So this week was a little warm and muggy here is SW Austin so I stayed inside and downloaded the Release Candidate for Windows 7. I have read a few good things about it especially in performance. 2 years ago I bought an HP dv5000 laptop with 2 gigs of ram and a T6400 Intel chip. Vista barely would run. With outlook and antivirus it was sitting around 1.9 gigs of ram in use. After a pain staking roll back to XP professional it went on to be an excellent laptop until it was replaced by a newer machine and the entire base Vista reinstalled.
So I slapped a test drive and downloaded the latest version of Windows 7 release candidate burned it on to a DVD and ran the install first as a non upgrade. It caught almost all of my hardware. The only problem was HP’s Quick Launch buttons which so far HP hasn’t released any compatible software. After a couple hours of testing I slid my configured drive in and did an upgrade from Vista Home Premium. The downside was I had to get Vista SP1 on the machine first and then uninstall the Norton 360 and HP quick launch buttons. Then let the install go. It took almost 2 hours to complete the upgrade.
Once it was completed and I had found a license key. Here are 2 resources to find them: List of Keys How to get a key then install my Windows 7 beta version of Norton 360. With my large Outlook data file open I was sitting under 1 gig of ram in use. So far all the other software is running fine. I do various graphics, database, web development and sales applications and so far no hitches. The new interface is a nice combination of Office 2007 look and feel and reminds me of a Mac environment. Very clean handling of graphics and themes. Finding common configuration areas was natural after so many years of XP and has some nice merging of locations from Vista. Has Microsoft finally gotten it right after the disaster of Vista and we can call this Win7 for short…
