My Windows 7 Experience

      by Wyatt Walter

I finally was able to get my hands on a preview copy of Windows 7. After all the hype of the new OS being much lighter than Vista, I decided to put it to the test. While I didn’t crunch together any stats on performance (Windows crashed before I could), I was able to install it on some pretty low-end hardware. I used my old school-issued Gateway tablet. It’s a Gateway M275 running at Centrino processor at 1.7Ghz with a whopping 512MB of RAM. I’d heard the chatter about running on 1GB of RAM and wanted to see what it could really do.

The first thing that I noticed was that it was pretty much the same as Vista. This early preview didn’t have the newer taskbar or application switcher as Microsoft promised. The machine was fairly responsive and my tablet pen worked right ‘out of the box’. I could launch IE, Windows Journal, Paint, and a whole host of the default built-in tools that Windows comes with at the same time and it didn’t choke out too bad. Sometimes it was obvious that Windows had to swap an application out to disk and when I switched it brought it back, but the GUI was still fairly responsive. The network manager was slightly clunky. I had to add my network manually before I could just select it out of the list and connect, but I would assume that that is just something that hasn’t been implemented yet.

In all fairness, the OS ran about as fast as Ubuntu does on that machine with XGL enabled. Of course, I am comparing Ubuntu with most of the GUI eye-candy enabled with Windows 7 without any eye candy. That being said.. we’ll see what happens when the changes are actually implemented, but Microsoft did make a vast improvement over Vista performance-wise. We’ll see what happens to performance once the release date comes closer and some of the changes are actually put into a public beta.

Unfortunately, my experience came to an end after a couple of hours of playing. I closed the lid and went away for just a few minutes. When I came back the machine had shut itself down. I went to turn it back on and Windows said it had been corrupted and couldn’t boot. I didn’t even have time to pull off my screenshots! Luckily, just a bit of quick thinking, a Ubuntu live CD, and a forced mount on the partition later I had my screenshots pulled off onto a flash drive. Windows 7 is definitely much faster than Vista and I think it might actually be slightly better than XP on that older machine. It even ran decently on my little laptop with only half a gigabyte of RAM which is much better than Vista would have done.

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Filed under News : Comments (4) : Nov 12th, 2008

  • http://myopera.com/dc.ricardo/blog Ricardo David

    Finally Microsoft will release an OS after XP! Maybe the intention with Vista was to lower RAM prices on the market? Because the rest just not got there…

    A Dell Core 2 Duo with 4Gb RAM arrived and I could not stay with Vista for more than 4 hours. Switch to Kubuntu 8.10 and the original Vista is running inside a VMWare machine. Perfect!

  • Michael

    How did you get wireless enabled? I’m trying it out on my M275 and still can’t the wireless driver to install and work correctly.

  • http://whatan00b.com Wyatt Walter

    I’m afraid I can’t be much help.. It “just worked” for me. I just went through the installation and at the end it asked me which wireless network to connect to.

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