For the last couple of days i've been playing around with the Windows 7 RC, so i thought i would share my impressions. First though, to compare it with the Beta version. I'm relieved this time it actually included basically all the drivers i needed to get going. When i installed the beta i found that some of my hardware hadn't been installed, including my all-important WiFi drivers. This caused me to prettymuch immediately abandon testing (64 bit drivers aren't available for my laptop from the manufacturer :-/).
This time the experience got off to a smooth start. Windows basically installed itself, without requiring me to spend half an hour specifying configuration options (like the classic XP or Ubuntu installs). The only drivers i had to install were my laptop keyboard for the special function keys, synaptics driver (so my touchpad disables when i plug in my external mouse), and the NVidia Video driver. Most of these were installed from the vista 64 versions.
Ok so the first thing anyone will notice in 7 is the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. It has several fancy features like Aero peek to augment it, but the taskbar in itself has been heavily overhauled. As anyone who's tried windows 7 will notice, applications running only have icons displayed, but because of the increased size of the taskbar and the quality of most modern icons, this isn't such a problem. Additionally, instead of having a "Quick Launch" bar slapped on there, you can basically pin applications to the taskbar. There are some additional niceties like when i was downloading something with internet explorer, the taskbar icon pane for IE showed the curent download progress. All up, i think it is a definite improvement to the classic windows desktop, although it should still be familiar enough (especialy to vista users) that it won't scare users off.
On that note, i remember thinking when XP came out that it's completely off-the-wall look would drive people batty, and it did for a while. As people were forced to come to terms with it at work and bought new PCs with it, slowly the interface became more acceptable. I think there will be a similar acceptance phase with Windows 7.
Let's talk performance. Windows 7 is much faster than Vista (although i haven't had a chance to try SP2), and tends to chew far less resources. This would probably change over time, as with all operating systems, but so far it's snappy, responsive, and beautiful. It still can't match up against Linux systems for memory performance (although probably does better on idle CPU usage), but all it's Vista-like chaching of program startup files does provide an advantage when applications start in a snap. Ubuntu or XP meanwhile leave droves of memory unused. Good for if you want to start a hefty app like a VM or game that needs in excess of 1GB, but now i can recognise why Microsoft chose to make use of it, rather than let it go to waste. That said, the Superfetch seems alot less agressive in this version of Windows compared to Vista. Vista was ever swapping away with my hard drive (probably driving it to an early grave). Windows 7 on the other hand will do some swapping when applications open and close, and memory is fluxuating wildly, but it reaches a steady state; a point where it either just casually ticks away at the hard drive or sits idle.
It makes a change from my Ubuntu desktop. Although it is shiny, at the moment i'm still tied to Ubuntu because of applications and research i have saved on there, and i don't want to get tied to this partition because it is only a time-limited RC (although i format my computer ~6 months anyway). I highly reccomend Widnows 7 to any current Windows user, whether you're using XP or Vista. Although on that note, i still reccomend you have 2GB of ram. I don't think the requirements for Windows 7 are that much lower than Vista, whatever Microsoft claims. On my laptop with 2GB of ram, 7 runs very comfortably, with some room to stretch it's legs.
