I know there are already a lot of articles on the Internet about Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100), but I aim for this one to be simple and straight to the point. This is why this whole article will only be comprised of bullet point text and simple headings. No images, just a fast brows-able article.
Installation
- Obviously a copy/paste job of the Windows Vista installation with some tweaks like; a better background, more refined fonts and edges
- Windows 7 installs faster than Windows Vista and Windows XP. In-fact, Windows Vista took ages to install from what I remember compared to Windows 7 which took a measly 20 minutes
Bootup
- The boot-up speed is unexpected and very impressive. It’s fast, even faster than Windows XP. It pretty much makes XP and Vista look like the grandparents of Windows OS’s.
- The boot screen no longer has that disgusting progress bar scrolling across the screen, instead Windows 7 RC has a nice animated Windows logo with a nice pulsating glowing effect. If you’ve used Vista or use Vista, you know that it has a fucking dirt ugly boot screen, guess it’s not really a big deal.
Running Older Software
- Windows 7 runs older games and software beautifully most of the time with it’s obviously refined compatibility mode
- It runs Starcraft & Starcraft Broodwar (although the graphics are a bit fucked up and require some hacks, I’m sure this will be addressed by Blizzard soon)
- If you try to install an older application or game that may not be Windows 7 compatible (even drivers), and the installation fails, Windows 7 will ask you if you would like to try again with recommended compatibility settings which seem to work 98% of all cases
Performance
- The RC has yet to crash on me once. Although it’s still early days and Microsoft software loves to crash after a certain period of time. **Update: My PC has been running for over 1 month now and still no crashes
- It’s more stable than Windows Vista SP2
- From login to desktop is amazingly fast, not as fast as superman, but you get the idea
- Although Windows 7 has a fair bit of eye candy like Windows Vista contained which made it an epic failure, the effects in Windows 7 don’t degrade performance whatsoever. In-fact, I’m running Windows 7 on 1 gig of ram as we speak with no ready boost drive. I’ve also got iTunes playing music, Firefox (obviously) and Adobe Photoshop open as well
- Disk drive performance seems to have marginally improved from Vista. If you recall or still do because you’re using Vista, disk transfer speeds were absolutely fucked and far from impressive for many people. Although file transferring is still a dog and I suggest downloading a copy of TeraCopy for lightning fast file copying and it’s completely free.
- Overall memory hogging synonymous with Windows Vista seems to be fairly non-existent, this makes the system feel fast.
- There is a small bug with my ATI Radeon 9200se drivers and Windows 7. On shut-down, Windows 7 will always blue screen, this isn’t so much an issue as it only happens when shutting down, still annoying though. The driver problem is an ATI issue though, not Windows 7.
Other Stuff You Probably Want To Know
- If you’ve used Windows Vista or are familiar with it’s interface, you will notice that it doesn’t really seem that much different. Windows 7 is Windows Vista with new effects and performance tweaks
- The implementation of jump lists actually is useful. Basically if your application supports jump menus you can see recently opened files relating to only that application. Mostly all applications support jump lists, pretty useful especially with Adobe applications
- Implementation of a wide variety of themes for an Rc. Microsoft have said the final release will contain many more and you’ll be able to download more from Microsoft for free
- Ability to set a shuffling desktop background that changes at a pre-defined interval
- UAC is gone, but a similar implementation which is less annoying and intrusive has been added instead. I can live with that
- The sidebar from Windows Vista that was once used to hold all of the widgets is gone and instead Microsoft have decided to allow your widgets to be placed anywhere you want on the desktop
- You can access items on your start-bar via a keyboard shortcut, which means no more alt + tab to switch windows. Simply press the windows key on your keyboard plus the number corresponding to the start menu list
- Ready boost now supports multiple USB drives at once. It also allows for more than 4gb of space on a drive to be utilised
- You will need at least 1 gig of ram, use an old usb drive for ready boost and you will get a marginally significant speed increase. It really does make a difference to the overall system speed.
- Doesn’t seem to like the pretty extreme overclocks on my system. I had to wind down the cpu bus speed for starters because Windows 7′s explorer.exe server kept restarting and crashing, an infinite loop basically. This didn’t happen to me in Windows XP.
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