief with Windows 7’s UAC (User Account Control). This is the security feature made infamous in Vista and carried over the Windows 7. It attempts to provide a better level of security over what XP (and its forbearers) offered. Despite my everyday account being a part of the administrative group, I get nagged at odd times with a message saying that I lack the authority to do what I want to do.

The UAC makes creating DataGate public database names especially frustrating. I solved this problem by right-clicking the ASNA DB Manager and selecting “Run as administrator.” I also experience a weird ASP.NET debugging issue: debugging an ASP.NET app will not work unless I use the same technique to run Visual Studio as an administrator. Both of these issues are frustrating because the account under which I’m running these apps is an administrator. I’m still researching what the issue is here. In the meantime, I’ve turned off the UAC control—maybe someday I’ll make better friends with it.

Am I happy?

You bet. With one exception (in my opinion) Windows 7 doesn’t have a single compelling reason to recommend it, but tons of little ones. I’ll get to what appears to me to be the killer reason to move to Windows 7 in a moment. Windows 7’s File Explorer is still as boring as always, but at least now it’s functional and I’m doing just fine without the third-party Windows Explorer replacement that I used to need very badly. As far as usability, my old XP skills have bridged over quite nicely. Many things are certainly different, but not jarringly so. Nothing that a little Googling hasn’t been able to resolve.

The Task bar is dramatically improved, as is the Start menu. The Task bar is now smart enough to group multiple launches of the same app and you can drag and drop button placement to suit you. The Start menu is now a listbox—it is much easier to navigate.

Perhaps my biggest Windows 7 disappointment is that Microsoft hasn’t evolved multi-monitor support at all. It’s 2010! Even lowly sales and marketing people use multiple monitors with Windows now. Why must it be so challenging to get separate taskbars for each monitor? That’s a feature that once you’ve used it you can’t live without it. As a long-time user of MultiMon on Windows XP, I gave up on MultiMon with WIndows 7 because the notion of having the Vista capable version in beta since March of 2007 (!) doesn’t inspire confidence. I jumped to DisplayFusion Pro for Windows 7 and it works fine and solves the taskbar problem quite nicely. DisplayFusionPro is highly recommended. If you use multiple monitors, beware downloading the trial: that guarantees you’ll be spending the $20 to license it.

I also installed a copy of Norton Internet Security 2010—this is another component that seems to me should have been available out of the box. One thing that I wish that I had done before installing Windows 7 is to have used DriveImageXML to backup my old drive. DriveImageXML is a highly recommended backup facility. It lets you get good backup of all of your folders—even while the PC is running. (I’ll be using DriveImageXML soon to copy a drive image from one drive to another—watch for a post about how that goes.)

Windows 7’s killer app

What appears to be Windows 7’s killer app is its ability boot from a virtual machine. Under Windows 7 you can boot directly to a virtual machine. Sounds killer to me—you get the benefits of a virtual machine, but it exists next to the hardware without the need for a resource-hogging host. I was quite happy to realize that my Dell Latitude D820’s processor is virtual machine-capable under Windows 7. More on this as I explore the feature. Not surprisingly, to really use this feature well lots of disk space is needed. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be swapping my 120GB drive out for a 320GB drive—I’ll be dedicating much of the left-over oodles of space to a variety of virtual machine configurations. I’ll be covering Windows 7 virtualization in more depth in an upcoming post.

Windows 7 exceeds all of my expectations. It’s prettier, isn’t any slower (don’t think it’s faster, though), and has lots of interesting little built in bells and whistles. I’m counting on the virtual machine capabilities of Windows 7 to dramatically change how I use my PC. But even if that doesn’t quite live up to expectations (which are currently pretty high)  I’d still rate Windows 7 is a must-have OS for Windows developers.

Comments

[Howie Driscoll]

You make it sound promising rp, thanks.

[Roger Pence]

Howie--I really think that this is one of the times that MS got it right. I'll post more soon on my adventures with Windows 7 virtual machines. Thanks for reading! rp