The Taber Family Blog

Windows 7

Today, I downloaded the newly available Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 and was able to get it installed on my Mac using Parallels. If you’ve been following the news as Microsoft pushes Windows 7 along this year to a hopeful commercial release in time for Christmas, you’d already know it’s getting favorable reviews as being faster, easier to use and overall a much more viable release than it’s predecessor, Vista.

Well you can add my name to the list of people feeling pretty darn good about Windows 7 so far. I actually downloaded and installed both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions on my Mac and found the installation for both to be very easy and amazingly fast. I can’t remember installing a version of Windows that didn’t take over an hour or more to get completely installed with all updates and drivers settled and functioning properly. Well, I can tell you that my two installations today had to be less than a half hour each, and when it was finished I was left with a completely functional, working version of Windows 7. And what is more amazing is I installed both on my Mac with little or no hardware issues whatsoever.

So far I can report that for me, Windows 7 seems dramatically snappier and responsive than Vista.  I only allocated 1GB of memory and 15GB of disk space to each installation and still the OS is quite snappy. Starting, stopping and rebooting seems quicker too, but that could be due to having nearly no start-up software or non-OEM software installed yet. But I still have the feeling the OS would be quicker in these situations regardless.

One thing I really like in contrast to Vista (not including the increased responsiveness) would be the OSX dock-like icons that can stay in place for applications you frequently use. The desktop gadgets are no longer tied to a particular side of the desktop either. There are many other items to report, but I’ve only played around with this for a day so far.

I’m pleasantly impressed so far and can’t wait until this is released commercially, so I can install and use it on my daily work laptop from home. And thus relieve myself of Vista once and for all.